The Twelve Tables of Rome (c. 450 BCE)¶

Author: The Decemviri (a Roman commission of ten men) Type: Primary Source · Legal Document Era/Period: WH Era 1 — Ancient Civilizations Standards: WH.6_12.2 · WH.6_12.3 · WH.6_12.4 · R.9

What This Text Is About¶

The Twelve Tables were Rome's first written law code, produced around 450 BCE after plebeians (common citizens) demanded that laws be written down so that patricians (aristocrats) could no longer interpret them secretly. The laws were engraved on twelve bronze tablets and displayed in the Roman Forum for all citizens to read. They governed daily life: debt, property, family, contracts, and criminal punishment. They are not the first law code in history (Hammurabi's predates them by 1,300 years), but they are the foundation of Roman law — and through Rome, of modern Western legal systems.

Read It¶

Standard public domain translation. The original Latin text was lost — these laws are reconstructed from later Roman legal writings that quoted them.

Table I — Concerning the Summons to Court¶

1. If anyone summons another before the magistrate, he must go. If he does not go, the one who summons him shall call witnesses to this. Then he shall seize him.

2. If he refuses or tries to flee, the summoner shall lay hands on him.

3. If illness or old age prevents the summoned man from appearing, the summoner shall furnish him a beast of burden. He is not obligated to furnish a covered carriage, unless he chooses.

4. If the defendant has a surety, the plaintiff shall proceed against the surety, not the defendant.

5. If the parties agree, they may settle the case themselves. If not, they shall state their case in the assembly or the court before noon. They shall appear together.

6. After noon, if only one party has appeared, the magistrate shall decide in his favor.

7. If both parties are present at sunset, the magistrate shall adjourn the case.

Table II — Concerning Trials¶

1. A lawsuit for which no specific penalty is fixed shall be assessed at three hundred asses if the matter involves a broken bone; one hundred fifty asses in other cases.

2. If a man is unable to appear due to serious illness or if he is engaged in the service of the state, the day for his appearance shall be postponed.

3. The witness who refuses to give testimony shall be publicly called out as infamous, and shall be barred from giving testimony and from calling others as witnesses.

Table III — Concerning Debts¶

1. After a debt has been acknowledged, or judgment has been pronounced in court, there shall be thirty days of grace.

2. After that, the debtor may be arrested. The creditor shall bring him to court.

3. If the debtor does not satisfy the judgment, and no one offers surety for him, the creditor shall take him home and put him in chains. He shall bind him with not less than fifteen pounds of chains, or with more if he chooses.

4. The debtor in chains shall live on his own food if he has it. If not, the creditor who holds him in chains shall give him a pound of grain per day, or more.

5. Unless the debt is discharged, the creditor shall hold him in chains for sixty days. During that time, on three successive market days, he shall bring him to the magistrate in the assembly and the amount of the debt shall be publicly announced.

6. If no one pays the debt, the creditor may sell the debtor as a slave beyond the Tiber River, or put him to death.

7. If there are several creditors, they may divide the debtor's body among them. If any creditor takes more or less than his share, there shall be no penalty.

Table IV — Concerning the Rights of Fathers (Patria Potestas)¶

1. A notably deformed child shall be killed immediately.

2. If a father sells his son three times, the son shall be free from his father.

3. To repudiate a wife, her husband shall order her to have her own property for her own use, shall take the keys, and shall expel her.

4. A child born ten months after the father's death shall not be admitted to a legal inheritance.

Table V — Concerning Inheritance and Guardianship¶

1. As a man has disposed of his household and his money in his will, so shall it be binding. If there is no will, the nearest male relation shall be heir. If there is no near relation, the clansmen shall have possession.

2. If a man is raving mad and has no guardian, his person and property shall be in the care of his clansmen.

3. An improvident person shall be placed under the guardianship of his clansmen or patrons. They shall have power over his property.

4. A child born after the father's will was drawn up shall receive the same share as if born before.

5. The debts of the deceased shall be divided in proportion among his heirs.

Table VI — Concerning Acquisition and Possession¶

1. When a man makes a contract or conveyance, whatever he states verbally, that shall be binding.

2. Usucaption of moveable things requires one year's possession for its completion; but usucaption of an estate and buildings, two years.

