Codification of the Law of the Twelve Tables
- Date
- 451–449 BCE
- Category
- Politics & governance
- Region
- Italy (Rome)
- Era
- Classical Antiquity
- Significance
A board of ten magistrates (the decemviri), appointed at the insistence of the plebeians, produced Rome's first written legal code.
Beginning in 451 BCE the commissioners drafted ten tables of law, supplemented by two further tables the following year, and the code was ratified by the assembly around 449 BCE and publicly displayed in the Forum, reportedly on bronze tablets. Before this, legal judgments rested on unwritten custom known mainly to a small group of patrician priests and magistrates, leaving ordinary citizens vulnerable to arbitrary interpretation. By fixing the law in public, written form, the Twelve Tables made legal rules knowable to all citizens and constrained the discretion of judges, covering matters such as debt, property, family, inheritance, contracts and court procedure. Though harsh by later standards and only partially preserved through quotation in later authors, the code became the foundational text of Roman jurisprudence; Roman schoolchildren memorised it for centuries, and its principles influenced the entire later development of Roman law and, through it, much of the Western legal tradition.
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Empires active in 451–449 BCE
- Achaemenid Empire550 BCE – 330 BCE
- Roman Republic509 BCE – 27 BCE
- Carthaginian Empire650 BCE – 146 BCE
- Kingdom of Kush1070 BCE – 350 CE
- Scythians800 BCE – 300 BCE
- Zhou Dynasty1046 BCE – 256 BCE
Related politics & governance events
- Assassination of Julius Caesar (the Ides of March)15 March 44 BCE
- Augustus founds the Principate (First Settlement)16 January 27 BCE
- Tribunate and murder of Tiberius Gracchus133 BCE
- Cleisthenes' reforms establish Athenian democracy508/507 BCE
- Foundation of the Roman Republicc. 509 BCE (traditional)
- Cyrus the Great Founds the Achaemenid Persian Empire550 BCE
Further reading
The wider story
Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic
Gripping popular narrative of the Republic's fall.
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