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Although the law of the Twelve Tables (lex duodecim tabularum) was for the most part a codification of existing rules, it marks a distinct advance in the recognition of plebeian rights, and thus was of the utmost political importance in framing rules for the whole state the question before the commissioners was whether the customary law embodied in the code should be that which prevailed in the patrician, or that which held good in the plebeian community. In almost every important particular plebeian law was preferred. The reason was not any regard for plebeian rights (the decemvirs re-enacted the rule forbidding marriage between the orders), but the simplicity and the capacity for universality of this law. The code is not a hap-hazard collection, but a scientific compilation; the aim was a “levelling” of the law, an arbitrament between classes, such as had often formed the task of the Greek legislator; and in effecting this object the commissioners showed more wisdom than any Greek legislator of whom we hear. The idea of legislating for a class, or the still more foolish idea of perfect logical adjustment, are strikingly absent. The code is thoroughly Roman in its caution and good sense, its respect for the past, which it disregards only when old custom violates the rules of common sense, and its judicious contempt for symmetry. Such a code as this might be changed in detail, but was never likely to be repealed. It remained the “fountain of all public and private law,” and justly, for, according to Tacitus, it was the “consummation of equal right.”[396] Its rhythmical sentences were learnt by heart by school-boys in Cicero’s time.[397] Elaborate commentaries were written on it by the republican lawyer Aelius, and the imperial jurist Gaius, and by Labeo, who stands at the meeting-point between the two régimes; and in the sixth century A.D. Justinian, in the old age of the world, still respects many of the provisions which date from the infancy of Roman legislation.