ero, in the consulate of Trebellius Maximus
and Annaeus Seneca, a senatusconsult was passed providing that, when
an inheritance is transferred in pursuance of a trust, all the actions
which the civil law allows to be brought by or against the heir shall be
maintainable by and against the transferee: and after this enactment the
praetor used to give indirect or fictitious actions to and against the
transferee as quasiheir.

5 However, as the instituted heirs, when (as so often was the case)
they were requested to transfer the whole or nearly the whole of an
inheritance, declined to accept for what was no benefit, or at most a
very slight benefit, to themselves, and this caused a failure of the
trusts, afterwards, in the time of the Emperor Vespasian, and during the
consulate of Pegasus and Pusio, the senate decreed that an heir who
was requested to transfer the inheritance should have the same right
to retain a fourth thereof as the lex Falcidia gives to an heir charged
with the payment of legacies, and gave a similar right of retaining the
fourth of any specific thing left in trust. After the passing of this
senatusconsult the heir, wherever it came into operation, was sole
administrator, and the transferee of the residue was in the position of
a partiary legatee, that is, of a legatee of a certain specified portion
of the estate under the kind of bequest called participation, so that
the stipulations which had been usual between an heir and a partiary
legatee were now entered into by the heir and transferee, in order to
secure a rateable division of the gains and losses arising out of the
inheritance.

6 Accordingly, after this, if no more than threefourths of the
inheritance was in trust to be transferred, then the SC. Trebellianum
governed the transfer, and both were liable to be sued for the debts
of the inheritance in rateable portions, the heir by civil law,
the transferee, as quasiheir, by that enactment. But if more than
threefourths, or even the whole was left in trust to be transferred, the
SC. Pegasianum came into operation, and when once the heir had accepted,
of course voluntarily, he was the sole administrator whether he retained
onefourth or declined to retain it: but if he did, he entered into
stipulations with the transferee similar to those usual between the heir
and a partiary legatee, while if he did not, but transferred the whole
inheritance, he covenanted with him as quasi-purchaser. If an institu