THE TWELVE TABLES. – A collection of legislative norms drawn up by extraordinary magistrates (decemviri legibus scribundis) appointed for the years 451 and 450 BC, and transcribed on wooden tablets, probably at the time of their publication, which took place in 449 BC by the consuls. Modern criticism has sought to demolish the tradition concerning these laws.
This legislation (so Pais and Lambert); yet today no one doubts the historicity of the two decemviral boards and of the law compiled by them.
It remains uncertain whether and to what extent certain provisions (e.g., restrictions on funeral luxury, the distance of plantations from boundaries, etc.) were influenced by the legislation of Greek cities; but even regarding the veracity of the account of an embassy to Greece or Magna Graecia, scholars today (Cornelius) are not so sceptical as they were fifty years ago (Pais, Lambert). The Twelve Tables, however, are not so much a body of new provisions as a codification of pre-existing customary norms. The principal nucleus of these, as can be gathered from Roman writers, concerns civil procedure and criminal law; but there are also, jumbled together, provisions relating to private law (family, succession, property) and some norms of public law. The Romans regarded these laws as the foundation of their entire public and private law, and they certainly studied them down to the age of the Antonines (commentary by Gaius).
Modern reconstructions (all dependent on that of Schoell, Legis XII tabularum reliquiae [Berlin 1866]), given the fragmentary nature of the sources, correspond only approximately to the original text.