This particular incentive to education was lacking in all but the senatorial class, from which, Jullian confesses,[753] the greatest number of pupils was drawn. Freedmen were definitely excluded by law. The emperors of 426 forbade all of their station to stand for the higher offices, or to be admitted as soldiers of the Imperial Guard.[754]
The laws which prevented the curial from leaving his class[755] were many and stringent. Once a curial, always a curial, and not even flight from his town could save him. The prize of five ‘aurei’ offered by the government would be sure to find him a captor.
Denk’s argument that the curial must have had a school training to manage municipal affairs does not go very far. The reading, writing, and arithmetic taught by the ‘litterator’ he would certainly need, but there is no reason for supposing that he went any further. The respectable curial on his freehold farm probably had little incentive to education, and found no inspiration in his forced work of somewhat anxious tax-gathering. He would probably have considered the poetical flourishes of the rhetor beside the point for his son. It would be much more important for him to learn the practical wisdom which his father had formulated as to the best methods of making people pay their taxes or of managing the problems of agriculture.
Now it is true that a law of Constantius[756] enacts that no one shall attain to the first rank in the ‘ordo decurialis’ unless he has passed through a course of studies. But firstly, the law applies technically only to the city of Rome, and its ‘decuriae’; secondly, the amount of education required was not excessive: all the emperor wanted was that a man of the first rank should be able to speak grammatically (ita esse litteris expolitum, ut citra offensam vitii ex eodem verba procedant); and finally, the regulation that this elementary knowledge was specially laid down as a qualification for the first rank (librarii) suggests that the other two (fiscales et censuales) were frequently held without such proficiency.
If the law tended to stifle the curial’s interest in education, much more was this so with those who belonged to a lower grade. The incentive needed there was greater and the incentive given, less. The work of the artisans belonging to the rigidly separated ‘collegia’ was harder, though it varied with the trade. The bakers’ guild was not far removed from slavery. Here, too, frequent flight from the class points to oppression. The tendency to learn only the practical tricks necessary to make the trade a paying one must have been even more accentuated. For where there is no prospect except the drudgery of the trade in which he grew up, it must be an exceptional man who will take an interest in education or awaken it in his son. Even the school of the ‘litterator’ must have been a mystery to many of these ‘corporati’. Moreover, intermarriage between the classes was regarded with horror, and forbidden on the severest penalties. Senators or men who ranked as ‘perfectissimi’, or ‘duumviri’, or ‘quinquennales’, or ‘flamines’, or ‘sacerdotes’, suffered ‘infamia’ if they married a freedwoman or the daughter of a freedwoman, an actress or the daughter of an actress, a shopkeeper (tabernarius) or the daughter of a shopkeeper, or any one of low standing.[757]
Whatever we may think of the wisdom of such a measure, one thing is clear: the difficulty of imagining that all ranks were levelled, as Jullian says, in the school, and that the son of a senator sat on the same benches as the sons of freedmen.
Further, the tendency of the emperors to restrict people to the same place must also have had an effect on education.[758] For the imperial policy aimed at uniformity and immobility, and in attaining them it lost life and progress. The discouragement of travel must have meant a restriction of knowledge and a strangling of that wonder which is stimulated by new scenes, and is, as Plato said, the beginning of philosophy.
Again, the inspiration which comes from the feeling of citizenship, the realization of being a living member of a group and helping to further its ends, was crushed out by the mechanical fiscal system of the empire. Men like Claudian and Sidonius might write with an enthusiasm inspired by this feeling, but what chance was there for the anxious curial or the fettered artisan to share this inspiration? For him the round of daily duty was too narrow or too relentless, to allow much room for ideals. ‘Municipal self-government, bereft of its political significance, restricted to the sphere of local interests and ambitions, is apt to degenerate into corrupt and spendthrift practices.’[759] To the curial, as he carried out the commands of the emperor, it must have been difficult to see any inspiring meaning in it all, when Gaul was day by day being more abandoned to the barbaric invasions, while the burden of taxation remained unalleviated. And yet it is where a meaning, an ideal, is most clearly seen, that education has its truest incentive and its most fruitful results.
