ABSTRACT
The legislation of the Twelve Tables was an important stage in the progress of the Roman people towards social equality. Especially was it important in that it associated the patricians and clientes with the plebeians, according to their l'esidence, in the local tribes which before had been exclusively plebeian. Thus the plebiscitum, or vote of a public meeting of the tribe, became an expression of the mind of the whole people, and not of the plebeians only. The three original patlician tribes liad now become practically useless, and fell into oblivion. But in the last two Tables, added to the code in the second year of the Decemvirate, were reactionary provisions of an oppressive kind. 'I'he old law of debt, which had provoked the secession forty
