Arc: legendary founding (753 BC) → Republic (509 BC) — "res publica," the people's thing (Cicero's frame, Political Thoughts 1.4) → the empire (Augustus, 27 BC) → the West's fall (476 AD) and Byzantium's continuation.
The two orders and their struggle:
• Patricians — the old citizen aristocracy, monopolising the senate, priesthoods and consulship; plebeians — the rest (farmers, artisans, traders, later the urban poor).
• The Struggle of the Orders (c. 494–287 BC) — the plebeians' weapon: secession (the general strike of the ancient world — the plebs withdrawing to the Sacred Hill); their institution: the Tribunes of the Plebs (sacrosanct, veto-wielding); the settlements: the Twelve Tables, the Licinian-Sextian laws (367 BC — consulship opened), the Hortensian law (287 BC — plebiscites binding on all). Result: the nobilitas — a mixed patrician-plebeian elite — and Rome's genius for absorbing its challengers into its constitution.
The Twelve Tables (c. 450 BC) — the law student's text:
• Origin: plebeian demand for written, public law — ending the patrician pontiffs' monopoly of legal knowledge (a commission to Athens, then the decemvirs, then the laws on twelve bronze tablets in the Forum);
• Content and character: procedure (summons, trial — Table I–II), debt bondage, family power (patria potestas), inheritance, land and water rights, assault tables (retaliation — talio — again), libel, funerals — customary law made public;
• Meaning (three lines): (i) the first great step of Roman law's thousand-year science — which ends in Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis (529–534 AD), the civil-law family's fountainhead (the legal ancestry of Nepal's codified system — Jurisprudence Unit 3.3's Roman road); (ii) the principle of law published for all — the Twelve Tables' gift equal to Hammurabi's; (iii) the lawyer's continuity: from the Twelve Tables through Justinian to the Muluki Ain and the Codes of2074, written public law is civilization's signature.