006 - The Twelve Tables

Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome. We ended last week with the plebes finally being granted nominal political rights, or at least defenders within the political arena, with the creation of the office of tribune. This stopped plebeian agitation for a while, but as the years passed a new generation came of age and demanded further protection from the ever-present threat of patrician tyranny. It was not enough to be protected from an abuse of the law, because, at the time, nobody knew exactly what the law was. The legal framework of Rome was a nebulous body of oral and written traditions, with precedents and sub-clauses hiding all over the place, in official decrees, letters, pronouncements, and, most dangerously, in the minds of old patrician lawyers. Who was to say a man was being treated unjustly if no one knew exactly what justice was? This new generation of plebeian agitators would ultimately win a great victory for themselves and the rule of law, giving the Romans a set of written precepts that would be memorized by every child and recited by every adult, the Twelve Tables of Roman Law. This official codification of the law occurred around 451 BC, but before we get to that point in our story, I want to give a brief account of what Rome dealt with in the forty-odd years between the inception of the tribunate and the creation of the Twelve Tables.

Internally, Rome was full of tension, but, as I said, for the first twenty years or so, nothing boiled over too much to disrupt the day-to-day, year-to-year operations of the city. The consuls and senates still held a lion's share of the power, though they were now checked somewhat by the tribunes. The Romans were held together by an unceasing series of wars against their neighbors to the north, east, and south. To the north, they fought a particularly hard campaign against their old nemesis, the Veites, that ended in a stalemate in 474 BC, a campaign that came complete with a dressed-up Battle of Thermopylae, with 306 members of the noble Fabi family cast in the role of King Leonidas and his doomed Spartans. Protecting an undefensible pass, the Fabi clan fought to the last man to give the legions a chance to regroup. The battles fought to the east and south were of a different sort and revolved around a geographically-based cultural clash. Veii may have been in competition with Rome, but at least it was a settled city of civilized farmers. Out in the eastern hills, however, nomadic tribes, particularly the Volscians and the Aequians, pressed at Rome's borders. The nomadic herdsmen coveted Rome's soft, flat land and tried every year to carve out some or all of Roman territory and turn it from parceled farms into a massive grazing zone. As a result, the Romans were constantly beating back encroachment by the migrant tribes, who occasionally mustered enough force to give the Romans a run for their money, but were usually dispatched easily.

For the first ten years after the secession of the Plebes and running concurrently with the on-again, off-again battles with Veii, the Volscians posed the greatest danger. They had already made great inroads south of the city, effectively securing all the land between the hills and the sea, blocking trade with Magna Graecia. The peak of the Volscian threat came early, in 491 BC, when a disgruntled Roman general named Corleonus defected and led a Volscian army through the legions and right to the gates of the city. The Roman men beaten, the women were sent to plead with Corleonus to end his attack, and it was only after a personal appeal from his own mother that Corleonus' heart finally turned and he withdrew the army. His Volscian officers were appalled at being denied their easy victory and back in Volscian territory they murdered their Roman leader. It has been noted that the story of Corleonus bears a striking resemblance to the story of the great Athenian general Themistocles, and that the story was probably inserted later to account for the defeat suffered by Rome at the hands of nomadic rabble. The Roman ego demanded that Romans could only be defeated by other Romans.

By the mid-480s BC, though, the Volscian threat had largely been contained and the city was never seriously threatened again, though the Volscians maintained control over the southern plains for the remainder of the century and were a constant menace along Rome's borders. Throughout the 470s and 460s BC, even though the external danger had been greatly diminished, the legions still went out every summer campaigning against the latest forays by the Volscians or Aequian raiders. The total military dominance of Rome over the hill tribes eventually led the plebe leaders to suspect that the patricians were not being totally honest with the threat level posed by the tribes, and with the record the Roman army had, it's hard to blame them. Without even breaking a sweat, the legions dispatched every enemy they encountered.

A political pattern began to emerge. Plebe leaders would decry the raising of yet another army to go to battle with the Volscians or whoever, even though they posed no serious threat, and would denounce the senate for starting wars to put off questions of further economic and political reform. These leaders would always, in turn, be denounced by the senate as self-absorbed traitors who were putting personal ambition ahead of Rome's safety. The plebe leaders would shoot back that the patricians were sending men out to die for no other reason than to tighten their grip on wealth and power. A standoff would ensue, but, Rome, being what it was, would ultimately raise the legion and the plebeian demagogues would be silenced. The Romans were soldiers and fighting is what they did.

