Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

When did writing have a practical value (as external memory or evidence, for instance), and when did it become part of the law itself? As I suggested earlier, Roman attitudes contain some self-contradiction. Nonetheless, we can see a slow, fairly steady move over time to accept the written word and eventually to privilege it in certain ways over the spoken.

Writing the Laws

For the Romans themselves, the greatest moments in legal his tory were occasions of writing down, and the most important was the publication of the original legal code, the Twelve Tables, in about 450 bc. The surviving fragments are some of our ear liest direct sources of information on Rome. Ancient accounts tend to see the Tables as a populist measure, since they lim ited the ability of the elite to apply the law arbitrarily; some today see the reverse, since their publication would have given a gloss of “objectivity” to rules composed by and (largely) for elites. Both views may well be correct. At any rate, the key points here are that (1) the composition (or perhaps mostly col lection) of the Tables required a total replacement of the earlier form of Roman government by a special commission for two years, (2) the Tables make up the longest Latin text we know of until more than 200 years later, and (3) even more than three centuries later, schoolboys were still learning the Tables as the heart of the legal system. At least in the establishment of law, the influence of writing was crucial and lasting from almost

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