We are not told that spartiates men rape helot women, but it takes wilful ignorance to deny that this happened. First of all, this is a society which sends armed men at night into the unarmed and defenseless countryside (Hdt. 4.146.2; Plut. Lyc. 28.2; Plato, Laws 633). These young men were almost certainly under the normal age of marriage and even if they weren’t, their sexual access to their actual spouse was restricted. Moreover (as we’ll see in a moment) there were clearly no rules against the sexual exploitation of helot women, just like there were no laws of any kind against the murder of helot men. To believe that these young men – under no direction, constrained by no military law, facing no social censure – did not engage in sexual violence requires disbelieving functionally the entire body of evidence about sexual violence in combat zones from all of human history. Anthropologically speaking, we can be absolutely sure this happened and we can be quite confident (and ought to be more than quite horrified) that it happened frequently.
But we don’t need to guess or rely on comparative evidence, because this rape was happening frequently enough that it produced an identifiable social class. The one secure passage we have to this effect is from Xenophon, who notes that the Spartan army marching to war included a group he calls the nothoi – the bastards (Xen. Hell. 5.3.9). The phrase typically means – and here clearly means – boys born to slave mothers. There is a strong reason to believe that these are the same as the mothakes or mothones which begin appearing with greater frequently in our sources. Several of these mothakes end up being fairly significant figures, most notably Lysander (note Plut. Lys. 2.1-4, where Plutarch politely sidesteps the question of why Lysander was raised in poverty and seemed unusually subservient and also the question of who his mother was).
We’ll get to the Spartan free-non-citizen-underclasses next week when we talk more about the Spartan manpower shortage, but for now, I just want to underline and bold something very clearly here: there was so much spartiate rape of helot women in Sparta that it created a significant, legally distinct underclass. And, just so we’re clear: yes, I am classifying all of that contact as rape, because sexual consent does not exist in master-slave relationships where one human being has the literal power of life and death over the other human being and her entire family. We may suppose that some helot women, trapped in this horrific and inhuman circumstance, may have sought out these relationships – but that does not change the dynamics of violence and compulsion permeating the entire system.
To recap quickly: poor peasant life in ancient Greece was already hard for anyone. Women in farming households had difficult, but extremely important jobs for maintaining themselves, their families and their society. To these difficulties, the Spartan state added unnecessary, callous and brutal conditions of poverty, malnutrition, violence, murder and rape.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part III: Spartan Women”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-29.
July 26, 2022
QotD: The nothoi class of Sparta
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