Some time in 59 BC, the year of the consulship of Gaius Julius Caesar and
Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus, Vettius "announced a conspiracy of leading nobles to murder Pompey". Supposedly, this conspiracy would have involved an attack on Pompey while he attended gladiatorial games in the forum. He included in his list of conspirators many big names: Bibulus (one of the consuls), the
younger and
elder Curiones, two of the Lentuli,
Lucius Aemilius Paullus, and
Marcus Junius Brutus. The conspiracy, according to Vettius, was led by the younger Curio, who at the time was leading the opposition of younger nobles against the so-called
First Triumvirate and gaining substantial popular support. His accusations were disbelieved: he claimed that he had received a dagger from a servant of the consul Bibulus, to laughter from the senators who asked how he had no other means to acquire a weapon; one of the Curiones protested Paullus could not be involved, for he was in Macedonia. Moreover, Bibulus had himself notified Pompey earlier of a plot against his life; after hearing his accusations, the senators ordered Vettius thrown in jail for his self-incriminating confession of carrying a dagger within the city. The next day, he was produced before the public in a by Caesar and his tribunician ally
Publius Vatinius; dropping mention of Brutus and Bibulus, he then accused
Lucullus,
Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus,
Gaius Fannius,
Gaius Calpurnius Piso, Marcus Iuventius Laterensis, and Cicero – indirectly under the terms of a certain "eloquent ex-consul" – of being part of the plot. It is likely that the changes in his story were induced by Caesar: who "it appears, intimidated Vettius and induced him to alter his testimony... in particularly to drop the name of Brutus, son of Caesar's mistress
Servilia". Vatinius pressured Vettius to name more names and promised to pass legislation to establish a special tribunal. These changed accusations also were not believed, as there was little corroborating evidence available. Returned to jail, shortly thereafter, Vettius was found dead. His death, officially of natural causes but rumoured to be murder, put an end to thoughts of a special tribunal. Views on the affair differ. Cicero, writing around the time (and also accused of being part of it), stressed his suspicions of Caesar and Vatinius' roles. For him, "Caesar had stage-managed the whole affair for the beginning... as a means of casting suspicion over the rising star of [the younger] Curio". However, Cicero's later speech
In Vatinium blames Vatinius for inciting the affair. This hypothesis, that Vettius was induced to fabricate accusations to ruin the younger Curio's electoral chances and discredit certain opponents of Caesar, has "won the assent of most commentators". Walter Allen, in
The "Vettius Affair" Once More (1950), argued that Caesar was to blame for the accusations with the additional motive of trying to drive a wedge between Pompey and Cicero.
Erich Gruen, in
The Last Generation of the Roman Republic (1995), dismisses this theory, arguing that "Pompey's relations with the
nobilitas were already sufficiently strained" and that "the notion of Vettius as Caesar's agent is difficult to swallow [when he] had endeavoured to implicate Caesar in the Catilinarian conspiracy" three years earlier in 62 BC. It is also possible that Pompey or his allies concocted the accusations "in order to deflect the growing odium onto Bibulus" and lend credence to his often claims of fearing for his life. The aftermath of the affair led to no major changes: "no wave of popular indignation arose against Bibulus or his allies... no discernible pressure was exerted to take preemptive vengeance on those who might have wanted Pompey dead; there were no 'kangaroo courts'[;] in the senate [there was] no rush to condemn in order to please the powerful... as one sees in a true ": the allegations were, "for all practical purposes, discounted". Different interpretations of who instigated the affair lead to different interpretations of who had failed to achieve their goals.
Lily Ross Taylor viewed Vettius as a Caesarian agent and that "Caesar blundered badly" in the plot. Other modern works generally dismiss reading too much into the poorly-understood and badly-documented affair. == Legacy ==