[4] Suetonius relates that after these accusations, Vettius was then badly handled by Caesar, who "punished [him] quite severely... destroying some of his personal goods, allowing him to be roughly beaten by a crowd at a contio [public meeting], and throwing him into prison".
Robert Morstein-Marx, a classicist, notes that Caesar's actions are "consistent with Roman legal custom protesting the dignity of magistrates and attitudes toward those who gave false accusation".
[5] Some time in 59 BC,[6] the year of the consulship of Gaius Julius Caesar and Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus, Vettius "announced a conspiracy of leading nobles to murder Pompey".
[8] 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.
[9] 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.
[10] 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.
[14][23] 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 dominatio": the allegations were, "for all practical purposes, discounted".