Again, the inspiration which comes from the feeling of citizenship, the realization of being a living member of a group and helping to further its ends, was crushed out by the mechanical fiscal system of the empire. Men like Claudian and Sidonius might write with an enthusiasm inspired by this feeling, but what chance was there for the anxious curial or the fettered artisan to share this inspiration? For him the round of daily duty was too narrow or too relentless, to allow much room for ideals. ‘Municipal self-government, bereft of its political significance, restricted to the sphere of local interests and ambitions, is apt to degenerate into corrupt and spendthrift practices.’[759] To the curial, as he carried out the commands of the emperor, it must have been difficult to see any inspiring meaning in it all, when Gaul was day by day being more abandoned to the barbaric invasions, while the burden of taxation remained unalleviated. And yet it is where a meaning, an ideal, is most clearly seen, that education has its truest incentive and its most fruitful results. Denk appeals to the fact that many Roman slaves could read and write, to Cato’s requirements of a household slave, and to Mommsen’s statement that there was much reading and writing among the lower classes. But (as far as the artisans and free labourers are concerned) the reference is to republican times when the guilds were free, and when a fiscal imperial system had not yet enslaved the people and created the frightful inter-class rigidity which culminated, to the detriment of education, in the fourth century. That there were, however, even then, some ‘collegiati’ who attained to higher education is clear from the law of 370.[760] The emperor, in asking the Prefect of Rome for a report of provincial students, makes an exception of those who are serving in the public guilds. But we must remember that these ‘collegiati’ probably belonged to the higher guilds, like that of the ‘navicularii’, in which the higher classes had a share, and were probably picked men. Ritter, in his commentary on the law, suggests that they were young men who had voluntarily joined a ‘corpus’ and were allowed to stay longer than usual because they were doing public work. However this may be, they were certainly the exceptions. The impression derived from the Theodosian Code is that the ‘collegiati’ who had the opportunity of higher education were very much the fortunate few.