Leiden conventions rendered as EpiDoc: restorations as supplied(reason=lost), gaps as gap, abbreviations as expan(abbr+ex), omitted letters as supplied(reason=omitted), surplus as surplus, corrections as corr. Critical apparatus as listApp. The facing translation is div type=translation; the historical commentary is div type=commentary.
[The clause opens in a lost passage.] … and likewise waxed tablets [—]; likewise whitened tablets on which [the names?] can be read — let the presiding magistrate see to their being set up; then those who are to cast their vote will do so seated on benches, just as when the vote was taken in the fifteen centuries of the Caesars and of Germanicus Caesar … voting-balls made as nearly equal as possible … let him have the senators draw lots, those who … the first, which … [five lines are entirely lost] … into the nineteenth chest let him allot …, into the twentieth … whosoever's lot comes out … it shall be permitted, whoever is from that tribe … let the vote be cast … from the same tribe let him summon the knights … one tribe and another let him draw by lot … so that into the chest into which the vote [is to go …].
[The penalty clause.] … because, whatever anyone … against this bill … whoever acts against [it] … whoever wishes, an action … by the judgment of the people … whatever anyone shall have done against [this bill] or whatever … of this bill …
The Tabula Ilicitana preserves part of the operative core of the rogatio: the mechanics of a destinatio vote. The surviving clauses regulate the physical apparatus of the ballot — tabellae ceratae (waxed voting-tablets) and tabulae dealbatae (whitened notice-boards on which names were displayed) — and then the procedure itself: the voters seated on benches (in supselliis), the casting of lots with balls (pilae) made as equal as possible, and the voting-chests (cistae) into which the ballots went. (Crawford, Roman Statutes I, 1996, no. 38.)
The decisive phrase is in lines 4–5: the vote is taken in the fifteen centuriae of the Caesars and of Germanicus Caesar. This honorific voting-system, the destinatio, was created by the lex Valeria Cornelia of AD 5 with ten centuriae named for the dead princes Gaius and Lucius Caesar; five more, named for Germanicus, were added by the lex Valeria Aurelia of AD 20 (the Tabula Hebana) — the fifteen of line 4. The nineteenth and twentieth voting-chest named in line 14 show the system grown once more: the honours for Drusus carried it to twenty centuriae — exactly the pattern Tacitus describes, the Senate piling on Drusus the honours of Germanicus with many more added (Annals 4.9).
Because the witness is so broken — five whole lines (9–13) are lost — the edition restores only what the closely parallel Tabula Hebana secures. Where the bronze gives nothing, the text shows a gap (---) and does not guess.
The Fragmentum Mediolanense, two joining scraps of a bronze tablet now in the Biblioteca Trivulziana in Milan, preserves part of the sanctio — the penalty clause that closed a Roman statute. Its formulae are unmistakable: aduersus hanc rogationem (against this bill), populi iudicio (by the judgment of the people), and the self-referential huius rogationis (of this bill) with which such clauses characteristically end. (Crawford, Athenaeum 82, 1994, 429–435; Roman Statutes I, no. 38.)
The word rogatio itself, twice named here, fixes the genre: this is a bill — a measure put by a magistrate to the popular assembly. The sanctio threatens those who might act against the law once carried, and refers the matter to the people's own judgment. That the two witnesses were found a thousand kilometres apart, in Spain and in Italy, shows the same measure was published as bronze in widely separated communities.