Denk appeals to the fact that many Roman slaves could read and write, to Cato’s requirements of a household slave, and to Mommsen’s statement that there was much reading and writing among the lower classes. But (as far as the artisans and free labourers are concerned) the reference is to republican times when the guilds were free, and when a fiscal imperial system had not yet enslaved the people and created the frightful inter-class rigidity which culminated, to the detriment of education, in the fourth century. That there were, however, even then, some ‘collegiati’ who attained to higher education is clear from the law of 370.[760] The emperor, in asking the Prefect of Rome for a report of provincial students, makes an exception of those who are serving in the public guilds. But we must remember that these ‘collegiati’ probably belonged to the higher guilds, like that of the ‘navicularii’, in which the higher classes had a share, and were probably picked men. Ritter, in his commentary on the law, suggests that they were young men who had voluntarily joined a ‘corpus’ and were allowed to stay longer than usual because they were doing public work. However this may be, they were certainly the exceptions. The impression derived from the Theodosian Code is that the ‘collegiati’ who had the opportunity of higher education were very much the fortunate few.
As for the slaves, it is true that there were some of them in the fourth century who could read and write like Ausonius’s ‘notarius’, but slaves qua slaves received no education. It was found useful to make them acquire a knack like shorthand, just as it is useful to break in a horse. Their knack was their only virtue. But there was no provision for them as a class, and no encouragement to extend their knowledge beyond their narrow speciality. A glance at the laws of the Theodosian Code is sufficient to show this. A ‘colonus’ is bound to the soil on which he is born, and if he runs away from the place of his birth he is to be brought back immediately, together with his family.[761] So says a law of A.D. 419. A law of Constantine had also enacted that ‘coloni’, who purposed flight, should be reduced to slavery and put in chains, and with this sentence upon them be compelled, as they deserve, to perform the tasks of free men.[762] The law shows that the ‘coloni’ were still regarded as belonging to the third rather than the fourth class. But their freedom did not exist in more than name, and it seems most improbable that they had any share in the education of the day.
Finally, the deduction of Lavisse that education was general from the fact that the sergeants could read, and that the sons of veterans had schools, is not altogether justified. For, again, the soldier would pick up just the minimum of school knowledge to help him through (and this he might conceivably have done even without going to a ‘litterator’) more especially as the army by this time consisted largely of barbarians. As for the veterans, they were a privileged class, as the thirteen enactments of the Theodosian Code[763] regarding their status and immunity from public burdens can prove.
Turning now to the contemporary writers, we can trace the effect of the code on their methods and ideas. Sidonius clearly thinks of men in ‘ordines’. At the feast of St. Just, in which all classes participate, there is not much trace of intermingling or exchange of greetings, and when they scatter for relaxation the lines of demarcation are still plain.[764] Eumenius, too, illustrates the value which men attached to class privileges. He had been ‘magister sacrae memoriae’, and the emperor, in appointing him to the school at Autun, assures him that his ‘dignitas’ will not be impaired by the change. The gratitude of Eumenius for this boon, ‘ut salvo honoris mei privilegio doceam’,[765] is effusive and significant.
But the important point is that the upper classes came to look on education as their monopoly. Sidonius rebukes a friend who is absorbed in the material concerns of his estate for neglecting his reading.[766] It is a nobleman’s business, he finely says, to maintain a noble level of culture. Think of the disgrace of being distanced in your old age by one of humbler rank, and surpassed in honours by men whose worth is that of a lower class—‘cum eos, quos esset indignum si vestigia nostra sequerentur, videris dolens antecessisse’. The argument is that the nobleman has to undertake administrative and other imperial offices; they are his by right. Therefore he must keep up his education, which is the road to office, and also peculiarly his prerogative.[767] And so, when Ausonius says: ‘It isn’t right that I, a royal master, should expound verses to the common herd’,[768] there is a background of fact to his jocularity. At the end of the empire, when the social fabric was tottering and the accustomed ranks and distinctions were vanishing away (iam remotis gradibus dignitatum), Sidonius sees in literary knowledge the only mark of nobility that will survive: ‘solum posthac nobilitatis indicium litteras nosse.’[769]
In these circumstances it is hard to see how Jullian is justified in calling the Roman society in Gaul during the fourth century ‘toute intellectuelle’.[770] Yet there are two considerations which must modify our conclusion. The first is that in practice the lines of demarcation were not so rigid as in theory. As we have seen in the case of the ‘collegiati’, there was higher education where we should not have expected it, and members of guilds were not always swallowed up in their guild work. The second consideration is that their interest in education was not always damped by discouraging surroundings. There was a strong and almost passionate loyalty to letters among the upper classes which must have spread lower down in society. The curial, no doubt, sometimes cultivated his intellect as well as land and tax-collecting, even though there was no material gain to be won. And it was felt, perhaps, that it was the respectable thing to send one’s son to a grammar school.
