[362] To recur to the case of rights acquired by prescription, every universal successor could add the time of his predecessor’s adverse use to his own in order to make out the right.  There was no addition, legally speaking, but one continuous possession.

The express fiction of inheritance perhaps stopped here.  But when a similar joinder of times was allowed between a legatee or devisee (legatarius) and his testator, the same explanation was offered.  It was said, that, when a specific thing was left to a person by will, so far as concerned having the benefit of the time during which the testator had been in possession for the purpose of acquiring a title, the legatee was in a certain sense quasi an heir. 1 Yet a legatarius was not a universal successor, and for most purposes stood in marked contrast with such successors. 2

Thus the strict law of inheritance had made the notion familiar that one man might have the advantage of a position filled by another, although it was not filled, or was only partially filled, by himself; and the second fiction, by which the privileges of a legal heir in this respect as well as others had been extended to other persons, broke down the walls which might otherwise have confined those privileges to a single case.  A new conception was introduced into the law, and there was nothing to hinder its further application.  As has been shown, it was applied in terms to a sale of the universitas for business purposes, and to at least one case where the succession was confined to a single specific thing.  Why, then, might not every gift or sale be regarded as a succession, so far as to insure the same advantages?

[363] The joinder of times to make out a title was soon allowed between buyer and seller, and I have no doubt, from the language always used by the Roman lawyers, that it was arrived at in the way I have suggested.  A passage from Scaevola (B.  C. 30) will furnish sufficient proof.  Joinder of possessions, he says, that is, the right to add the time of one’s predecessor’s holding to one’s own, clearly belongs to those who succeed to the place of others, whether by contract or by will:  for heirs and those who are treated as holding the place of successors are allowed to add their testator’s possession to their own.  Accordingly, if you sell me a slave I shall have the benefit of your holding. 1

The joinder of times is given to those who succeed to the place of another.  Ulpian cites a like phrase from a jurisconsult of the time of the Antonines,—­ “to whose place I have succeeded by inheritance, or purchase, or any other right.” 2 Succedere in locum aliorum, like sustinere personam, is an expression of the Roman lawyers for those continuations of one man’s legal position by another of which the type was the succession of heir to ancestor.  Suecedere alone is used in the sense of inherit, 3 and successio in that of “inheritance.” 4 The succession par excellence was the inheritance; and it is believed that scarcely any instance will be found in the Roman sources where “succession” does not convey that analogy, and indicate the partial [364] assumption, at least, of a persona formerly sustained by another.  It clearly does so in the passage before us.