The day arrived when the more enlightened men of the Conservative party realised that the law, in the form in which it had been drafted, would never be approved. Piso by himself, helped by the Popular party and by the growing mistrust of public opinion, sufficed to checkmate the majority of the Senate and the party in power. It was necessary, therefore, to devise a compromise. And the man who devised it was Hortensius, the great orator who ten years before had been Verres’s defending counsel. He proposed that the two Consuls should abandon their law; and that Fusius Calenus, who was tribune of the _plebs_, should bring forward another, in which the first part of the preceding law, that which made of Clodius’s act an incest, should be retained, but the second part should be modified in such a way that the judges summoned to administer it should not be the College of Pontiffs but the ordinary jury, chosen in the ordinary way, that is to say, by lot, and not, as the law of the two Consuls proposed, by the Prætors. By this equable compromise Hortensius hoped to satisfy all parties—he disarmed the opposition of the Popular party, which would not dare, now that the law had been purged of the provision which aroused the greatest mistrust in the public, to persist in its opposition, and to risk appearing too openly to desire the protection of Clodius. He gave a sop to public opinion, which was deeply stirred and offended by the scandal. He gave satisfaction to the _amour propre_ of the Conservative party, by presenting them with the head of Clodius. As a matter of fact, he thought—and this was the argument he used to persuade the most recalcitrant of the Pietist party—that it was not necessary to alter the mode of choosing the judges. Clodius’s guilt was so evident that it was quite impossible to imagine that a court of law, however corrupt, could acquit him.