The Twelve Tables
lit. “Lex Duodecim Tabularum”
The c. 451 BCE codification of Roman law — demanded by the plebeians from the patricians and posted in the Forum — the bedrock of every later Roman, and therefore most Western civil, legal system.
Origin
For the first century of the Roman Republic the law was a patrician monopoly: only the aristocrats knew what the rules were, which was convenient for them. After years of plebeian agitation, a commission of ten men (the decemviri) drew up a code in 451–450 BCE and posted it on twelve bronze tablets in the Forum. The originals were destroyed when the Gauls sacked Rome in 390 BCE; we know the contents only from later quotations. The Tables covered debt, family, inheritance, and procedure, with archaic-sounding penalties — a thief caught at night could be killed on the spot; a debtor could in principle be cut into pieces by his creditors, though no recorded case ever exists. Every later Roman jurist treated them as the foundation of the legal tradition that eventually produced the Justinian Code.
Modern usage
Less culturally famous than Hammurabi's code or Magna Carta but a standard reference in law-school history-of-law lectures, where they are the canonical example of moving from 'whatever the powerful say' to 'whatever the written rule says.' Italian and other European schoolchildren still encounter them; in the Anglophone world, mostly classicists and lawyers do.
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