3. A woman who does not wish to be subjected to her husband's control in this manner shall absent herself three nights in succession in every year, and so interrupt the usucaption of each year.

4. If a man wishes to alienate a slave or an animal and the slave or animal has a defect, the seller shall disclose it. He is responsible for concealed defects for two years.

5. A beam built into a house or a vineyard trellis may not be removed. Action may be taken against one who has built in another's beam for double its value.

6. Timber felled and made into boards shall be provided to the owner, if he desires, to enable him to claim his stolen property.

Table VII — Concerning Land Rights¶

1. Let a space of two feet and a half be left between neighboring buildings.

2. Where the road is not paved, animals may be driven in any direction, as the driver wishes.

3. If the rainwater of a neighbor does injury to a man's property, he may bring an action. But if it is a natural watercourse, he may not.

4. A man must trim back his trees to a height of fifteen feet, so that neighbors' property receives light. If the tree extends over the neighbor's property, the neighbor may lop it himself.

5. A man may gather any fruit that falls from his tree onto a neighbor's property.

6. The right of passage over another's land may not be acquired by long use.

Table VIII — Concerning Torts and Delicts (Injuries)¶

1. If anyone sings or composes a song that slanders or dishonors another, he shall be clubbed to death.

2. If anyone has broken the limb of another and does not settle with him, let there be retaliation in kind.

3. If anyone has broken a bone of a freeman with his hand or with a club, he shall pay a penalty of three hundred asses; or one hundred fifty asses if the bone is of a slave.

4. If anyone has committed a personal injury upon another, the penalty shall be twenty-five asses.

5. If a dog savages a man, the owner shall either restrain the dog or compensate the victim.

6. If anyone commits robbery or theft by night and if the owner kills him in the act, he shall be held to have killed him lawfully.

7. It is forbidden for a thief to be killed by daylight, unless he defends himself with a weapon; even then, the owner must call out before killing him.

8. In the case of a thief caught red-handed, if he is a slave, he shall be flogged and thrown from the Tarpeian Rock. If he is a free man, he shall be flogged and delivered as a bondsman to the person he robbed.

9. If anyone sets fire to a building, or to a heap of grain left near a farmhouse, he shall be bound, flogged, and put to death by fire; provided always that he has committed this act knowingly and with malice aforethought. If it was an accident, the law provides that he shall make good the damage; or if he has not the means, he shall receive a lighter punishment.

10. If anyone destroys by grazing or cuts another's crops harvested by night, he shall be hanged and put to death as a sacrifice to Ceres.

11. If a patron defrauds his client, he shall be declared an outcast.

12. Any person who incites an enemy against the Roman state, or hands over a citizen to the enemy, shall be put to death.

13. It shall be a capital offense for a judge or an arbiter to have accepted money in the course of a trial.

14. Testimony of a witness who has been found guilty of false witness shall never be received again.

Table IX — Concerning Public Law¶

1. No privileges or statutes shall be enacted in favor of private persons, to the injury of others contrary to the law common to all citizens, and which individuals, no matter of what rank, have a right to make use of.

2. The penalty shall be death for a judge or arbiter legally appointed who has been found guilty of receiving a bribe for giving a decision.

3. It is forbidden to put to death any man unconvicted. The sentence must be that of the Roman people.

4. If anyone should stir up war against his country or deliver a citizen to the enemy, he shall suffer capital punishment.

5. Whoever shall have caused a tumult by night in the city, or whoever shall have killed another person shall be condemned.

Table X — Concerning Sacred Law¶

1. No person shall bury or burn a corpse within the city.

2. One shall not do more than this in the preparation of a funeral: not more than three mourning garments, a small purple tunic, and ten flute players.

3. Women shall not tear their faces nor wail at funerals.

4. No person shall collect the bones of a deceased in order to hold a second funeral. This law does not apply to soldiers who have died in war or abroad.

5. Gold shall not be placed with the dead except in the following case: if the dead man's teeth are bound with gold, it shall be lawful to bury or burn that gold with him.

6. Let no newly made grave come within sixty feet of a house or a planted field.

Table XI — Supplement I¶

1. Marriage between patricians and plebeians is hereby forbidden.

(Note: This prohibition was abolished shortly after the Tables were published, by the Lex Canuleia of 445 BCE — one of the earliest examples of a Roman law being successfully challenged by popular protest.)

