But among the upper classes of the Gallo-Romans generally Roman pride was still very strong. They held high offices at the court of the barbarians, for whom they cherished a secret contempt, or else retired to their great châteaux[153] (ruins of which are still to be seen[154]) and bewailed to one another the encroachment of the Goths, who retained, to a large extent, their lawless and roving instinct. There is a feeling that literature and religion (in both of which we see, though in different degrees, the growth of a ceremonious externalism) are the only things left. Sidonius asks Basilius to see to it that the bishops obtain the right of ordination in those parts which the Goths have taken, so that there may be, at any rate, a religious if not a political bond.[155] And both in religion and literature they despised the Goths. For the Goths were Arians, and their jargon was barbarous. The well-known epigram of the Latin Anthology[156] expresses the attitude of mind: Inter _hails_ goticum, _scap jah matjan jah drigkan_ non audet quisquam dignos educere versus. How can one write poetry, exclaims Sidonius, among people who put rancid oil on their hair? ‘The Muse of the six-foot metre has scorned her task, since the appearance of patrons seven feet high.’[157] And to Philagrius he confesses: ‘barbaros vitas quia mali putentur: ego etiamsi boni’.[158] How sensitive men of Sidonius’s class were to the charge of barbarism we may see from Avitus’s letter to Viventiolus.[159] Rumour whispers that in one of his sermons he has slipped into a ‘barbarism’, and his friends are openly criticizing. ‘I confess’, says the bishop with wounded pride, ‘that such a thing may have happened to me. Any learning I may have had in more youthful years is now the spoil of age, “omnia fert aetas”’—a Virgilian quotation to indicate that, in spite of his profession to his friend, his ‘studia litterarum’ still remain to mark his culture. The barbarism at issue is the quantity of the middle syllable of ‘potitur’, to which he devotes most of the letter. Thus to the nobleman of the fifth century, even if he was a churchman and might, therefore, be expected to take the wider Christian view, culture meant something essentially Roman. By the side of this Roman culture Germanic influence must seem small, and yet, when we remember the attitude of men like Paulinus of Pella to the Goths, and allow a margin for Sidonius’s prejudice, it cannot seem unimportant in the civilization of Gaul. 5. ROMANIZATION OF GAUL Having glanced at the negative side of Gallic Romanization, it is important to look a little closer at the positive side, in order to form an idea of the extent of Gallo-Roman education.