The all-pervading imperial atmosphere, therefore, was not encouraging for the historian. We hear of histories begun but never finished. Symmachus tells of one Protadius, a nobleman, who set about writing a domestic history.[1218] Sidonius had been asked by Bishop Prosper to write a history of the war with Attila, and actually set to work on it but gave it up.[1219] It was not only on the tax-payer that the Empire weighed heavily. It may be, too, that the emperors interfered with the selection of the material for the historical course, such as it was. In the list given by Ausonius (Jung remarks) much stress was laid on the history of insurrections, and this was done by way of an object-lesson to the Gauls ‘quo magis rebellionem audientes detestarentur’.[1220] Whether this was actually the case, or whether the remark is a mere scholastic refinement, we cannot with certainty say. The imperial authorities were quite capable of such an act, but, on the other hand, the evidence is not conclusive. We are inclined to give the emperors the benefit of the doubt. With the reaction against the superfluities of rhetoric in the Christian schools, there followed important results for history. Christian writers, as we have seen, reinforced and developed, especially in Gaul, the tendency towards chronography. This was part of the reaction against the domination of Form in historical writing, and it proved to be a valuable antidote from the historian’s point of view. But another and a greater service resulted. The Christian reaction, as we saw, affected thought as well as style, and the Christian historians, with their renewed interest in theology and philosophy, began to look for first principles in the series of events. The universality of the Christian religion made them look not only to single nationalities (though the Church fostered nationalism),[1221] but to the whole world. They tried to see all things in relation to their conception of the divine. Thus they tended to produce a philosophy of history, which, though often distorted and biased, set history on a much more markedly philosophic basis than before. As instances we may remember Augustine’s _City of God_, which was written to justify the fall of Rome, and the universal history of Orosius (who wrote with far less balance than his master Augustine), which attempted to prove that ‘there’s a Divinity that shapes our ends’. Filled with the same note, and poignantly real, are the _de Providentia Dei_ and the _ad Uxorem_, written in Gaul after the great invasion at the beginning of the fifth century had forced men to reconsider their philosophy of life.