Extreme centralization had also another and subtler influence. We feel, as we read the words of Eumenius or Ausonius to the emperors, that there was an unhealthy relation between them, one which tended to destroy the individuality of the subject. The deification of the emperor looms very large in the _Panegyrici_:[859] his favour was the summit of a man’s ambitions, to him all ideas and ideals had to be accommodated. It is quite pitiful to watch the hysterics of the panegyrists. It is no more a case merely of the rules of rhetoric and the laws of the game; it is the complete breakdown of all self-respect and individuality, an abasement of body and soul before the temporal powers, springing partly from the rhetorical tradition and partly from a real sense of dependence on the emperor. ‘O that fortunate journey of mine!’ exclaims one of the panegyrists of his visit to the emperor at Rome, ‘O labour excellently begun and ended! What blessings do I taste of! With what joys am I furnished! What wonders will I dispense when I return to the cities of the Gauls! What numbers of thunderstruck people around me, what huge audiences will listen to me when I say: “Rome I have seen, Theodosius I have seen, and both together have I looked on. I have seen him, the father of the prince, I have seen him, the prince’s avenger, him, the restorer of the prince.”’[860] Such is the recurrent language of a distinguished man, Pacatus the Gaul, a friend of Ausonius, who dedicated to him the _Ludus Septem Sapientum_ and the _Technopaegnion_, and said of him that none, save Vergil, was better loved by the Muses.[861] Nazarius, who may be one of Ausonius’s professors,[862] solemnly maintains that it is wicked to form an opinion about the emperors, and reasons out his thin-spun absurdities thus: ‘Nam et in vestibulo suo inquirentem repellit obiecta veneratio, et si qui mentem propius adierunt, quod oculis in solem se contendentibus evenit, praestricta acie, videndi facultate caruerunt.’[863] The splendour of majesty (it is a golden glitter) affects the eyesight of the orator. Ausonius had been asked by the emperor to write a poem. ‘I have no talent for it: but Caesar has commanded: I will have. It isn’t _safe_ to refuse a god.’[864] He speaks with great glee of his escape, in attaining to the consulship, from all the usual methods of candidature: all was summed up in Caesar ‘Romanus populus, Martius campus, equester ordo, rostra, ovilia, senatus, curia—unus mihi omnia Gratianus’.[865] The ease implied in the simplification of everything to the person of the emperor was no doubt pleasant: but it was a mark of decadence. It meant a limitation of ideas, a cramping of individuality, a slavishness of spirit which must eventually reduce education to spiritless formalism. What perverted results this militaristic control of education sometimes could produce is well illustrated by the _Cento Nuptialis_. Ausonius had enough education and taste to be half ashamed of his subject.