The Roman women would even go to greater extremes than the conducting of a political campaign. Over a hundred years before the event recorded above, when the women had much less privileges, when the despotic actions of husbands became unendurable, the women sought a way of rescuing themselves. At the time a number of men of the upper classes were attacked by an unknown disease, in every case attended by similar symptoms, and nearly all died. No cause could be found until a female slave offered to explain upon promise of freedom and to suffer no harm in consequence. Upon the Senate's guaranteeing such to her, she told them that the deaths were from poison, that the wives met together to compound the poison. She took the officials to the place, where they found the women preparing the ingredients. The women were charged with the matter, and to prove their innocence they partook of the drugs, upon which death followed, and with the same symptoms as with the men. Upon investigation 170 of the women were found guilty and it is held that 300 or more wives had entered into the plot to put their husbands to death. Some doubts are thrown upon this story by some historians but at any rate it is stated that the Romans believed it and told it for the truth. Another story is told of women's appearing in public. At the time of the second triumvirate, funds being needed, a decree was passed requiring that fourteen hundred of the richest women should make a valuation of their property, under severe penalties against concealment or undervaluation, and that they should turn over such a portion as the triumvirs might require. The women appealed to the sister of one of the triumvirs and to the mother and wife of another but with little success. They then in a body went to the tribunal of the triumvirs, whose acts no man dared question, making for their spokesman, Hortensia, the daughter of the famous orator, Hortensius, and protested against the edict. It is claimed this is the first time to be enunciated the principle of "no taxation without representation." They succeeded in getting the amount reduced to a comparatively small sum. There are some other instances of the public assembling of women. Under the empire there was an assembly of women known as the _conventus matronarum_, or the "little senate," as one writer of the time named it. The Emperor Heliogabalus built on the Quirinal a meeting-place for this body. This body of matrons met and discussed and voted upon and decided the various points of court etiquette, such as questions of dress, precedence, and the use of carriages. The public standing of the citizen-woman at Athens has been given in the quotations on pages 179-181, which may be compared with the public standing of the citizen-woman at Rome as given in the following: