Rome and Italy in the Imperial Period

Rat: The law is designed to make it every single slave's business to work against each other. If you're in the house, if thereis a staff of a hundred and 50 or 200 enslaved servants, and one of them kills him, you're dead,. whether or not you did it. It is essentially conscripting you into a kind of security service on top of everything else you are doing. This is a community that can only really be controlled through, on one hand, these sort of promises of freedom and manumission which are not entirely plausible. But on the other hand, the threat of extreme violence.