The Whipping Boys of Roman Culture Are the Rich, Free Slave

With Tyro, you get Cicero's brother writing and asking about his health. You know, you've just been freed, but they can still make jokes about thrashing you. And of course, what happens with the general freedman class is that Romans free these slaves in really an enormous numbers,. But then they continue to be deeply snobbish about them. So slavery is there, I think, kind of disrupting the Roman social hierarchy because it's a kind of a mobile within a would-be static system. They're never good enough. The whipping boys of Roman culture is the rich, free slave, the nouveau reach who gets above himself and has too much power