Naturally, these discussions, these laws, and these proposals served only to increase the general excitement; and of this excitement Verres took advantage to identify still further his own cause with that of the party in power. He placed at the disposal of the party the wealth he had well or badly earned in his province as well as his influence and his personality. The party on their side chose as candidates for the consulship Q. Hortensius, his defending counsel, and Quintus Metellus, who was a great friend of Verres; for the prætorship, Marcus Metellus, a brother of Quintus and no less than Quintus a friend of Verres. They opposed with all their force the law proposed by Cotta, which would have transformed the courts in a manner most unfavourable to Verres’s interests. The Democratic party in their turn took the Sicilians’ cause under their protection, to the extent of choosing Cicero, their illustrious advocate, as candidate for the ædileship. Thus the elections of the year 70 promised to be bound up in the trial of Verres. They seemed likely to be the means by which the two parties would endeavour to influence public opinion in favour of the prosecution or of the defence. Unfortunately, when Cicero, after an absence of about two months returned to Rome from Sicily, with abundant matter in the shape of documents and proofs, he found the situation of the popular party, and consequently his action against Verres—for its fate was bound up in that of the party—gravely compromised by a rupture which had arisen between the two Consuls. There was no love lost between Pompey and Crassus. Each was jealous of the other. In putting themselves at the head of the Democratic party, they had been guided by ambition and political calculations. But they were both too rich, and had too many ties with, and friendships among, the dominant party—from which both of them came—to be able to infuse much zeal and sincerity into their services to the opposition. As a result, each had ended by attacking the other; and these attacks, after some months of activity, had paralysed the Democratic party, and restored boldness and confidence to the Conservative party, which was now resolved to wreck the law of judicial reform and to obtain Verres’s acquittal, the two triumphs at which it aimed.