Victorius had the scientific spirit, but no use can be made of it for history, which, to Ausonius, means something much nearer to the brilliance of the rhetor than to the patient study of a Victorius or a Staphylius, whom he regards with an airy smile of contempt. The ‘prompta studia’ of the ordinary teacher who glibly talked the traditional stuff are separated with an air of respectability from the work of such cranks as indulge in dusty research.[1199] Rocafort rightly suspects that these students ‘irrisioni, sicut Ausonio, ita cunctis Burdigalensibus fuisse’.[1200] A practical sign of this is the low position which Victorius held: he was not even a grammarian but merely an assistant (_subdoctor sive proscholus_),[1201] poorly paid, ‘exili nostrae fucatus honore cathedrae’. The subsidiary position of history is indicated by Augustine when he says that it was an accessory to ‘Grammar’, and its mythological and artificial character is criticized in the remark that it was more worked at by grammarians than actual historians.[1202] It is quite clear that history was studied in a very haphazard way. Even a teacher of sufficient prominence to deliver several[1203] panegyrics before the emperor, such as the Gallic author of the speech to Constantius, talks in a very vague way about some of the best-known statements of Herodotus. ‘Xerxes, _ut audio_, _Persarum rex potissimus_, pedicas iecit aureas in profundum....’ Unfamiliarity with Greek history is implied both on the part of the speaker and on the part of the audience. When Ausonius tells us that he wrote a Roman History for his son (_ignota aeternae ne sint tibi tempora Romae_[1204]), we get the impression that he did it largely because his name appeared in the list of consuls, and to urge his son to follow his footsteps. Scire cupis qui sim? titulum qui quartus ab uno est quaere: leges nomen consulis Ausonii. And, Exemplum iam patris habes, ut protinus et te adgreget Ausoniis purpura consulibus;[1205] and again, to Proculus: Mille annos centumque et bis fluxisse novenos consulis Ausonii nomen ad usque leges.[1206] It is a pity that the main part of the work is lost, but probably its author merely followed the tendency of the age to epitomize, as he did in the summary of Suetonius’s lives of the Caesars. The study of history, in fact, was merely ancillary: ‘ut aliquid nitoris et copiae orationi afferrent (_sc._ _historiae studia_) et aliquid materiae carmini.’[1207] The models followed by the historians are chosen chiefly for their literary brilliance. Sallust is the most famous, and he plays a large part in Ausonius’s syllabus. Orosius was greatly influenced by Tacitus, and Arnobius by Lucretius.