TWELVE TABLES (Lat. Lex or Leges Duodecim Tabularum) the name given to the earliest code of Roman law. According to the ancient account, the code originated in this wise: In the year 462 B.C. a tribune, C. Terentilius Arse, brought forward a pro posal to appoint five men to B.C., up a set of laws, with the view of limiting the imperium of the consuls. The aristocracy, always furious, selfish, and unwise in their struggles with the commons of Rome, violently resisted this reform, and for eight years a fierce parliamentary warfare—if we may so call it—was carried on between the two orders, which ended in a sort of partial victory for the plebians; that is to say, in 454 B.C., the senate assented to a plebiscitum (see PLEBISCITE), in virtue of which three commissioners were dispatched to Greece to report on the laws in force among the dif ferent states there. After a lapse of two years they returned; and it was then agreed that ten men (decemvirt.) should be selected to draw up a code (legtbus scri7runclis); but the patrician or aristocratic party took care that these decemvirs should all be chosen from their body. The story of the political fortunes of the decemviri (q.v.), and of the fate of the leading decemvir, Appius Claudius (q.v.), are well known, though we believe that it has not come down to us in a very historical dress; indeed, it is politically quite unintelligible in the main. But what concerns us here is not the political career of these men, but the character of the legislation ascribed to them. We say ascribed to them, for the whole story of the foreign travels of the commissioners, and of their eclectic pro cedure in the matter of the Solonian and other laws, is so completely at variance with the simple. narrow, home-centered feelings of the Roman people at that early time, and with the thoroughly Italian stamp of the legislation embodied in the "twelve tables," that it has very been doubted whether such a commission ever existed, or, if it did, whether it did not acquire its information from the Hellenic cities of lower Italy. Niebuhr, however, thinks the embassy to Greece just possible. though he is obviously reluctant to go further, and affirm that it really did occur (Lett. Rum. ' vol. i. p. 296), and points out very clearly the difference between the Roman and Greek laws. " All," says he, " that is distinctive in the Roman law, is not to be found in the Athenian; and distinctive it is with regard to the rights of persons and things. Never
had the Greeks the right of paternal authority, like the Romans; never the law, that the wife, by her marriage, entered into the relation of a daughter and co-heiress; never the jus mancipii, the formality in the purchase. The difference between property by formal purchase and simple property, between property and hereditary possession, does not exist in the Attic law; the Roman law of inheritance, the Roman law of debt, the Roman sys tem in contacts of borrowing and lending, are quite foreign to the Athenians" (Led. Rom. list., vol. i. pp. 295, 296). These differences, and the number could easily be enlarged, have induced modern historians to adopt the theory—if, indeed, that should be called a "theory" which, in the eyes of all sound investigators, is a demonstrated fact—viz., that the twelve tables, instead of being an eclectic assortment of foreign laws, hitherto unknown to the people of Rome, and imposed on them for the first time, really expressed the first effort toward the codification of the consuetudinary law of the Latin race.
According to Livy (iii. 57) and Diodorus (xii. 56), the laws of the twelve tables were cut on bronze tablets (whence their name), and put up in a public place. Whether these tablets were destroyed by the Gauls when they sacked and burned Rome (390 n.c.) is un certain. At all events, the later Romans entertained no doubt that the collection which existed in their time was genuine. The only portions extant are those which have been quoted by jurists and others. The twelve tables is described by Livy (iii. 34) as the fops publici privative jnrie—the fountain of public and private law. Cicero (de Or. i. 43,44) speaks of them with high praise. In the course of years. the jus publicum, as could not fail to be the case, was greatly changed, but the jus prize tum of the twelve tables con tinued the fundamental law of the Roman state. See George Long's article "Lex," in Smith's Dic. of Gr. and Rom. Ant.; Niebuhr's Led. Rom. list. (English translation, vol. i., pp. 295-319), Mommsen's list. of Rome (English translation, vol. i. book i. chap. 11, and book ii. chap. 2). The most complete essay on the history of the extant fragments of the twelve tables is to be found in Dirksen's Uebersicht der big erigen Versuche ZUr and Herstellung des Textes der Zwiilf-Tafel-Fragmente (Leip. 1824)