It is not suggested that the pagan efforts to advocate morality were worth less than the Christian, or that there was a steady and abiding advance in morals from this time onwards. Only, there are two facts to bear in mind: the moral state of Gaul was bad, and paganism as a motive to morality had failed. Where then was the incentive to come from? Without claiming for the Church any special virtue, and realizing its many grievous errors, we must answer that the moral inspiration for the future came at this time through Christianity. And the Church and her schools were the channels by which this inspiration reached the people. Thus once more Christian education supplemented the work of the pagan schools.
One of the ways in which Christianity exercised its moral influence consisted in raising the status of women; and this was done, to a large extent, by making education more general among them.
In answering the question whether girls attended the schools at Bordeaux, Jullian[1162] says that this was probably the case. We may omit the ‘probably’. It would have been strange indeed if this had not been the case, seeing that at Rome girls’ schools go back possibly to the time of the unfortunate Virginia[1163] (449 B.C.), while in the Ciceronian period Hortensia belonged to the orators, Lesbia wrote poetry, and girls are mentioned as attending school with the boys by Martial[1164] and Ovid.[1165] Moreover, Ausonius says quite plainly to his grandson, referring to the ordinary school course:
Haec olim genitorque tuus genetrixque secuti ...[1166] and tells us that his aunt was a student of medicine, though he indicates that this was not the usual thing (more virum medicis artibus experiens).[1167] Sometimes the mother taught her daughter literature:
Latios nec volvere libros (says Claudianus of the bride),[1168] desinit aut Graios, ipsa genetrice magistra.
But such home-education was probably rare and confined to the upper classes. We hear of no such instance in Gaul. Yet we know that there was sufficient interest in the classics and in knowledge generally on the part of the Gallic women to elicit a lament from Claudius Marius Victor. For among the signs of corruption of his day he notes their preference for pagan authors. Moreover, they show a knowledge of abstruse questions and a desire to know which is truly monstrous:
Quae ... Deo tantum sunt nota, recondita cunctis,
scire volunt (heu grande nefas!) et scire videntur.
But it is all the fault of the men, he says (sunt nostri crimina sexus). Without the example of the husband, the wife would never have strayed into such ways of wickedness: