Then came a second and even more unexpected surprise. At the very moment when Clodius seemed to have emerged victorious, there appeared to destroy his alibi.... Who? Cicero himself. Cited as witness, Cicero deposed that on the day of the mysteries, three hours before the hour at which Causinius declared that he had spoken to Clodius at Terni, Clodius had come to call on him at his house in Rome! What had happened? Cicero had up to that time adopted a distinctly reserved attitude, making it clear that he, who since the suppression of Catiline’s conspiracy had become one of the leading figures in the State, had no wish to be mixed up in so trivial and stupid an affair. For what reason did he thus hurl himself all at once, at the close of the trial, into the thick of the fight, and opposing his evidence to that of Causinius, seem to challenge the jury to choose between his word—the word of a man of consular rank, the word of one of the three or four most famous men in the Empire—and that of this obscure and probably corrupt witness? Had he yielded to the pressure of the Conservative party, which, realising that the prey was slipping from their grasp, had wished to make a supreme attempt to destroy the alibi which had been so adroitly prepared by Clodius? Had he, upright and honourable man as he was, yielded to his disgust at seeing a comedy, which had been staged with such ability, completely successful? Or had he yielded to pressure and to considerations of the sort of which Plutarch speaks? Plutarch says that Cicero’s wife, Terentia, was jealous of Clodia, Clodius’s sister, whom she suspected of having cast eyes upon Cicero; and had so much worried Cicero, by harping upon the subject, and accusing him of sparing Clodius out of regard for the sister, that Cicero, in order to convince her that her jealousy was groundless, gave the evidence he did.