Spinning and weaving and the supervision of handmaids involved in those tasks were traditional duties of the materfamilias, whether patrician or plebeian. The historian Livy records (Ab Urbe Condita I.57) that when in the year 220 AUC her husband Collatinus and the princely nobles visited their homes late at night to test their wives, Lucretia alone was found weaving with her maids. For the Romans, these activities became symbolic of the purity and dedication to family of the woman of the house. The grammarian and historian Asconius (c. 9 BCE-76 CE), in his commentary to Cicero's oration against Piso, describes how, in 53 BCE, political thugs who supported Pompey against Caesar invaded the house of the interrex, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, a Caesarian, and destroyed the items they found in the atrium, among which were a threaded loom. Asconius pauses in his description of this violation of the integrity of family space to praise Lepidus' wife Cornelia as an exemplum of womanly virtue.