1While high and low alike received from them this prompt justice, as incorruptible as if from an oracle, at the same time attention was being given to framing the laws; 1and, amid enormous expectation, they set up ten tablets and called the people to an assembly, and, praying that it might be good, favourable and fortunate for the state, for the people themselves and their children, they bade them go and read the laws that had been set up. 3They had, they said, as far as could be foreseen by the wits of ten men, made rights equal for all, the highest and the lowest; 4but the wits and counsels of many had greater power.
4Let them turn over each point in their minds, then discuss it in conversation, and bring out for all to consider whatever was too much or too little in each point: the Roman people should have such laws as the consent of all might seem not so much to have ratified when proposed as to have proposed itself. 6When they seemed sufficiently corrected in the light of the comments people made on each section of the laws, the laws of the ten tablets were carried in the centuriate assembly; and even now, in this vast heap of laws piled one upon another, they remain the source of all public and private law.
6Then a rumour spreads that two tablets were lacking, and that if these were added a complete body, as it were, of all Roman law could be finished. 7This expectation, as the day of the elections drew near, created a desire to elect decemvirs again. 8By now the plebs, besides hating the name of consuls no less than that of kings, did not even look for the tribunes' protection, since the decemvirs allowed appeal from one to another in turn.