We must, therefore, allow a certain margin for higher education among the ‘curiales’ and the ‘corporati’, while we accept a very wide range of mere literacy,[771] such as could be obtained from an elementary school teacher. The enormous staff of scribes required for the imperial ‘scholae’ must have embraced many of a lower social standing. The need for people who could read and write was great, and we may perhaps see in the large[772] number of grammarians[773] (as compared with the rhetoricians), which the emperors provided, an indication of this need. But, as we go down the social scale, it is only the exceptions who go beyond the grammarian, while the majority probably knew none but the elementary master.
Libanius draws a picture of the rhetor lingering in the classroom after the day’s work because of the unpleasantness of conjugal and family difficulties at home;[774] and Ausonius roundly declares, emphasizing another side of the teacher’s unfortunate lot, that a grammarian is not happy and never was; that the very name of grammarian is incompatible with happiness. If beyond destiny and fate there has existed one that was happy, he must indeed have passed beyond the bounds of the mere grammarian.[775]
Routine produced its usual discontent, and it was true of the fourth century as of the first:
Yet the striking thing about the Gallic teachers (if we may take Bordeaux as typical of the province) was their sociability. Alethius is ‘comis’ and ‘liberalis’;[776] Luciolus is commended by the poet for his geniality to his guests, his good temper to his clients, his gentleness with his servants;[777] and to Minervius[778] he says: ‘No gall embitters your heart; your wit is abundant; yet your jokes are never such as lead to strife.’[779]
They loved their dinners and their jokes, and could jest without malice and in gentleness of spirit. So Nepotianus is addressed as a man ‘old in years yet witty and young in heart; a spirit unembittered and overflowing with much sweetness’.[780]
Leontius earns the cognomen Lascivus,[781] and Jucundus, though condemned for inefficiency, is admitted to the ‘numerus grammaticorum’ on account of his social and personal pleasantness.[782] It may be noticed, too, that Constantius, in appointing Eumenius to the head-mastership of the Maeniana, stated as one of his qualifications ‘his pleasing ways’.[783] Wine played a great part among them. Crispus, the old master of Ausonius, was believed to have tippled occasionally.[784] To the reader Ausonius says in his introduction to Bissula that he is to be read only by those who have dined and dined well:
About the futile Griphus he declares that all serious judgement must be suspended, for ‘iniurium est de poeta male sobrio lectorem abstemium iudicare’,[785] and the convivial spirit is further illustrated by the epistles to Paulus[786] and to Theon.[787] Moreover, a favourite ideal among these professors was to marry an heiress. Like Dynamius, who found fortune and a wife as a teacher,[788] the jovial Marcellus won the goodwill and the daughter of a nobleman,[789] as did the rhetor Alethius Minervius.[790] Even the Syracusan Citarius ‘soon attained to wedlock in a rich and noble family’.[791]
The Theodosian Code clearly shows how eager the emperors of this time were to increase the social status of the teacher. A law of 425, for example,[792] raises certain ‘grammatici’ and ‘sofistae’ to the rank of comes, and adds that all such teachers, if they behaved well and showed skill in their profession, would enjoy the same privileges after twenty years of diligent service.
In the social world, therefore, these teachers ranked high: in the intellectual world their place was considerably lower. We find that there was a certain standard set for a teacher:
Jucundus[793] is reproached for not reaching this standard and being unworthy of his profession. But there can be no doubt that the requirements were fairly low and very irregularly fulfilled. Leontius knew only the little that his poor position demanded,[794] and masters like Ammonius and Anastasius were equally ignorant.[795] Ausonius twits Auxilius on his defective pronunciation and addresses him as ‘inscite magister’,[796] and Rufus, the rhetorician, had so little sense (cor) that he used to write ‘reminisco’ in his verses. Moreover, he was very like a statue in his lifelessness—only softer and more effeminate.[797] Philomusus, again, had stuffed his library full of books, but this was his only claim to knowledge.[798]
Jung[799] finds an illustration of the general tendency to superficiality in the fact that many of the Bordeaux professors were at the same time advocates, poets, and farmers.[800] But we feel that this is carping criticism, and that such combinations of activity are no more anomalous or indicative of shallowness than they are in many universities of to-day.
