The inference is that the popular conception of the grammarian’s task included moral training. We find that ‘Grammatica’ was regarded as the nurse of the virtues. A training is obtained through it for practical life. Not only the orator but the soldier was supposed to be thus formed. It is the school of the grammarian that trains the soldier whom the Campus Martius receives. ‘Grammar’ has fired him with imaginary battles, taught him courage by accustoming him to the apparatus of war even among the blandishments of peace, and so will make him obedient to the actual trumpet call.[1156] All this is claimed for the school. Such was the theory, but what sort of training was given in practice? It was of little use that fables with moral tags were put before the child if there was not at the same time the living example. And Seneca’s objection to the character of the ‘grammatici’ seems to have held to some extent in Gaul during our period. The disgusting picture of social vice which Ausonius gives in the latter part of the _Epigrams_ applies in part also to the teachers. Eunus, the pedagogue, figures prominently in the list, and Ausonius himself speaks quite naturally about things that directly contradict the Christian morality which he professed. There was a hollowness in the teaching of the ‘grammaticus’ which logically followed from the attempt to maintain the precept without the example. The objections to the low ethical standard of the gods in Homer, which were urged in the fifth century as in the time of Plato and Cicero, were unheeded by the teachers, says Augustine, even when a man of their own school (_ex eodem pulvere_) proclaimed that Homer had transferred human qualities to the gods.[1157] A barbarism or a solecism was of more account than a moral offence: to forget the _h_ in _homo_ was more serious than to forget to love a fellow man.[1158]