We must, however, be careful how we interpret ‘historia’. It was an elastic term. In the _Technopaegnion_, for example, Ausonius has a piece ‘de historiis’,[1191] but the subject-matter is almost entirely in the shadowy realm of mythology—the ‘history’ of Narcissus, Juno, and Philomela; and when the grammarians Crispus and Urbicus are said to be ‘callentes mython plasmata et historiam’, we feel that the juxtaposition of the two subjects is significant. ‘History’, Quintilian had said, ‘is akin to the poets, a sort of prose poetry.’[1192] The interest in the actual facts of history and their meaning is small. A teacher like Ausonius takes very little notice of contemporary events. He refers vaguely to ‘tempora tyrannica’,[1193] and to the residence of Constantine’s brothers at Toulouse.[1194] But of all those contemporary events which we should have expected a man in Ausonius’s position to mention, the declaration as emperor in Gaul of the German Magnentius (350), the campaigns of Julian against the invading Franks (357-8), the crossing of Maximus to Gaul after having been declared emperor in Britain (383), and the affair of Arbogast and Eugenius (392)—these and many other contemporary events of importance do not appear in the pages of Ausonius. If mythology was a danger for history on the one side, there was antiquity on the other. In the former the tendency was to wander away from facts altogether, in the latter there was a temptation to concentrate on bare facts too much. The historical facts which Sidonius sometimes enumerates sound very much like an inventory.[1195] Staphylius, who is noted for his knowledge of history, was steeped in the six hundred volumes of Varro,[1196] and the antiquarian Victorius dug deep into the musty documents of antiquity, spending on unexplored fields a keen intellect and a tenacious memory.[1197] Ausonius remarks that this meticulous encyclopaedism had made Staphylius neglect Cicero and Vergil, et quidquid Latia conditur historia.[1198]