But, on the whole, we get the impression that Julian’s emphasis on the preparation of teachers,[801] apart from its motive, was much needed throughout this period, and that the level of the Gallic university was probably not much above that of a modern high school.[802]
In the professional world the status of the teacher had steadily risen, ever since Vespasian had given education the imperial blessing by appointing Quintilian to the first State-paid chair. We find Constantius, in his letter to Eumenius, deprecating the idea that the teachers’ task is a lower form of imperial service;[803] and there can be no doubt that Gaul in the fourth and fifth centuries, all enthusiastic as she was for literature and culture, honoured her teachers more than had previously been the custom. With the full light of imperial favour upon them, they were respected, not so much for what they were, but for all the golden avenues of imperial office to which their profession could lead.
The picture which Ausonius gives of the Bordeaux professors suggests a resemblance to Oxford. The division of studies between the grammarian and the rhetor gives an ‘institutio’ which is the forerunner of the Oxonian School of Classics. For the grammarian did ‘Mods.’ work, training the pupil in a wide range of detailed facts, while the rhetorician aimed (though in a poor way) at a philosophic combination of the facts into a speech, and at grace and lucidity of style. And this is largely also the aim of ‘Greats’.
Moreover, there is a similarity of social atmosphere. There is a bright and genial contact of man with man, which implies a study of men as well as of books, and there is that emotional content springing from such intercourse, which, if kept within bounds, serves to keep thought fresh and balanced, and prevents the letter from killing the spirit. That there was also the danger, as at Oxford, of the social side looming too large, is clear from a study of these professorial portraits.
A change had come over the administration of schools in the later part of the empire. In early republican times there had been no public interference with education: the ideal of men like Cato was ‘in gremio matris educari’.[804] But even the spirit of Cato could not stop Crates of Mallos from establishing the first school of grammar, after the Punic Wars had opened the flood-gates of Greek influence; nor could it prevent fathers from paying large sums for the services of these public teachers. A transition stage came in the first century, when the conflict between the old and the new reached a crisis. The censors grew alarmed, and issued a decree in 92 B.C. prohibiting the teaching of the Latin rhetoricians as being contrary to the ‘mos maiorum’.[805] They had endured Greek rhetoricians, but when Romans began to adopt the ways of these ‘Graeculi’ they thought it was time to interfere.[806] But public schools were rapidly growing, and when Vespasian fixed the salaries of teachers the old conservative Roman prejudice against public education had practically died out. In the second century Hadrian opened his Athenaeum—the first school for higher education. Alexander Severus gave salaries to teachers ‘etiam in provinciis’.[807]
The goodwill and personal interest of the emperors in the schools is seen in the letter of Constantius to Eumenius.[808] ‘Our loyal Gauls’, he says, ‘who enjoy the benefits of civilization in Autun, deserve that we should take thought for the development of their children’s talents. What gift, then, more fitting than that which fortune can neither give nor take away? Therefore, we appoint you to be head of this school; for we have learned to know from your service under us, your eloquence and your genial temper.’
Nor was this mere wordy benevolence. Public works, temples, schools had been repaired.[809] Augustodunum had suffered badly from the inroads of the barbarians, but so effective was the help given, that the restored city, says the orator, possibly with some exaggeration, was greater and grander than the old one (ipsa moles restitutionis immanior). Money was given for private as well as public buildings, and not only money, but artificers from over the sea, new inhabitants of high rank, and soldiers to guard them during the winter.[810] All this had a very real bearing on education. Like Britain, the city had gradually got rid of its ‘barbarism’, and had emerged into the light of Roman culture.[811] Amid all the benefits of the emperors, says Eumenius, the greatest is their zeal in fostering liberal studies. Though the cares of state are great and engrossing, they find time to attend to education, and herein perhaps the true future of Rome may lie—‘si non potentia, sed etiam eloquentia Romana revirescat’.[812]
The Theodosian Code shows how Constantine continued and developed this patronage of education. Gaul appeared prominently in this connexion with the promulgation of the Law of Gratian and Valentinian in A.D. 376 for the regulation of teachers’ salaries, addressed to the prefect of the Gauls.
