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:
Quod laude clarus, quod operatus litteris,
omnem refugisti ambitum.[833]
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]