I don't know. Via can have a figurative meaning as well, so it would certainly have made sense and looks like something possible to say, but I've personally never seen the expression as such.
Ah... quite simple. I didn't think of that. Typical Tacitean construction as well, letting one verb appear in one clause and be implicitly repeated in others.
And without the punctuation, you can't know which clause it's supposed to belong to, but then it doesn't matter because it belongs to both...