In this, as in many other laws, it is clear that the imperial policy aimed at the spread of education. ‘In the most populous, powerful and famous cities of every district entrusted to your Magnificence, let all the best teachers be appointed for the education of the young: we refer to Greek and Latin rhetoricians and grammarians.’[813] Similarly, Valentinian and Valens had exhorted any one who was qualified, either to open a new school or to revive an old one.[814] But the emperors were not content with a general policy for education. They provided directly for all the details of a student’s behaviour and discipline. Those Gallic students who went to Rome for the study of law had to submit to the enactment of 370,[815] which prescribed many regulations for their studies and their conduct.
A different and a closer interest in the schools had been shown by Julian—the interest of a philosopher. He had laid stress on the morals and efficiency, and on the personal share he desired to have in the appointment of teachers, probably with a view to ejecting Christians.
‘Masters and teachers must show excellence first, in character, and then, in eloquence. But, since I cannot be present in person at every city, I command that all who wish to teach should not rashly and hastily leap into this profession, but only when their order has judged them fit and the unanimous vote of the best citizens has gained them a decree of the curials. This decree will be referred to me for consideration, so that the teachers may approach their work of public education with the higher honour of our approval.’[816] This moral emphasis is repeated in a decree of Valentinian and Valens: ‘si qui erudiendis adulescentibus vita pariter et facundia idoneus erit.’[817]
From pupil to teacher, from teacher to civil servant or imperial dignitary, the emperor’s influence was paramount. He decreed when studies must cease, and how they must be conducted; it was he who fostered the schools, and from him needy children received financial support. The institution of the ‘alimenta’ is said to be as old as Ptolemy, the founder of the Alexandrian library;[818] and we read that Nerva, like Augustus,[819] reared children at the public expense,[820] and that Trajan (as is proved by two famous inscriptions)[821] and Hadrian followed his example.[822] These ‘alimenta’, which had originally been instituted as a measure against the decreasing birth-rate, were fully organized in the early empire, but dwindled as financial difficulties grew.[823] Yet we find Constantine passing laws about the support of children which probably remained in force at least until the end of the fourth century. ‘Officium tuum’ is his mandate to the Praetorian Prefect, ‘haec cura praestringat ut si quis parens adferat subolem, quam pro paupertate educare non possit, nec in alimentis nec in veste impertienda tardetur ... ad quam rem et fiscum nostrum et rem privatam indiscreta iussimus praebere obsequia.’[824] Again, in 322, there is a similar law, this time specially intended for provincials: ‘Quiquis igitur huiusmodi reperietur qui nulla rei familiaris substantia fultus est, quique liberos suos aegre ac difficile sustentet, per fiscum nostrum ... stipem necessariam largiantur....’[825] As far as actual schooling is concerned, this kind of imperial support, being intended for the relief of the lower classes, applied only to elementary education.
