The Twelve Tables
Roman law is written down and posted in the Forum where anyone can read it.
- When
- Known to
- ± 10 years
- Era
- Classical, Holocene
Around 450 BCE, after pressure from the plebeians, Rome's laws are codified onto twelve bronze tablets and displayed publicly. The content is harsh and often archaic, but the principle is decisive: law that is written and public cannot be reinterpreted at will by the patrician priests who had controlled it. Roman schoolboys memorised them for centuries, and they are the foundation of a legal tradition that underlies most of the world's civil law systems.