Semper timere ..

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From Chapter 5.

"Lashing caused excruciating physical pain. The lacerations were visible for days, as slaves bore the "marks of cruelty" on their bodies. Chrysostom warned masters they should not tear through the tunic when they beat their slaves, and he chided masters whose cruelty was evident on the slave's body when the slave was at the public bath.

Jerome called it an "everyday custom" for a slave to use the time between blows to ask for death as a reprieve. Basil of Caesarea, criticizing the rich, said they could see their wicked deeds all around them, including the "slaves whom you have ripped to shreds."

The violence of lashing could of course be chaotic and disorderly. The incentive model should not lead us to forget that the actors involved were human beings, with all that implies about fallibility and passion and unpredictability, in which one party possessed extreme power over another.

Iamblichus said that philosophers never lashed their slaves while they were still in a state of anger — implying that the average man did. Masters might chase their slaves around the house punishing them.

Arnmianus reported that a slave who was slow to serve received 300 lashes. The context is clearly one of exaggeration, but the point to notice is that the blows were numbered. Chrysostom spoke of thirty or fifty lashes as a high number. A really bad whipping was one in which the blows were "countless."  ...

Fear was perhaps the primary strategy of mastery in the Roman slave system. In the corpus of late antique writings, no attribute was more often associated with slavery than fear. It was the most keenly felt element of the relationship.

"To fear is the symbol of slavery."

"Who does not know that the one who is a slave by nature and employed in a master's power cannot be without the emotion of fear?"

"To fear was in the nature of slaves."

"Nothing is more particular to slavery than the eternal fear."

Semper timere. We hear so much of this emotion because it was precisely what masters sought from their slaves.

"If a slave is under fear and the lash, and immediately trembles when anything is said to him by the master, lest he hear he is to be beaten, certainly the master rejoices in this situation."

Fear was a means of maintaining the constant labor and subjective annihilation demanded of slaves. Violence commuted into its potential, spread out into all corners of the relationship, tinged all interaction between masters and their human property.

Physical punishment was not the only means of corporal control over slaves, and psychological manipulation was not limited to the threat of violence. Perhaps nothing breaks down the strict dichotomy between pain and positive incentives like the use of food as a tool of domination in the Roman slave system.

With a few important exceptions, the use of hunger and the promise of dietary satisfaction have been terribly neglected by ancient historians. ..."

Thanks to modern genetics and/or AI we'll be so much more enlightened. Our android slaves will live to do our bidding - there will be little reason to starve them or beat them to a pulp.

Semper amare.

Isaac Asimov tried to do it with cognitive rules .. but emotions are so much more reliable.

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See also: "The Economics of Roman Slavery - Kyle Harper".