Throughout these years, Rome's position vis-a-vis the nomadic herdsmen was never seriously threatened, though in the following century, Rome would fight a knockdown, drag-out war with a rising hill tribe called the Samnites that would ultimately see all Italy eventually fighting on one side or the other.

In the years after the secession of the plebes, there were essentially two major initiatives that excited the plebes and kept the patricians up at night. The first was proposed by a tribune named Valero in 473 BC. It stated simply that the tribunes ought to be elected by the tribal assembly and not by the comita centuriata as they had been in the first years after the office was created. The patricians balked at the idea, knowing full well that they would no longer have undue weight in choosing who would be tribune. As I noted last week, the patricians inevitably failed in their attempt to quash the proposal. An election of the tribunes was duly passed to the comita tributa.

As if this wasn't bad enough, in 462 BC, a tribune named Tarantullus made an even more radical proposal. The laws of Rome should be written down and posted so that all citizens would be bound to the same codes and no man could rise above them. The patricians were horrified at the thought and spent the next ten years doing everything in their power to stop its implementation. It was during these years that the plebes really started to resist military service and openly questioned patrician motives. At one point, however, caught up in their own rhetoric, they failed to believe it when the senate woke up one morning and announced that during the night, a small Sabine army had penetrated the city and taken the citadel. It was only after a desperate plea by the consuls that the plebes finally agreed to raise an army, finding much to their surprise that the citadel had in fact been taken and their city was under siege. The legions, along with a contingent of local allies, easily dislodged the Sabines and the greatest casualty of the whole encounter was what little influence the tribunes had so recently achieved. The patricians, as a result, managed to put off Tarantillus' proposal for another ten years.

In the end, though, they were forced to relent. Political consciousness had been raised in the city by travelers from the south who brought with them word of Solon's political reforms in the great Greek city of Athens, causing proponents of reform to beat a steady drum. Finally, a combination of plague, famine, and the economically destabilizing introduction of coins as a medium of exchange in 454 BC led to a crisis of confidence in the leadership and something had to be done to assuage the masses. It was agreed in 451 BC that consular power for the year would be transferred to a body of ten men called the decemvirate, whose main task it would be to collect and condense Roman law into a single uniform code to be published on bronze tablets in the forum for all to see.

Unfortunately, the total contents of the twelve tables, each posted on a separate bronze tablet – hence the name – have been lost to history and all we have to rely on is occasional excerpts and summaries by later Roman authors. We know generally what topics each table covered and the range in detail gives a fascinating insight into the Roman mind. Held within the tables written 2,500 years ago, we find the basis for many of our own founding principles. For example, the ninth table explicitly forbids passage of laws against specific individuals – a principle still enforced today – while the first table establishes the sanctity of the subpoena or the requirement to appear before a court. The tables covered a wide range of matters, from lawsuit procedures to payment of debts to inheritance rights to upkeep of public sewers to divorce and property boundary issues.

I will not bore you with a lengthy recitation of the contents of each table, but I do want to highlight some of the more curious facets of the Roman legal mind. For example, according to the eighth table, a thief caught at night may be killed without penalty but if the same thief is caught during the day, he must be delivered unharmed to the magistrates. Contained within the same table, we discover what the penalty was for throwing an un-aimed weapon into a crowd. The accused was fined one ram. The seventh table states that fruit that falls from a tree onto a neighbor's property shall be the property of that neighbor, a provision which demonstrates just how scrupulously litigious the Romans could be.

Death was the ultimate penalty and was prescribed for a number of crimes, including murder and the destruction of crops, but also, interestingly, for matters involving the integrity of the courts. Magistrates who took bribes to influence their decisions, as well as witnesses who lied under oath, were both ordered flung from a high cliff. To the Romans, perjury was a heinous crime that threatened the entire community.

