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.