Tacitus, Annals, 15.20­-23, 33­-45. Latin Text, Study Aids with Vocabulary, and Commentary, 2013a

[Therefore, after everything was prepared and arranged to his satisfaction,
Metellus left for Numidia, bearing with him the high hopes of the citizens,
which were inspired not only by his good qualities in general, but especially
because he possessed a mind superior to riches; for it had been the avarice
of magistrates that before this time had blighted our prospects in Numidia
and advanced those of the enemy.]
The lex Calpurnia de repetundis (‘Calpurnian law on the
recovery of public funds’) of 149 BC, proposed by the tribune of the people
Lucius Calpurnius Piso, established Rome’s first permanent court, the
quaestio de repetundis, the same court in which Verres stood trial. One of its
main functions was to try governors for extortion committed during their
term of office.
The procedure for passing each of the laws
mentioned will have been similar, but Tacitus/ Thrasea opts for lexical
variation. rogatio refers to a proposed measure that is put before a Roman
assembly for approval – our ‘bill.’ Once approved, a rogatio/ bill becomes a
lex (‘law’). A scitum, which is the perfect participle of scisco (‘to vote for’, ‘to
approve’), is a resolution of a popular assembly. The word thus places the
emphasis on the process of decision-making, and it is usually found with
a genitive of the decision-making body, especially the people: plebis scitum
(‘plebiscite’), populi scitum (‘the decree of the people’). For this reason, it
does not work quite as well as rogatio or lex with an adjective attribute
of the person responsible for drafting the bill or law because technically
speaking the scitum that turned the rogatio of Piso into the lex Calpurnia was
not that of Piso, but that of the people. The slight incongruity is more than
made up for by the rhetorical effect of the lexical variety: it seems to imply
that the examples could be further multiplied.
nam culpa quam poena prior [sc. est], emendari quam peccare posterius
The two quam go with the two comparatives prior and posterius and
coordinate the four subjects: culpa and poena, emendari and peccare. Thrasea
closes his opening gambit with a gnomic saying that is as intricate in
rhetorical design as it is banal in content. He makes the same point twice,
first with a pair of nouns, then with a pair of infinitives (functioning as
nouns), juxtaposed (once again) asyndetically: crime precedes punishment,
to be reformed comes after committing a transgression. But the order is
for once chiastic: culpa correlates with peccare, poena with emendari, though
there is a whiff of parallel design in the alliterative sequence poena prior ~