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.