Lex Julia Municipalis

Lex Julia Municipalis commonly called the Tabula Heracleensis. It was discovered on bronze in two fragments at Tarentum (Heraclea) in 1732 and 1735, which have been united and kept in the Museo Borbonico at Naples since 1760. The inscription on one side is a Greek psephisma of the town of Heraclea, that on the other is a copy of part of a Roman lex (clearly made for the use of the citizens of the town), which contains police regulations for the city of Rome: rules for the constitution of communities of Roman citizens (municipia, coloniae, praefecturae, fora, conciliabula civium Romunorum), and others relating to capacity for the decurionatus and magistracies, to the census in the Italian towns, and to changes in local regulations. It was thus a lex of the class called Satura.

It seems that the lex of the year B.C. 49, which gave the civitas to the Transpadani, enacted that a Roman commissioner should be sent to all the towns for the purpose of framing regulations for their municipal organisation. The Lex Julia empowered the commissioners to continue their labours for one year from its date, and included the whole of Italy within the scope of their authority. The name of the lex (which for a long time was called simply Tabula Heracleensis) was determined by Savigny by means of an inscription discovered at Padua in 1696 (Orelli, Inscr. 2.3676): its date is now regarded by the authorities to be fixed at B.C. 45 by a passage of Cicero (Cic. Fam. 6.18), so that its determining cause seems to have been the admission of the Transpadani to the civitas, B.C. 49.

(A lithographed copy of the Table is given by Ritschl, Tab. xxxiii. xxxiv.: the text may also be found in Orelli's Inscriptions, 1.206, and Spangenberg's Monumenta legalia, 1830, No. 16, p. 99 sq. The first work on the subject is that of Mazochi, Naples, 1754, 1755: the best is Savigny's Essay (with two appendices) in his Vermischte Schriften, vol. iii. pp. 279-413: cf. Puchta, Institutionen, § 90.)