were indicted for bribery. The senate delayed elections to hold an inquiry, but the specific steps forward became quickly contested and various tribunes vetoed the elections. Coupled with raging street battles in the city between Milo and Clodius' armed gangs, elections were finally held after more than seven months without any magistrates, in July 53 BC. Dio attributed these delays to tribunician vetoes against elections of interreges designed to incite appointment of Pompey as dictator. Pompey was not in the city; his return in the summer and his declining of a dictatorship, however, may have stabilised the city sufficiently – both by his presence and by his starting a rapprochement with Cato's conservative faction – to allow for elections. By July, alliance's support for Scaurus, along with Gaius Memmius, had gone nowhere. The comitia instead returned candidates supported by a coalition of triumviral enemies: Marcus Valerius Messalla Rufus and Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus. As a whole, these various elections showed the weakness of the triumviral coalition: Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus were unable to produce consistently favourable results except when their aims were entirely united; the joint consulship in 55 BC was brought about by force and, "thereafter, their [the alliance's] stock with the voters rapidly depreciated". Pompey's sole consulship, 52 BC In spring of 53 BC, while Rome dealt with its own political crisis, Crassus launched his invasion of Syria and Caesar was dealing with a military crisis as the Gauls rose up. From the perspective at Rome, news of ambushes against in Gaul arrived first: Caesar abandoned his civil functions in Cisalpine Gaul to rescue his legions wintering in the Eburones' territory (near modern Belgium). A few months later, news of the disaster at the Battle of Carrhae arrived, reporting that Crassus and much of his army had been killed by the Parthians. Still at this point, Caesar and Pompey were on friendly terms. Caesar praised Pompey, for example, for lending one of Pompey's Spanish legions to help against the Gauls, a private military arrangement which Cato criticised in the senate for usurping senatorial prerogatives on legionary assignments. The consuls immediately prepared to hold elections for 52 BC, which proved impossible when they were injured by stones thrown by the crowd. As the year 52 BC started, the consuls stepped down without replacement. For the first 18 days of the year, tribunes continually interposed their vetoes against election of an