Table XII — Supplement II¶

1. If a slave commits a theft or injury in accordance with his master's order, the master is responsible.

2. If anyone knowingly commits fraud in dedicating property to the gods, he shall be judged guilty of a capital offense.

3. Whatever the people orders and enacts last shall be held as established law.

ELA Standards This Connects To¶

R.9 — The Twelve Tables are a structured legal argument: each provision states a rule and implies the reasoning behind it. Students analyze what each law reveals about Roman values and what problems it was trying to solve.
R.7 — The terse, declarative style ("If anyone… he shall…") is a deliberate legal register. Compare to the narrative style of the Egyptian Book of the Dead or the philosophical verse of the Dhammapada — three different ways of encoding moral rules.

WH.6_12.2 — The Tables reveal Roman values: family authority (patria potestas), property rights, the sacred obligation to honor the dead, the horror of treason. What Rome believed shows in what Rome punished.
WH.6_12.3 — The Twelve Tables are the foundation of Roman law — and Roman law is the foundation of most Western legal systems today. They established the principle that laws must be written and public. The demand for written laws by plebeians is one of the first examples of citizens using political pressure to limit the power of an aristocracy.
WH.6_12.4 — Tables III (debt slavery) and IV (patria potestas) reveal the economic and social structure of early Rome: extreme inequality between creditors and debtors, near-absolute power of fathers over families, and legal distinctions between free citizens, freed persons, and slaves.

Key Vocabulary¶

Term	Definition
Patrician	A member of the Roman aristocracy — the class that originally controlled law, politics, and religion
Plebeian	A common citizen of Rome — the class that demanded the Twelve Tables so they could know the laws that governed them
Decemviri	The committee of ten men appointed to write the Twelve Tables
Patria potestas	"Power of the father" — the legal authority of a Roman father over his entire household, including the power of life and death over his children
Usucaption	Acquiring legal ownership of property by possessing it for a long enough time without the owner objecting
Surety	A person who guarantees to pay a debt or fulfill an obligation if the primary party cannot
Tarpeian Rock	A cliff on the Capitoline Hill in Rome from which criminals and traitors were thrown to their deaths

Key Passage¶

If a father sells his son three times, the son shall be free from his father. — Table IV, Law 2

This law reveals both the extreme power of Roman fathers (they could legally sell their sons into slavery) and a limit on that power — the son could be freed after three sales. It shows a legal system still treating people as property while beginning to recognize limits on that treatment.

Studio Ideas¶

"Who Did Roman Law Protect?" — EQ: When a law is written down, who benefits? · Standard: WH.6_12.3 + WH.6_12.4 · Demo Mode: Written Assessment (read Tables III, IV, and VIII carefully. Who is protected by these laws? Who is not? Write a W.4 argument: were the Twelve Tables a step toward justice, or a codification of inequality?)
"Three Legal Codes" — EQ: What does a civilization's law reveal about its values? · Standard: WH.6_12.3 · Demo Mode: Visual/Creative (create a comparison chart of Hammurabi's Code, the Twelve Tables, and one modern law — what problem does each address? What does each assume about human nature? What punishments does each allow?)
"The People Demand to See the Law" — EQ: Why does it matter whether laws are written down and public? · Standard: WH.6_12.3 · Demo Mode: Verbal Conversation (the Twelve Tables were created because plebeians demanded that laws be written down. Why? What happens when only some people know what the laws are? Can you think of modern examples where access to legal knowledge creates inequality?)

Why This Is Relevant Today?¶

The Twelve Tables were created because ordinary Romans demanded that the laws be written down and posted publicly — before that, patrician magistrates could apply the law however they chose because only they knew what it said. That demand (make the rules visible to the people they govern) is the foundation of due process, the rule of law, and the legal right to know what you're accused of. When people argue about mandatory sentencing guidelines, judicial transparency, or the right to see the government data collected about you, they're making the same argument the plebs made in 450 BCE. The Twelve Tables also established that law should be fixed and predictable — not whatever the magistrate feels like today — which is still the argument in every debate about judicial discretion vs. mandatory minimums. Ignorance of the law is no excuse, as every law student learns — but that principle only makes sense when the law is publicly posted.