A theoretical model of slavery?

Over the course of this trip, we have seen many historical monuments and artifacts that would have taken many years and a large amount of man power to complete. We often look at things like this and say, "it's amazing the the Romans built that!" Well they didn't. Their slaves did. The Colosseum is no exception to this. It's size and history made it one of the most incredible places I've seen in my travels. I can only imagine the thousands of slaves it must have taken in order to create such an extravagant arena.

However, there is something important to distinguish when using the word slaves. In the US, we consider the term slave to be very different than some other cultures. Really there are two types of slavery: stick slavery and carrot slavery. In the southern US we primarily saw stick slavery; that is using physical force as the only way to get slaves to work. The Romans often used carrot slavery instead. Carrot slavery involves the use of wages as incentives in order for slaves to work harder. The ultimate goal of this being that some day they could buy their freedom. These wages, although next to nothing, provided a small incentive for slaves to continue to work towards their freedom and live normal lives. This was very interesting to me as I have always thought of alavery as a purely physical abuse type of labor.

Pictures to come when I fix my computer...