Jus civile flavianum
Jus civile flavianum Appius Claudius Caecus, who was censor B.C. 312, is said to have drawn up a book of actiones or forms of procedure, with a calendar of days on which actions might or might not be tried: this was made public by his clerk, Cn. Flavius, and was known as the Jus Flavianum (Cic. de Or. 1.4. 1, 186). According to one story (Dig. 1, 2, 7), Flavius surreptitiously obtained possession of the book of Appius, and was rewarded by the people for his services by being made tribunus plebis and curule aedile. The effect of this publication was to extend the knowledge and the practice of the law to the plebeians, and to separate to some extent the jus civile from the jus pontificium. This reform was almost contemporaneous with the opening of the pontificate to the plebeians by the Lex Ogulnia. (Liv. 9.45; Cic. pro Mur. 11, 25, ad Att. 6.1, 8; Plin. Nat. 33.17; Macrob. 1.15, 9; Gellius vii. (vi.) 9; cf. Danz, Lehrbuch der Gesch. des röm. Rechts, 1.49; Karlowa, Rechtsgesch. i. p. 475; Krüger, Geschichte d. Quellen.)
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.