The Twelve Tables

The Twelve Tables, also known by its Latin name Duodecim Tabulae, is the earliest known codification of Roman law, traditionally dated to 451 and 449 BC. The Roman Republic appointed a commission of ten men, the decemviri, to record customary law into a fixed public text after plebeians agitated against arbitrary judgments handed down by patrician magistrates who alone knew the unwritten law. The original bronze or wooden tablets did not survive antiquity; the text known today is reconstructed from quotations preserved in later Roman writers, above all Cicero, who described memorizing the Twelve Tables as a schoolboy exercise centuries after their enactment. The surviving fragments cover legal procedure, family and inheritance law, property, delict, and religious law, set out in terse, formulaic rules rather than connected prose. Roman jurists continued to comment on and interpret its provisions for centuries, and it stands as the foundational text of the civil law tradition that Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis would later systematize a thousand years afterward.