Kyle Harper

But it's –

It's a system of exploitation.

That means there's always a mix of carrots and sticks, to put it crudely.

Like the Romans extract people's labor partly through physical violence but also partly through like systems of manumission that try and incent people to –

to obey and not to rebel in order to earn their freedom.

They're using everything from literal chains to like enticements to try and keep rebellion from ever sort of coalescing in a way that can turn into collective violence.

It's a little bit challenging for us to look back and say, I mean, we know like in Pompeii, the slave population in Pompeii is huge.

It must be 30%.

And not all of these people would have been like plantation, you know, workers who were lashed every day and, you know, worked to the physical bone.

A lot of them are nurses and textile, you know, workers and maids and tutors and workers.

all sorts of things that are sort of quasi embedded in households as well, where there's always this weird psychological dimension too.

I mean,

And part of the strangeness of slavery is how it's deeply embedded in domestic institutions as well.

And so there's ideologies in which the paterfamilias is sort of the father and the master that sort of brainwashes – tries to brainwash people against resistance.

But it's this – like the important thing to recognize is it's just like a pervasive system that tries to colonize people's minds and pervasively tries to keep them from resisting.

It's definitely an argument that's been made.

Aldo Schiavone, who's an Italian historian, has argued that it's kind of a...

There's like a neo-Marxist tradition that argues this.

It's an interesting argument.

I don't buy it at all.