Twelve Tables

Laws of ancient Rome, composed in part from those of Solon and other Greek legislators, and in part from the unvsritten laws and customs of the Romans. These laws first appeared in the year of Rome 303, inscribed on ten plates of brass. and the entire code bore the name of file "Laws of the Twelve Tables." The principles they contained were the germ of all the Roman law, the original source of the jurisprudence of the greatest part of Europe. See a fragment of the Law of the Twelve Tables in Cooper, Just. 656; Gibb. Hist. Rom. Emp. c. 44; Code, § 27,

LAWS OF THE. Laws of ancient Rome. It was formerly supdoes. Modern students take the view that Roman law was not at any one time a perfect and symmetrical whole. Probably they were regarded as an ultimate source of law for the field they covered, but they did not purport to include the whole of the recognized customary law; they were no mere consolidation, but a reforming co<jle. It is certain that they incorporated Greek materials. The means of information were at hand in the Greek cities of Southern Italy. On the other hand, doubts that have lately been cast upon their antiquity have not met with a favorable reception. It would seem that they went near to stereotype an archaic and formalist procedure and that the Romans of later generations escaped from great inconvenience only by the devices of legal fictions and equity. Pollock’s Maine’s Anc. L. 19, 25. It is by no means certain that the extant fragments of them have come down to us in their precise form and expression. The language has probably been somewhat modified by subsequent usage. These laws are not fresh enactments, but merely a written statement of the law as it actually stood. They were substantially a codification, and not merely an incorporation, of the customary law of the people. There were Greek elements in them, but still they were essentially Roman; Hunter, Rom. L. 16. See Stephenson, Hist. Rom. L. 120; Sohm’s Inst. Rom. L. See Code; Dr. Voight’s Twelve Tables (Leipsic, 1883).

and formed the basis of the Roman law; positive law, as opposed to natural law. Lex MUa Sentia: the..Elian Sentian law, proposed by the consuls ^lius and Sentius, and passed A. U. 756, restraining a master from manumitting his slaves in certain cases. Lex agraria: the agrarian law, — a law proposed by Tiberius

The Romau plebs, in their struggle with the patricians for equality of rights, demanded that the laws of the state be reduced to written form, the patricians, it was claimed, administering the law to suit themselves. A commission of ten persons {decemviri) was appointed, 451 B. C, to draw up a code. In 452 the commission reported ten tables or chapters of laws, and added two more in 453. The object was to obtain an open and exact statement of the system already existing. This code continued for many centuries as the fundamental law. The legislation of Justinian supplanted it iu form. The original Tables were inscribed on plates of brass. Quotations are preserved in the extant worljs of ancient writers. Form and ceremony in actions were rigorously insisted upon.*