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Essay on Ancient Roman law and Order
The Twelve Tables were an early product of the struggle between the Orders. The law was at that time administered by Patrician magistrates, and evidently even the knowledge of its contents was denied to the populace at large. One of the demands of the Plebeians was therefore for the publication of the law. The traditional story—compounded in what proportions of legend and of fact we do not know—is that in 451 B.C., after a delegation had been sent to Greece to study the legislation of Solon, ten men compiled a code which was set up in the marketplace on ten bronze tablets. A further two were added by another commission of ten in the following year.
In a sense, therefore, the Twelve Tables were both a statute and a code, but one must beware of pressing either word too far. They were not a code in the modern sense of a complete and coherent statement of the law; and though they were in form a statute, it is unlikely that in substance they departed much from the traditional customary law. Such at least are the conclusions which it seems reasonable to draw from what evidence we have, but there is a great deal of uncertainty and conjecture in any assessment of the Twelve Tables, since our knowledge of their content is fragmentary and derives from a much later date.
The original tablets are said to have perished when the Gauls burned Rome in 390 B.C., and certainly there was no official text at the end of the Republic, though there must have been many private copies. (Cicero records that in his youth boys learned them by heart at school.) We cannot be sure what proportion of the whole is represented by the surviving fragments, but their scale suggests that only the more salient rules were expressed......
