we have issued
respecting the rights of patrons, that in agnatic succession the
transference of the rights to accept from a nearer to a remoter degree
shall not be refused: for it was most absurd that agnates should
be denied a privilege which the praetor had conferred on cognates,
especially as the burden of guardianship fell on the second degree of
agnates if there was a failure of the first, the principle which we have
now sanctioned being admitted so far as it imposed burdens, but rejected
so far as it conferred a boon.

8 To statutory succession the ascendant too is none the less called who
emancipates a child, grandchild, or remoter descendant under a
fiduciary agreement, which by our constitution is now implied in every
emancipation. Among the ancients the rule was different, for the parent
acquired no rights of succession unless he had entered into a special
agreement of trust to that effect prior to the emancipation.

TITLE III. OF THE SENATUSCONSULTUM TERTULLIANUM

So strict were the rules of the statute of the Twelve Tables in
preferring the issue of males, and excluding those who traced their
relationship through females, that they did not confer reciprocal rights
of inheritance even on a mother and her children, though the praetors
called them to succeed one another as next of kin by promising them the
possession of goods in the class of cognates.

1 But this narrowness of the law was afterwards amended, the Emperor
Claudius being the first to confer on a mother, as a consolation for the
loss of her children, a statutory right to their inheritance,

2 and afterwards, very full provisions were made by the SC.
Tertullianum, enacted in the time of the Emperor Hadrian, and relating
to the melancholy succession of children by their mothers, though not
by their grandmothers, whereby it was provided that a freeborn woman who
had three or a freedwoman who had four children should be entitled to
succeed to the goods of her children who died intestate, even though
herself under paternal power; though, in this latter case, she cannot
accept the inheritance except by the direction of the person in whose
power she is.

3 Children of the deceased who are or who rank as family heirs, whether
in the first or any other degree, are preferred to the mother, and even
where the deceased is a woman her children by imperial constitutions
have a prior claim to the mother, that is, to their own grandmother.
Again, the