Bordeaux, on the other hand, is described in the language of affection.[870]
If Rome and her rule appeared so artificial even to the upper class of society, much greater must have been the effect on the less privileged and enlightened. There is evidence that the law providing immunity from public burdens in the case of teachers was frequently abused. So little public spirit and sense of citizenship was there that men falsely assumed the philosopher’s cloak to escape serving their city. Against this a law of Valentinian and Valens[871] (A.D. 369) protests. ‘Let every man be returned to his country who is known to assume the philosopher’s cloak illegitimately and insolently ... for it is disgraceful’ (does a ripple of humour momentarily penetrate the rigid face of Roman law?), ‘it is disgraceful that he who professes ability to bear even the blows of fortune, should shrink from the burdens of his country.’[872] The general feeling of citizenship, when we look beneath the rhetorical veneer, was unquestionably low; and it is only rarely that we find a man like Eumenius who really had the ‘amor reipublicae’[873] which issued in action, and the enthusiasm of a Sidonius for the Empire could hardly have been shared by the less privileged classes who had had fewer opportunities of enjoying Rome’s benefits, and had suffered so much more from her failure to protect them against the barbarian or the corrupt official.
Monroe, speaking of the imperial support of education, says: ‘This is probably but another evidence of the general decline in virility and morality, for it is in order to combat these tendencies that education is encouraged.’[874]
Now there were elements of decline in the education of the day, but the emperors did not see them. If they had, they would have changed, not merely increased, the schools. If it was virility they wanted to restore, they would not have encouraged the panegyrists; if morality, they would hardly have expected teachers to write things like the Cento Nuptialis, and there would have been more of them who, like Julian, mentioned such an aim in their educational decrees. Much truer it would be to say that the support of education was due partly to a real enthusiasm for letters,[875] and partly to that policy which sought to gain the goodwill of the provincial youth, at a time when the provinces were becoming more and more important. And in education lay the key to the deeper Romanization of Gaul.
About the general sincerity of the emperors in passing their educational laws there can be no doubt. Jung thinks that these magnificent and munificent decrees were not always sincerely meant or carried out, ‘et multa interesse, ut Romani aiebant, inter os atque offam’.[876] But the concrete fact of the help given to Autun, and the general correspondence between the historical events and the school conditions as recorded in Ausonius and elsewhere, suggest that the suspicion is on the whole unjustified. The slackness in paying salaries, which he quotes, was one of the abuses to which the emperors specially addressed themselves, and Ausonius’s epigram about the happiness of the grammarian,[877] to which he refers, is no proof whatsoever. For it does not imply broken promises, and happiness may be impaired by causes independent of imperial laws.
PART III
CHRISTIAN EDUCATION
1. Introductory: Church and State
We have seen how large the emperors loomed in the ideas and education of the fourth century, and what some of the evil effects of this were. As we pass into the fifth century we find a growing reaction. The balance is shifted, and the Church begins to receive from the emperors an authority which had previously been confined to the secular State.
At first the Church had been independent, unnoticed by the State; then, after the persecutions of the early Empire, it found imperial recognition with the accession of Constantine. But there was still a measure of independence of the State: the emperors did not interfere with Church dogma, and the bishops took no part in politics. They were, as yet, very humble and submissive, for they felt the need of imperial protection, having no sufficient organization of their own and no effective ecclesiastical government; though a considerable machinery had been created by the councils which had been meeting since the third century.