Routine produced its usual discontent, and it was true of the fourth century as of the first:
Occidit miseros crambe repetita magistros.
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:
Ieiunis nil scribo; meum post pocula si quis
legerit, hic sapiet.
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.