The final provision I want to point out was hidden deep in the ninth table, a piece of fine print that, once discovered, outraged the plebs and led to violent class confrontations. No patrician shall be allowed to marry a pleb. Effectively, this codified a closing off of upward social mobility to the majority of the population and guaranteed that none of them would ever hold the most powerful office of state, the consulship. This did not go over well with the plebs.

As I mentioned earlier, the twelve tables were the foundation of later Roman law and were memorized by all citizens, literate or not. The existence of a written body of law was not a Roman innovation, nor did it make them unique in the ancient world, but it did put them into a select group of states that valued the objectivity of the law over the subjectivity of capricious rulers.

The story of the decemvirs, the magistrates tasked with the compilation, ends with an interesting bit of legendary melodrama. During the year, or two depending on the source, that the decemvirs were in office, they held ultimate authority. The unbroken chain of consular elections had been broken, and effectively a new form of government had been briefly ushered in. Rather than rule by two men, it was rule by ten men, and among those ten men, one was first among equals, a man named Apius Claudius. Claudius came from a family of staunch patricians and was a vigorous opponent of just about any proposed plebeian reform. After finishing their appointed task, the decemvirate had lost their raison d'etre and was set to disband, but Claudius, enjoying his newfound power, convinced his colleagues that they should remain in office after their term expired. The other decemvirs, similarly enjoying the trappings of power, agreed, and when the consular elections for that year arrived, the decemvirate simply did not allow anyone to stand and no elections were held. The people found themselves unexpectedly in a constitutional crisis.

Even though Claudius and the decemvirs had made a naked power grab, there was no legal avenue available to stop them, for the decemvirate had been instilled with all judicial authority. Ironically, the body of men who laid down the laws were the first to blatantly ignore them. Days and weeks passed with the decemvirate maintaining their illegal hold on power, until finally Claudius went too far and the entire city rose up in revolt. Claudius had his eye on a beautiful plebeian girl who was said to be married to a young army officer. Claudius declared out of the blue that the girl in question was an escaped slave owned by one of his clients and that she must be returned. A hearing was called to decide the case and numerous witnesses were brought up, attesting to the free-born status of the young woman, but the trial was overseen by Claudius who, to the astonishment of everyone present, ruled that the girl was indeed an escaped slave and was the property of the complaining client, despite obvious evidence to the contrary. The people were appalled at this absurd conclusion and the army, when it caught wind of the decision, joined in their outrage. The husband-to-be and the father of the woman were both officers in good standing and the army was incredulous at the arbitrary injustice of Claudius towards one of their own.

The people, supported by the army, then used their bargaining chip of last resort and abandoned the city, removing themselves to the sacred mount just as they had done 40 years earlier. The decemvirs, recognized that their position had become untenable, finally resigned. Claudius was arrested, but rather than face trial, he killed himself. Regular consular elections then took place and Rome's domestic tranquility was restored. The plebeians actually emerged from the order better off than they had been, for in their negotiations to return to the city, they demanded the number of tribunes be raised to ten, which the senate, anxious to get things back to normal in a gin-fearing invasion, agreed to. And of course, the codification of the laws, the decades-long plebeian demand, had already been accomplished, leaving them in a much stronger position legally to fend off future patrician tyranny.

The creation of the Twelve Tables left the plebes on the one hand overjoyed, but on the other they were horrified by some of the provisions it contained. True, the rule of law would now dominate patrician subjectivity, but that one sticking point of the illegality of patrician-plebe marriage opened their eyes to an oppression that they never knew existed. Only patricians could be consuls or hold the other high magistries, including Ponifex Maximus. If no plebe could ever marry a patrician, then no plebe would ever hold high office, and the patricians would always and forever hold the winning political hand. The next cycle of patrician-plebe conflict would revolve around this very issue, eventually leading to a number of reforms that further diluted the patrician stranglehold on power, which we will get to in the weeks ahead.

Those of you who know Roman history may have noticed that I ran right by one of the most well-known folk legends, which occurred around 460 BC, without so much as a mention. That is because next week I want to focus in detail on the central figure of that story, the great Cincinnatus, whose career spans both sides of the Decemvirate interlude. Join me next week as we untangle the man from the myth, and figure out what made Cincinnatus such a towering figure that American settlers felt compelled to name their new boomtown on the Ohio River after a Roman who had been dead 2,200 years.