The lack of official support and the alienation of a section of the people may perhaps be traced in the successive defeats of his candidature for the curule and plebeian aedileships,[810] although in the elections to these offices the attention of the people was so keenly directed to the candidate's pecuniary means as a guarantee of their gratification by brilliant shows, that the aedileship must have been of all magistracies the most difficult of attainment by merit unsupported by wealth. Even when the rejected candidate had won favour on other grounds, the electors could salve their consciences with the reflection that the aedileship was no obligatory step in an official career, and that, where merit and not money was in question, they could show their appreciation of personal qualities in the elections to the praetorship. A year after his repulse Marius turned to the candidature for this office, which conveyed the first opportunity of the tenure of an independent military command. He was returned at the bottom of the poll, and even then had to fight hard to retain his place in the praetorian college.[811] A charge of undue influence was brought against the man who had struggled successfully to preserve the purity of the Comitia, and it was pretended that a slave of one of his closest political associates had been seen within the barriers mixing with the voters. That the charge was supported by powerful influences, or was generally believed to be correct, is perhaps shown by the conduct of the censors of the succeeding year who expelled this associate from the senate.[812] The jurors[813] before whom the case was tried--representatives, as we must suppose, of the equestrian order and therefore presumably uninfluenced by senatorial hostility--were long perplexed by the conflict of evidence. During the first days of the trial it seemed as though the doom of Marius was sealed, and his unexpected acquittal was only secured by the scrutiny of the tablets revealing an equality of votes, a condition which, according to the rules of Roman process, necessitated a favourable verdict.