The teacher was dependent on the emperor (as we have seen) for his appointment. Sometimes a man would be directly appointed by the emperor, as Eumenius was,[826] but generally in Gaul, as at Antioch,[827] he would be nominated by his municipality, and his nomination would be subject to the approval of the imperial patron,[828] to whom he looked for all good things. The Gaul of Panegyric VI speaks of ‘privatorum studiorum ignobiles curae’, and the suggestion is that it is the approving glance of the emperor that makes them ‘nobiles’. Eumenius clearly brings out this relation between the teachers and the emperors, who are praised because they found time to appoint schoolmasters as well as masters of the horse.[829]
And finally, both teacher and student depended on the emperor for promotion. Imperial service was the conscious motive of education, and the rhetor could count among the officials of the empire many a former pupil. One of the panegyrists looks proudly and wistfully back to those who left his school and rose high in the forum or the offices of the palace, and fondly thinks of them as his children. ‘For many and not ignoble are the streams that take their course from me,’ he exclaims to the emperor, ‘many whom I guided have risen to govern thy provinces.’[830] The reason why the emperors take so much care to appoint efficient teachers is, ‘lest those who ought to be appointed to the various forms of State service should be overtaken, as it were, by a sudden cloud midway on the waves of youth, and steer their course by doubtful stars of oratory.’[831] The service of the emperor is so obviously the best, that anything else looks like partial shipwreck. The imperial goal dominates everything. Ausonius served, like many of the Bordeaux teachers, on the municipality of his town, and rose to be consul and prefect. Even a man like Exsuperius, whom Ausonius criticizes as a trivial talker,[832] could become governor of a province. So much was a public career the fashion that Ausonius expresses surprise at Alcimus for keeping out of the imperial service:
All this finds its counterpart, of course, in the direct encouragement of the emperors. If Constantine had merely said: ‘We allow teachers to stand for office, if they wish, but do not compel them,’[834] Constantius, with an enthusiasm for letters rarely paralleled among princes, could promise that he would promote to higher rank him who by his studies and eloquence seemed to be worthy of the first place. ‘For literature must not be denied her rewards—literature which is the greatest of all virtues.’[835]
One of the main features of the imperial policy towards the teachers was the panegyric. The emperors had to mould public opinion, and, not possessing newspapers, they fell back on the professor. And perhaps this is the reason why, during the fourth century, they made such a special point of residing in Gaul and expressing their fondness for her by word and deed—Gaul the home of rhetoricians. However that may be, the panegyric obtained a regular place among the teacher’s duties.
Ever since Pliny had set the fashion with his panegyric on Trajan, ‘there had gradually grown up a custom, especially in the cities of Gaul, where rhetorical studies were flourishing, a custom which became frequent in the times of Diocletian and Maximian, and again under Constantine and Constantius, of sending rhetors to the emperor to congratulate him on successes and to thank him for benefits.’[836] The panegyric was one of the accomplishments of the famous Minervius,[837] and among the ‘Panegyrici Latini’ it was a much-coveted honour to be allowed to air this accomplishment. ‘Summam votorum meorum’[838] is the description applied by the sixth panegyrist to his speech before the emperor. Nor need we consider this mere flattery; for the rewards were many and substantial. Sidonius’s panegyric on Avitus procured him a statue in the forum of Trajan,[839] after his panegyric on Majorian (who had been nominated by Avitus’s murderer Ricimer), he was admitted into the court and became a count, and when he performed the same service for Anthemius in 468 he was made prefect of Rome and president of the Senate; he tells us himself that he obtained the praefecture ‘sub ope Christi, styli occasione’.[840]
These were the rewards of the brilliant. But even the humblest grammarian enjoyed the emperor’s favour as a potential panegyrist. Many laws at different times protected him from taxes and military service. Constantine had decreed this, and had added that they were also to be free from prosecution and shielded from wrongdoing. The magistrates were to exact a fine of £1,000 from any one who injured them, or themselves bear the punishment.[841] In the case of a slave whipping was prescribed. In 333 Constantine confirmed this law ‘to facilitate and extend the teaching of liberal arts and studies’.[842] His example was followed in 414 by Honorius and Theodosius, who decreed that grammarians, orators, and teachers of philosophy as well as certain court doctors, besides all the privileges granted to them by the emperors in the past, should enjoy freedom from the rearrangement, municipal or curial, of property which had been put together from several sources in order to be divided equally (conlatio), from the marking out of land for the senatorial or land tax (descriptio), and from all office and public burdens. Nor were they to have soldiers or judges billeted on them wherever they lived. Moreover, all these privileges were to be shared by their sons and wives, so that their children could not be forced to serve in the army.[843]
But the gratitude of the Gallic teachers to the emperor was based on more than personal benefits. They realized very clearly (in the fourth century, at any rate) that without the Roman military power education could not have flourished. Eumenius tells how, after the confusion of destroying barbarians, the trees flourish again and the corn-stalks lift their heads when the frontier is made secure. The age of gold has come again. ‘Adeo, ut res est, aurea illa saecula, quae non diu quondam Saturno rege viguerunt, nunc aeternis auspiciis Iovis et Herculis renascuntur.’[844] Panegyric inspires comforting pictures, but in this case there is a basis of truth. There is a true ring about the praises of the Aeduan who describes the evil condition of his country, and pours out his thanks before the emperor,[845] even though he has a tendency to hysterics.[846] There is a certain amount of real feeling in his exclamation: ‘O divinam, imperator, tuam in sananda civitate medicinam’;[847] and the Gallic orator of the sixth panegyric is not very far wrong when he says: ‘Thence, O emperor, comes this peace which we enjoy: not the waters of the Rhine, but the terror which thy name inspires is the rampart that defends us.’
