The law of succession addresses the legal destiny of a person’s rights and duties after his death.

Closely tied to the fundamental and peculiar features of Roman family and society, the law of succession presents vast difficulties for Roman lawyers because of its highly sophisticated nature and lack of systematic coherence.

The development of the law of succession reflects important social changes in Roman economic structures and value systems. It echoes the progression from an old Roman agrarian society to a new commercial one. From a technical legal perspective, the law of succession reveals the tension between civil law and praetorian law. Without formally altering the civil law, the praetor intro­duced fundamental adjustments to protect emancipated persons, blood relatives in the female line, and surviving spouses, among others.

At the heart of the classic Roman inheritance system lay the idea that the last freely made will of a Roman citizen disposing of his property after death should prevail over any earlier will. The testament (or will) had an early and mature development in Roman law. That was probably because Romans con­sidered it essential to make a testament before they died. According to Plutarch (Cato 9.6), Cato the Elder regretted only three things in his whole life: that he had entrusted a certain secret to his wife, that he had paid fare to get places by ship instead of walking when he might have walked, and that he had lived one whole day of his adult life intestate, i.e. without having made a will.

Practically speaking, the first thing to know in disposing of a deceased per­son’s property was always whether he or she had left a valid will, because the provisions of a will would trump the principles laid down by the law of intestacy. Still, this chapter will address intestate succession first, because it is older than testamentary succession and thus provides a helpful framework for under­standing the latter. We begin, however, with a few basic concepts common to both kinds of succession, to make the rest of the chapter’s exposition intelligible.