Burns essentially asks, “can’t we just draw a box around the spartiates and assess them on their own?” And what I hope the proceeding analysis has shown is that the answer is: no, you can’t. The helots and the brutality the Spartan state inflicts on them are integral to the system – they can’t be removed. Without helot labor, there is effectively no Spartan economy and no agricultural production to support the spartiate class’s leisure. The brutality is the vital tool of maintaining those laborers in a state of slavery, without it, the system cannot “function” in its abominable way. Without the helots, Sparta’s military power collapses – not only because of the loss to the spartiates, but also because the helots seem to make up large forces of light infantry screens.
And in sheer numerical terms, the helots were Sparta. If we want to talk about drawing boxes, the box we ought to draw is not around the spartiates, but around the helots. The helots so decisively outnumber the spartiates that any assessment of this society has to be about the quality of helot life (which is terrible). To draw boxes as Burns wants would be like putting a box around Jeff Bezos and declaring that America was the first all-billionaire society. In actual fact, American millionaires represent roughly the same percentage of America as the spartiates represent of Sparta, roughly six percent.
This is a fundamental flaw in how we teach Sparta – in high schools and in college. We teach Sparta like it was a free citizen society with a regrettable slave population that, while horrific, was typical for its time – something more like Rome. But it wasn’t: Sparta was a society that consisted almost entirely of slaves, with a tiny elite aristocracy. The spartiates were not the common citizens of Sparta, but rather the hereditary nobility – the knights, counts and dukes, as it were. We should as soon judge 17th century France by the first two estates as judge Sparta only by the spartiates.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part II: Spartan Equality”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-23.
June 22, 2022
QotD: Sparta without the helots could not have existed
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