But the important point is that the upper classes came to look on education as their monopoly. Sidonius rebukes a friend who is absorbed in the material concerns of his estate for neglecting his reading.[766] It is a nobleman’s business, he finely says, to maintain a noble level of culture. Think of the disgrace of being distanced in your old age by one of humbler rank, and surpassed in honours by men whose worth is that of a lower class—‘cum eos, _quos esset indignum si vestigia nostra sequerentur_, videris dolens antecessisse’. The argument is that the nobleman has to undertake administrative and other imperial offices; they are his by right. Therefore he must keep up his education, which is the road to office, and also peculiarly his prerogative.[767] And so, when Ausonius says: ‘It isn’t right that I, a royal master, should expound verses to the common herd’,[768] there is a background of fact to his jocularity. At the end of the empire, when the social fabric was tottering and the accustomed ranks and distinctions were vanishing away (_iam remotis gradibus dignitatum_), Sidonius sees in literary knowledge the only mark of nobility that will survive: ‘solum posthac nobilitatis indicium litteras nosse.’[769] In these circumstances it is hard to see how Jullian is justified in calling the Roman society in Gaul during the fourth century ‘toute intellectuelle’.[770] Yet there are two considerations which must modify our conclusion. The first is that in practice the lines of demarcation were not so rigid as in theory. As we have seen in the case of the ‘collegiati’, there was higher education where we should not have expected it, and members of guilds were not always swallowed up in their guild work. The second consideration is that their interest in education was not always damped by discouraging surroundings. There was a strong and almost passionate loyalty to letters among the upper classes which must have spread lower down in society. The curial, no doubt, sometimes cultivated his intellect as well as land and tax-collecting, even though there was no material gain to be won. And it was felt, perhaps, that it was the respectable thing to send one’s son to a grammar school. We must, therefore, allow a certain margin for higher education among the ‘curiales’ and the ‘corporati’, while we accept a very wide range of mere literacy,[771] such as could be obtained from an elementary school teacher. The enormous staff of scribes required for the imperial ‘scholae’ must have embraced many of a lower social standing. The need for people who could read and write was great, and we may perhaps see in the large[772] number of grammarians[773] (as compared with the rhetoricians), which the emperors provided, an indication of this need. But, as we go down the social scale, it is only the exceptions who go beyond the grammarian, while the majority probably knew none but the elementary master. (iii) THE TEACHER IN SOCIETY