The surprise, the scandal, the jubilation, the amusement, according to each man’s disposition and party, were great in Rome when this result was announced. In truth, whoever, after the lapse of so many centuries, reads the history of the trial will find no difficulty in believing Cicero when he accuses Crassus of having secured Clodius’s acquittal by the exercise of pressure and corruption. In no other way can be explained the fact that a Roman Court of law, forced to choose between Cicero and Causinius, believed Causinius. Nevertheless, it is certain that Clodius was much helped in this struggle by the political mistakes of the Conservative party, by their blind relentlessness, and by the obstinacy with which they had endeavoured for so long to bring about, to the detriment of Clodius, a change in the method of choosing the judges. At this epoch, justice in Rome was much too much exposed to the influence of politics. If, however, the times were disturbed, if the parties were divided by acute discord and men’s minds inflamed by the memories of a terrible civil war, the sense of justice was, nevertheless, not yet so much blunted by party passions as to allow the dominant party to abuse their own power beyond a certain point. Clodius might be a man little deserving of public interest; but there were many persons in Rome to whom it was repugnant that, even for the purpose of punishing a sacrilege, recourse should be had to means so unusual, revolutionary, and extreme. So the Popular party, with the support of the general sentiment of legality, had succeeded in checkmating the Conservative party, the Sullan association. The checkmate in itself was, however, not a serious one, because the trial of Clodius had not been so important and complex that his acquittal could seriously weaken the strength of the Conservative party. The indirect consequences, on the other hand, were most serious. The first was that Clodius went over body and soul to the Popular party, and became the boldest and most violent of its leaders. If the Conservative party had followed Cicero’s advice and abandoned Clodius to the infamy which his act must have brought upon him, there would have been an end of Clodius. The man who had profaned the mysteries of the _Bona Dea_ would not have dared to show himself any more in public. By persecuting him as it did, and by giving him the chance of posing before the public as the victim of its persecutions, this unpopular party saved his career, or at least helped to enable him to continue to play a part in the political world of Rome, and a part fraught with danger to the State. Clodius, realising that, after the trial, he could no longer hope for anything from the Conservative party in which he had grown up and in whose ranks he had fought, turned to the Popular party; and, in order to make that party forget his origin, his relations, and the _Bona Dea_ scandal, became the most violent and turbulent of its chiefs.