This chapter will continue laying out a model for society in Barbarian Gaul. The previous chapter focused on participants within Gaul's multiple aristocracies, large landowners, prominent courtiers, and ecclesiastical aristocrats. Gallic authors characterized people who succeeded in their strategies of marrying with landed elites, acquiring high secular office and prominently patronizing churches as society's “best” (optimi). But, as the hopeful expression of a non-aristocratic father for his son to continue the family line, presented in this chapter's introductory quote, indicates, schemes for social improvement in fact might differ between nobles and non-elites only by a matter of degrees. This chapter concentrates on details of people from the lower social ranks as they sought social betterment through marriage, pursuit of secular office, and church affiliation. Analysis will progress according to descending rank, free to slave. Freepersons will be divided into two groups, ingenui and pauperes, according to terminology used by contemporary writers. But even this division cannot do justice to the variation, economic and otherwise, that existed within the large “middling” group of people that archaeologists and social historians are now realizing characterized late ancient societies.