What had been inscribed on bronze was soon put into pamphlet form and was still being learned by heart, so Cicero tells us, by schoolboys of the first century BCE. Long after the rules had any practical force, they continued to be reissued and re-edited, and several ancient scholarly commentaries were compiled on the meaning of the individual clauses, their legal importance and language – to the irritation of some lawyers in the second century CE, who felt that their book-bound colleagues were rather too interested in the linguistic puzzles of old Roman precepts.
