DĔCEMVĬRI, or the “ten-men,” the name of various magistrates and functionaries at Rome, of whom the most important were:--(1) DECEMVIRI LEGIBUS SCRIBENDIS, ten commissioners, who were appointed to draw up a code of laws. They were entrusted with supreme power in the state, and all the other magistracies were suspended. They entered upon their office at the beginning of the year B.C. 451; and they discharged their duties with diligence, and dispensed justice with impartiality. Each administered the government day by day in succession as during an interregnum; and the fasces were only carried before the one who presided for the day. They drew up a body of laws, distributed into ten sections; which, after being approved of by the senate and the comitia, were engraven on tables of metal, and set up in the comitium. On the expiration of their year of office, all parties were so well satisfied with the manner in which they had discharged their duties, that it was resolved to continue the same form of government for another year; more especially as some of the decemvirs said that their work was not finished. Ten new decemvirs were accordingly elected, of whom App. Claudius alone belonged to the former body. These magistrates framed several new laws, which were approved of by the centuries, and engraven on two additional tables. They acted, however, in a most tyrannical manner. Each was attended by twelve lictors, who carried not the rods only, but the axes, the emblem of sovereignty. They made common cause with the patrician party, and committed all kinds of outrages upon the persons and property of the plebeians and their families. When their year of office expired they refused to resign or to appoint successors. At length, the unjust decision of App. Claudius, in the case of Virginia, which led her father to kill her with his own hands to save her from prostitution, occasioned an insurrection of the people. The decemvirs were in consequence obliged to resign their office, B.C. 449; after which the usual magistracies were re-established. The ten tables of the former, and the two tables of the latter decemvirs, form together the laws of the Twelve Tables, which were the groundwork of the Roman laws. This, the first attempt to make a code, remained also the only attempt for near one thousand years, until the legislation of Justinian.--(2) DECEMVIRI LITIBUS or STLITIBUS JUDICANDIS, were magistrates forming a court of justice, which took cognizance of civil cases. The history as well as the peculiar jurisdiction of this court during the time of the republic is involved in inextricable obscurity. In the time of Cicero it still existed, and the proceedings in it took place in the ancient form of the sacramentum. Augustus transferred to these decemvirs the presidency in the courts of the centumviri. During the empire, this court had jurisdiction in capital matters, which is expressly stated in regard to the decemvirs.--(3) DECEMVIRI SACRIS FACIUNDIS,