Caesar's career was marked by two conspiracies: in one of them, which failed, he was a participant ‘from a distance’, or was at least aware of it; of the other, which succeeded, he was the target. He was on the fringes of the Catilinarian conspiracy, but he stood to be swept away by it. It was Cicero who came to his rescue. Somebody had produced documents, possibly not genuine, which seemed to implicate Caesar in the plot. Lucius Vettius, a Roman knight who in his youth had known Cicero at the time of the social war (89 bc: both had fought at Ascoli), later a friend of Catiline and a participant in the conspiracy, went over to the other side and denounced the plotters. He declared before the investigation carried out by Novius Niger that he was in possession of compromising letters to Catiline signed by Caesar. Caesar had in the meantime taken up the praetorship, and the accusation could have cost him his life: in January Catiline and his followers had fought with astonishing bravery against the army of the consuls at the battle of Pistoia in Tuscany. Caesar ‘appealed’, as Suetonius puts it, to Cicero for help. But that help, according to Suetonius, could not consist in proving that the documents were forged. The best that Cicero could do in response to Caesar's plea was to testify that Caesar had actually on his own initiative confided to the consul those details that he knew of the conspiracy months earlier, when the conspiracy was in train.