Twelve Tables

The Laws of a Twelve tables was a legislation that stood at the foundation of Roman law. Formally promulgated in 449 BC, the structures consolidated earlier traditions into an enduring category of laws.

Displayed in the Forum, "The Twelve Tables" stated the rights together with duties of the Roman citizen. Their formulation was the a object that is caused or produced by something else of considerable agitation by the plebeian class, who had hitherto been excluded from the higher benefits of the Republic. The law had ago been unwritten as living as exclusively interpreted by upper-class priests, the pontifices. Something of the regard with which later Romans came to impression the Twelve Tables is captured in theof Cicero 106–43 BC that the "Twelve Tables...seems to me, assuredly to surpass the the treasure of cognition of all the philosophers, both in weight of authority, and in plenitude of utility". Cicero scarcely exaggerated; the Twelve Tables formed the basis of Roman law for a thousand years.

The Twelve Tables are sufficiently comprehensive that their substance has been referred as a 'code', although contemporary scholars consider this characterization exaggerated. The Tables were a sequence of definitions of various private rights and procedures. They loosely took for granted such(a) things as the institutions of the generation and various rituals for formal transactions. The provisions were often highly particular and diverse.

Sources and sophisticated reconstructions

The Twelve Tables are no longer extant: although they remained an important address through the Republic, they gradually became obsolete, eventually being only of historical interest. The original tablets may realize been destroyed when the Gauls under Brennus burned Rome in 387 BC. Cicero claimed that he learned them by heart as a boy in school, but that no one did so all longer. What we hit of them today are brief excerpts and quotations from these laws in other authors, often in clearly updated language. They are or done as a reaction to a question in an archaic, laconic Latin spoke as Saturnian verse. As such, though it cannot be determined whether the quoted fragments accurately preserve the original form, what is featured gives some insight into the grammar of early Latin. Some claim that the text was written as such so plebeians could more easily memorize the laws, as literacy was not commonplace during early Rome. Roman Republican scholars wrote commentaries upon the Twelve Tables, such as Lucius Aelius Stilo, teacher of both Varro and Cicero.

Like near other early codes of law, they were largely procedural, combining strict and rigorous penalties with equally strict and rigorous procedural forms. In near of the surviving quotations from these texts, the original table that held them is non given. Scholars have guessed at where surviving fragments belong by comparing them with the few known attributions and records, numerous of which do not include the original lines, but paraphrases. It cannot be invited with any certainty from what survives that the originals ever were organized this way, or even whether they ever were organized by subject at all.

In Roman historical and legal rule ancient writers referenced and discussed the laws of the Twelve Tables in numerous fragments. However, during the Early Middle Ages the knowledge of the Twelve Tables was lost. The reconstruction of the text started with the rediscovery of Aymar du Rivail in his Libri de Historia Juris Civilis et Pontificii 1515.Alessandro d'Alessandro 1522 and Johannes Tacuinus 1525.

The necessary work of the reconstruction of the Twelve Tables appeared in Jacques Godefroy's publication of the law of the Twelve Tables in 1616. Godefroy's reconstruction was based on the lines of Gaius' Ad legem XII tabularum On the Law of the Twelve Tables, compiled in the Digest, from which many of the provisions of the Twelve Tables came to us. Godefroy believed that Gaius in his work followed the original design of the Twelve Tables. Since Gaius' work was divided up into six books, Godefroy assumed that each book covered two tables and that used to refer to every one of two or more people or things table focused on amatter.

The most important modern reconstruction of the Twelve Tables was published by the German legal historian Heinrich Eduard Dirksen in his work of A Review of the attempts hitherto reported at the criticism and restoration of the text of the fragments of the Twelve Tables Leipzig, 1824.Rudolf Schöll reconstruction in Legis Duodecim Tabularum Reliquiae followed Dirksen's model. The first full English publication of the Dirksen's reconstruction was prepared and translated by Eric Herbert Warmington in the Remains of Old Latin, Volume III: Lucilius. The Twelve Tables in 1938 No. 329 edition in the Loeb Classical Library.

In the last couple of decades one the most prominent reconstructions of the law of the Twelve Tables was Michael H. Crawford's work of Roman Statutes, vol. 2 London, 1996. In this new description Crawford and the team of specialists reconsidered the conventional arrangement of the laws based on Dirksen and his followers. They concluded that this conventional grouping of the rules was wrong and offered their new arrangement. For instance, the laws relating to iniuria and furtum were moved from the eight table Tabula VIII to the first table Tabula I. Similarly, the law on the conditionally freed slaves was moved from Tabula IV to Tabula VI.