Valentinian I, ‘the frontier emperor’, restored the defences of the West against the barbarians (367-8). Trouble was brewing among the Persians,[848] says Ammianus, ‘but Valentinian, conceiving in his mind great things and profitable’, fortified the whole of the Rhine from Rhaetia to the sea, strengthened camps and forts, planted many towers in suitable spots along the Gallic frontier, and sometimes even across the river close to barbarian territory.[849] Zosimus remarks on his care for the provinces and for the Celtic peoples.[850]
Even the usurper Constantine, ‘the vain deliverer of Gaul’, as Gibbon calls him, in A.D. 407 ἐγκατέστησε ... καὶ τῷ Ῥήνῳ πᾶσαν ἀσφάλειαν, ἐκ τῶν Ἰουλιανοῦ βασιλέως χρόνων ῥᾳθυμηθεῖσαν.[851]
One of the panegyrists[852] mentions ‘sapientia’ as a blessing of the empire, ‘ipsa ... illa quae videtur rerum omnium domina esse’, and this wisdom comes by experience of men and things, ‘perspectis hominum moribus et exploratis rerum eventis’. By giving opportunities to the Gauls for studying and mixing with different types from all parts of the world, Roman rule contributed to the general culture of the country; and the provincial orator is not guilty of his usual exaggeration when he emphasizes the fact that in this way, too, the empire was a boon at this time to the education of Gaul.
But against these real and undeniable advantages there may be set some corresponding drawbacks. Elaborate centralization[853] may be good from a purely military point of view, but it checks the progress of the human spirit. The panegyrists show how excessive the expenditure of the central court was, and how the interests of the empire were sacrificed to the sovereign.[854] The accession of Julian was a boon, for ‘the provinces were exhausted, partly by the plundering barbarians, partly by the greed, destructive as it was disgraceful, of the provincial governors.’[855] And of Julian the orator asks in a way which affirms the charge on the part of his enemy Constantius: ‘Flagitiis administrantium non modo frena laxaret, sed etiam stimulator accederet...?’
This over-centralization resulted in over-interference in education. ‘The traditional liberty which had formed the foundation of Roman education was seriously infringed by the appearance of imperial privileges.... All these benefactions were in reality an interference in the affairs of education.... Thus from the second to the fourth centuries of our era, the complete transformation of school organization was quietly accomplished. It is the transition period between the ancient Roman school and the formalism of the Middle Ages.’[856] This stiffening of the imperial support into formalism and tyranny is seen in the Theodosian Code. The personal liberty of the teacher becomes more and more restricted. Theodosius and Valentinian decreed[857] in 425 that no State teachers, on pain of being driven from the city with the stigma of ‘infamia’, were to hold classes in public outside the prescribed limits. Tutors in private families were permitted if they confined their teaching to the inmates of the house. But all who taught in the emperor’s Capitoline ‘auditorium’ were strictly forbidden to teach privately or else they must lose all the privileges of their office.
It looks as if this prohibition of all public schools outside the imperial academy was directed against the itinerant sophists. The law was issued at Constantinople and it may have been a salutary measure in some ways; but there is a suspicion that the emperor is rather abusing his authority to favour his own particular college, and the principle of vesting such unlimited powers over education in one man is a dangerous one. The penalty imposed on those who disobey this injunction (infamia and banishment) seems to be disproportionately severe. It smacks of that rigidity which made the emperor forbid the masters of his academy (intra Capitolii auditorium) to teach, even privately, elsewhere. And it is a continuation of that coercive attitude on the part of the imperial patron towards the schools, which we see increasing from the beginning of our period when Julian enacted that every teacher must receive the imperial approval before he was qualified to teach.[858] He was right in insisting on efficiency, but his evident attempt to abolish private adventure schools can hardly be justified.
