TWELVE TABLES. – A collection of legislative norms, drawn up by extraordinary magistrates (decemviri legibus scribundis) appointed for the years 451 and 450 B.C., and transcribed on the t. t., probably at the time of their publication, which took place in 449 B.C. through the agency of the consuls. Modern criticism has attempted to demolish the tradition relating to this legislation (thus Pais and Lambert); but today no one doubts the historicity of the two decemvirates and of the law they compiled.
It is uncertain whether, and to what extent, the legislation of Greek cities influenced certain provisions (e.g., the limitation of funeral luxury, the distance of plantations from boundaries, etc.); but even regarding the truthfulness of the account of an embassy to Greece or Magna Graecia, people are not today (Cornelius) as skeptical as they were fifty years ago (Pais, Lambert). The t. t., however, are not so much a body of new provisions as the codification of pre-existing customary norms. Their principal core, insofar as can be gathered from Roman writers, concerns civil procedure and criminal law; but, poorly intermingled with these, there are also provisions relating to private law (family, succession, and property) and some rule of public law. The Romans regarded these laws as the foundation of all their public and private law, and certainly continued to study them until the age of the Antonines (Gaius’s commentary).
Modern reconstructions (all dependent on Schoell’s, Legis XII tabularum reliquiae (Berlin 1866)), given the fragmentary nature of the sources, correspond only approximately to the original text.