Twelve Tables

TWELVE TABLES. - A collection of legislative norms, drafted by extraordinary magistrates (decemviri legibus scribundis) appointed for the years 451 and 450 B.C., and transcribed onto the t. t. probably at the time of their publication, which took place in 449 B.C. through the consuls. Modern criticism has attempted to demolish the tradition concerning this legislation (thus Pais and Lambert); but today no one doubts the historicity of the two decemvirates and of the law compiled by them.

It is uncertain whether and to what extent legislations of Greek cities influenced certain provisions (for example, 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 to Magna Graecia, people today (Cornelius) are not 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 main core, as far as can be gathered from Roman writers, concerns civil procedure and criminal law: but in them one also finds, poorly intermingled, provisions relating to private law (family, succession, property) and some norms of public law. The Romans regarded those laws as the basis of their entire public and private law: and they made them an object of study certainly down to the age of the Antonines (commentary of 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.

Pietro de Francisci