Extreme centralization had also another and subtler influence. We feel, as we read the words of Eumenius or Ausonius to the emperors, that there was an unhealthy relation between them, one which tended to destroy the individuality of the subject. The deification of the emperor looms very large in the Panegyrici:[859] his favour was the summit of a man’s ambitions, to him all ideas and ideals had to be accommodated. It is quite pitiful to watch the hysterics of the panegyrists. It is no more a case merely of the rules of rhetoric and the laws of the game; it is the complete breakdown of all self-respect and individuality, an abasement of body and soul before the temporal powers, springing partly from the rhetorical tradition and partly from a real sense of dependence on the emperor.
‘O that fortunate journey of mine!’ exclaims one of the panegyrists of his visit to the emperor at Rome, ‘O labour excellently begun and ended! What blessings do I taste of! With what joys am I furnished! What wonders will I dispense when I return to the cities of the Gauls! What numbers of thunderstruck people around me, what huge audiences will listen to me when I say: “Rome I have seen, Theodosius I have seen, and both together have I looked on. I have seen him, the father of the prince, I have seen him, the prince’s avenger, him, the restorer of the prince.”’[860] Such is the recurrent language of a distinguished man, Pacatus the Gaul, a friend of Ausonius, who dedicated to him the Ludus Septem Sapientum and the Technopaegnion, and said of him that none, save Vergil, was better loved by the Muses.[861] Nazarius, who may be one of Ausonius’s professors,[862] solemnly maintains that it is wicked to form an opinion about the emperors, and reasons out his thin-spun absurdities thus: ‘Nam et in vestibulo suo inquirentem repellit obiecta veneratio, et si qui mentem propius adierunt, quod oculis in solem se contendentibus evenit, praestricta acie, videndi facultate caruerunt.’[863] The splendour of majesty (it is a golden glitter) affects the eyesight of the orator. Ausonius had been asked by the emperor to write a poem. ‘I have no talent for it: but Caesar has commanded: I will have. It isn’t safe to refuse a god.’[864] He speaks with great glee of his escape, in attaining to the consulship, from all the usual methods of candidature: all was summed up in Caesar ‘Romanus populus, Martius campus, equester ordo, rostra, ovilia, senatus, curia—unus mihi omnia Gratianus’.[865] The ease implied in the simplification of everything to the person of the emperor was no doubt pleasant: but it was a mark of decadence. It meant a limitation of ideas, a cramping of individuality, a slavishness of spirit which must eventually reduce education to spiritless formalism. What perverted results this militaristic control of education sometimes could produce is well illustrated by the Cento Nuptialis. Ausonius had enough education and taste to be half ashamed of his subject. ‘Piget enim Vergiliani carminis dignitatem tam ioculari dehonestasse materia.’ Yet what was he to do? ‘Iussum erat.’ Valentinian had commanded it: ‘sanctus imperator ... vir meo iudicio eruditus’. If we are to judge of this erudition by such fruits as these, we cannot say much for its depth or taste. ‘Ridere, nil ultra expeto’, says the poet. But there is more than one way of laughing, as he very well knew. Here, then, we have imperial interference making a man at the head of his profession, a man who would be imitated by his pupils and by other teachers as he imitated the emperor, write for the edification of the world the most asinine and disgusting verses ever produced.
Not only the personal, but also the collective individuality, tended to be impaired by over-centralization. The sense of citizenship, which it is one of the duties of education to foster, was crushed in the great mechanical organization of the Empire. Loyalty to Rome grew hollow for lack of a subordinate and more immediate loyalty. Loyalty is in the first place evoked by personal contact, and the emperor was sometimes very far away. The subordinate official lost the full sense of partnership because some mighty power from without imposed laws and made regulations, and could interfere between him and his superior official at any moment. Even in men like Ausonius, who could get into touch with the emperor and feel genuine loyalty towards him by reason of a sense of partnership and personal benefits, we find Rome appearing as the symbol of the Empire in a very official capacity. In his description of noble cities he gives one perfunctory line to Rome and forty to Bordeaux. ‘Bordeaux has my love, Rome my respect’,[866] he says, and he gives the reason: ‘here stood my cradle, there my chair of office.’ Officialdom may evoke respect, but it can never call forth that spirit of love which is the basis of true loyalty in every sphere. Paulinus of Pella, writing after the barbarian invasions of the early fifth century, expresses himself in a similar way. Rome is only cursorily mentioned[867] in conventional terms,[868] and there is no point at which Rome touches him personally. Indeed, he has rather bitter memories of her: