The period of Vittoria's stay in Rome on this occasion must have been a pleasant one. The acknowledged leader of the best and most intellectual society in that city; surrounded by a company of gifted and high-minded men, bound to her and to each other by that most intimate and ennobling of all ties, the common profession of a higher, nobler, purer theory of life than that which prevailed around them, and a common membership of what might almost be called a select church within a church, whose principles and teaching its disciples hoped to see rapidly spreading and beneficially triumphant; dividing her time between her religious duties, her literary occupations, and conversation with well-loved and well-understood friends;—Vittoria can hardly have been still tormented by temptations to commit suicide. Yet in a medal struck in her honour at this period of her life, the last of the series engraved for Visconti's edition of her works, the reverse represents a phœnix on her funeral pile gazing on the sun, while the flames are rising around her. The obverse has a bust of the poetess, showing the features a good deal changed in the course of the six or seven years which had elapsed since the execution of that silly Pyramus and Thisbe medal mentioned in a previous chapter, though still regular and well formed. The tendency to fatness and to a comfortable-looking double chin is considerably increased. She wears a singularly unbecoming head-dress of plaited linen, sitting close to and covering the entire head, with long pendants at the sides falling over the shoulders. [Sidenote: THE COLONNA AT WAR.] These pleasant Roman days were, however, destined to be of brief duration. They were cut short, strange as the statement may seem, by the imposition of an increased tax upon salt. For when Paul III. resorted, in 1539, to that always odious and cruel means of pillaging his people, Ascanio Colonna maintained that, by virtue of some ancient privilege, the new tax could not be levied on his estates. The pontifical tax-gatherers imprisoned certain of his vassals for refusing to pay; whereupon Ascanio assembled his retainers, made a raid into the Campagna, and drove off a large number of cattle.[205] The Pope lost no time in gathering an army of ten thousand men, and "war was declared" between the sovereign and the Colonna. The varying fortunes of this "war" have been narrated in detail by more than one historian.[206] Much mischief was done, and a great deal of misery occasioned by both the contending parties. But at length the forces of the Sovereign got the better of those of his vassal, and the principal fortresses of the Colonna were taken, and their fortifications ordered to be razed.