There were complaints that the masters were ill-paid. Quin tilian made a fortune by his school, but Juvenal calls him in this respect a white crow.
Grammar and rhetoric schools spread through out the Roman world and continued substantially unchanged in method and subject to the days of Gregory the Great and Augus tine the apostle of the English. The Confessions of St. Augustine of Hippo, a schoolmaster at Carthage, Rome and Milan, before his baptism in the year 387, and the poems of his contemporary Ausonius, educated in the grammar school at Toulouse, and him self a schoolmaster at Bordeaux before becoming prefect of Illyria and of Gaul, show that the schools were much the same in the 4th century as in the first. Ausonius celebrated in verse all the Bordeaux schoolmasters, some coming from schools at Athens, Constantinople, Syracuse and Corinth, one the son of a Druid at Bayeux, others schoolmasters from Poitou, Narbonne, Toulouse, who went to Lerida and other places in Spain. Ausonius had for his pupil the emperor Gratian, who in 376 established a legal tariff for schoolmasters' salaries. "In every town which is called a metropolis, a noble professor shall be elected." The rhetoric master (rhetor) was to have at least 24 annonae (an annona being a year's wages of a working man) ; while the grammar masters were to receive half that. But at Trier, then the capital of Vie
Western empire, the rhetor was to have 3o, the Latin gram marian zo, and the Greek grammarian, if one could be found, 12 annonae (Cod. Theod. xiii. 3. 11 ). The same century saw Priscian, a schoolmaster at Constantinople, compose the Latin grammar, which, itself for the most part a mere translation from Greek, reigned without a rival till the Reformation, and is represented by over r,000 mss. Venantius Fortunatus, educated in the grammar school at Treviso, wrote in 57o a life of St. Martin of Tours in three books of hexameter verse, and lives of saints and bishops. His era was one of transition, and marks the passing of the schools from secular to ecclesiastical control. His contemporary Pope Gregory in a letter to Desiderius, "bishop of Gaul," at Vienne commends the monks whom Gregory was sending with Laurence the priest and Mellitus the abbot to Augustine of Can terbury, thus bringing the grammar-school-teaching bishop into direct connection with the conversion of the English, and the foundation of the first English school.