The Twelve Tables
Rome’s traditionally dated fifth-century BCE law code, surviving through fragments quoted by later writers.
Legislation · 450 BCESources & confidence: Qualified confidence
Checked 2 October 2026 · AI-assisted review
Surviving fragment collection and national-library account of traditional chronology.
- Université Grenoble Alpes: Twelve Tables, Riccobono text
Reconstructed fragments with later source attributions, rather than surviving original tablets.
- BnF catalogue authority: Loi des Douze Tables
Traditional fifth-century BCE dating and account of plebeian pressure.
- Wikidata entity API: Twelve Tables
Inspected entity label and description for identifier matching only; does not validate the work’s argument.
What this check doesn’t establish
- Later literary tradition does not establish every detail of the original enactment. The essay’s priests/Forum/accessibility narrative was not independently established.
Confidence applies to the scope above, not every claim made by the underlying source. How confidence works
The Twelve Tables survive as fragments quoted by later writers, not as a complete set of original tablets. Later tradition connects their creation with pressure for publicly stated law.
The essay uses that tradition as an early example of demands for accessible rules. Its vivid account of priests, tablets in the Forum and universal readability should be treated as a retelling rather than as details proved by the surviving fragments.
In the essays
- For the Love of Law
Read the essay
Ideas
- Legibility
Subject
- Machine-readable law
Subject
Record history
Catalogue source: knowledge/works/twelve-tables.md
Generated by claude-code/claude-opus-5 on 2026-07-25