Sublime

The Twelve Tables threw aside those old principles; they treated property as belonging, not to the gens, to the individual; they therefore recognized in man the right of disposing of his property by will.

It takes a real effort of the imagination for us to see the world the way it was in ancient Rome. We have to abandon all our notions of equal rights under the law. In that day and age, there was only a small minority who had rights — Roman citizens.

Then, from the mid 20s BCE, he arranged to be granted a series of formal powers that were modelled on those of traditional Roman political offices but not the offices themselves: he took ‘the power of a tribune’ but did not hold the tribunate, and ‘the rights of a consul’ without holding the consulship.