“Nōn sum quālis eram” comes from Horace’s Odes 4.1, the poem that begins Intermissa, Venus, diū. The speaker asks Venus to stop stirring up the old wars of love again, and says that he is no longer the man he was under the rule of good Cinara.
Quālis, “of what kind”, looks back to a “such” left unsaid: I am not such as I was. Eram is the imperfect, the tense of what used to be. Tap the words to see how the clause is built.
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Horace · Odes 4.1
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quālissuch asCinaraeof Cinara