Twelve Tables of Roman Law

In 451–450 BCE, Roman politicians appointed a committee of ten legislators to control the government and to compile an outline of the private and public laws of the Roman Republic, resulting in the Twelve Tables of Roman Law. Twelve tables containing information on specific points of law were posted in the main Forum of Rome for public approval. Previously known only to the elite patrician classes, these descriptions and definitions of procedures, parental rights, remedies, and rights and responsibilities of creditors and debtors would be instrumental in helping ease the social stresses that threatened to overturn the newly created republic. After a great deal of deliberation, an attempted coup by members of this committee, and their subsequent removal from power, the Laws of the Twelve Tables were finalized and submitted for approval. After much pressure from the plebeians (commoners), the Senate formally promulgated the laws in 449 BCE, and they became the centerpieces of the burgeoning Roman legal system. Six decades later, however, in 390 BCE, the Gauls, a neighboring people originating in what is now southern France, sacked Rome and burned it, destroying the tablets forever. No full record of them survives, and what little information has been passed down about them has been reconstructed from quotations in the works of ancient authors and from legal texts.

By enumerating the legal rights of the citizenry, the committee called the decemvirate (a group of ten men) removed a shroud of mystery from Roman legal proceedings and opened up for the public the laws' interpretation and analysis. This move greatly influenced the power structure of the Roman world, untangling the reins of legislative power from the upper patrician class and allowing greater political and legal freedom and influence for the lower plebeian class. This development in turn was pivotal in the eventual resolution of the period known as the Conflict of the Orders. The Twelve Tables would become the basis of further Roman legal codification, which would serve as the origin for nearly all of the legal systems of modern Europe. The Twelve Tables marked the only attempt at a compilation of Roman law until the emperor Theodosius I's codex was published in 438 CE, nearly a thousand years later.