{"id":69265,"date":"2022-04-30T01:00:08","date_gmt":"2022-04-30T05:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=69265"},"modified":"2022-04-29T08:40:57","modified_gmt":"2022-04-29T12:40:57","slug":"qotd-the-position-of-helots-in-spartan-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2022\/04\/30\/qotd-the-position-of-helots-in-spartan-society\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The position of helots<\/em> in Spartan society"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>… helots<\/a><\/em> made up not only a simple majority of the human beings living under the Spartan state, but in fact a huge super-majority. For comparison, about a third of the population of the American South in 1860<\/a> was held in slavery and we rightly<\/em><\/strong> call that a “slave society”. Societies where an absolute majority of persons are held in slavery are extremely<\/em><\/strong> rare, but Sparta’s massive super-majority of enslaved persons is \u2013 to my knowledge \u2013 unique in human history.<\/p>\n

We are very poorly informed about the helots. Our snobbish sources … are, for the most part, singularly uninterested in them, so we’re left putting together a patchwork of information. That in turn leads into situations where students of ancient Greece can can up with the wrong impression if they don’t have all<\/em> of the sources in mind (we’ll see this is a common trend with Sparta \u2013 reading just<\/em> Xenophon or just<\/em> Plutarch can be deeply misleading).<\/p>\n

First, let us dispense with the argument, sometimes offered, that the helots<\/em> were more like medieval serfs than slaves as we understand the ideas and thus not really<\/em> slaves \u2013 this is nonsense<\/strong>. Helots<\/em> seem to have been able to own moveable property (money, clothing etc), but in fact this is true of many ancient slaves, including Roman ones (the Romans called this quasi-property peculium<\/em>, which also applied to the property of children and even many women who were under the legal power (potestas<\/em>) of another). Owning small amounts of moveable property was not rare among ancient non-free individuals (or, for that matter, other forms of slavery).<\/p>\n

No, what legally<\/em> separated helots<\/em> from douloi<\/em> (chattel slaves in most Greek societies) was that they were slaves of the Spartan state<\/em> rather than of individual Spartans \u2013 this had nothing to do with any sense of greater freedom they might have had. Indeed, Plutarch relates the saying that “in Sparta the free man is more free than anywhere else in the world, and the slave more a slave<\/strong>” (Plut. Lyc<\/em>. 28.5). He can only be referring to the helots<\/em> here. Indeed, Plutarch’s statement is telling \u2013 the helots<\/em> were treated poorly by the standards of ancient chattel slavery<\/em>, which is, I must stress, an incredibly<\/em><\/strong> low bar. Ancient societies treated enslaved people absolutely horribly<\/em> and yet somehow the helot<\/em> lot was commonly thought worse.<\/p>\n

But the final word on if we should consider the helots<\/em> fully non-free is in their sanctity of person: they had none, at all, whatsoever<\/strong>. Every year, in autumn by ritual, the five Spartan magistrates known as the ephors<\/a><\/em> declared war between Sparta and the helots<\/em> \u2013 Sparta essentially declares war on part of itself<\/em> \u2013 so that any spartiate<\/a><\/em> might kill any helot<\/em> without legal or religious repercussions<\/em> (Plut. Lyc<\/em>. 28.4; note also Hdt. 4.146.2). Isocrates \u2013 admittedly a decidedly anti-Spartan voice \u2013 notes that it was a religious, if not legal, infraction to kill slaves everywhere in Greece except Sparta<\/em> (Isoc. 12.181). As a matter of Athenian law, killing a slave was still murder<\/em> (the same is true in Roman law). One assumes these rules were often ignored by slave-holders of course \u2013 we know that many such laws in the American South were routinely flouted. Slavery is, after all, a brutal and inhuman institution by its very nature. The absence of any taboo \u2013 legal or religious \u2013 against the killing of helots<\/em> marks the institution as uncommonly brutal not merely by Greek standards, but by world-historical standards.<\/p>\n

We may safely conclude that the helots<\/em> were not only enslaved persons, but that of all slaves, they had some of the fewest protections \u2013 effectively none, not even protections in-name-only.<\/p>\n

But what do the helots<\/em> do?<\/p>\n

The answer is mostly “they farm” but getting more specific than that get sticky fast. But we may try to keep this brief: helots<\/em> were enslaved agricultural laborers. Helots<\/em> were owned not by individual spartiates<\/em>, but by the Spartan state, where they were assigned \u2013 through whatever method we do not know \u2013 to work the plots of land (kleroi<\/a><\/em>, see above) assigned to the spartiates<\/em> who, as noted above, were forbidden from engaging in any kind of productive labor. The helots<\/em> seem to have lived in their own villages and settlements \u2013 no great surprise, as the Messenian helots<\/em> seem to have been far more numerous than the Laconian ones and the spartiates<\/em> themselves did not live in Messenia in any great numbers. It does seem that the Messenian helots<\/em> were gathered in a smaller number of nucleated villages rather than split up as farmsteads, probably to make it easier for the small number of spartiates<\/em> stationed there to keep watch on them. And they seemed to have produced not only simple cereal staples, but the full range of agricultural products: wheat (Xen Lac<\/em>. 5.3 \u2013 we’ll come back to this), barley, grapes and wine, figs, olives and olive oil, cheese, textiles (wool) and animal products, including meat and fish.<\/p>\n

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part II: Spartan Equality”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry<\/em><\/a>, 2019-08-23.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

… helots made up not only a simple majority of the human beings living under the Spartan state, but in fact a huge super-majority. For comparison, about a third of the population of the American South in 1860 was held in slavery and we rightly call that a “slave society”. Societies where an absolute majority […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,1526,7,41],"tags":[1457,262,605,1151],"class_list":["post-69265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-greece","category-history","category-quotations","tag-bretdevereaux","tag-culture","tag-slavery","tag-sparta"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-i1b","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69265"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69265\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73316,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69265\/revisions\/73316"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}