Note 77 — Chapter III · ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE (C) THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE CULTURES

What is important to us, therefore, in the Law of the Twelve Tables is not the supposed contents (of which scarcely an authentic clause survived even in Cicero’s day), but the political act of codification itself, the tendency of which corresponded to that of the overthrow of the Tarquinian Tyrannis by senatorial Oligarchy—a success which, now endangered, it was sought to stabilize for the future. The text which schoolboys learned in detail in Cæsar’s time must have had the same destiny as the consular lists of the old time, in which had been interpolated names upon names of families whose wealth and influence was of much later origin. In recent years Pais and Lambert have disputed the whole story of the Twelve Tables, and so far as concerns the authenticity of the reputed text, they may well be right—not so, however, as regards the course of political events in the years about 450.