The common view of Sparta is of a society divided between
the wealthy, politically privileged (albeit underfed, cowed yet brutal etc.
etc.) Spartiates, and the oppressed, helpless, despised helots. As I have noted
in earlier entries, this ignores the vitally important role of perioikoi, but
today I wish focus on helot society, particularly the fact that it too was
highly differentiated. Not all helots were equal – nor equally miserable.
Historical sources make reference to helots in a variety of
positions. First and foremost, of course, the helots worked the land. But
helots also played a – singularly undefined – role in the Spartan army. Helots
accompanied the Spartan army to Plataea, for example, and they were ordered to
set fire to the sacred wood after the battle of Sepeia. These army helots
appear to be a collective body under the command of the king, not the
individual attendants of Spartan rankers. But each Spartan hoplite did,
apparently, also have a helot body servant to look after his kit and help him
arm. We hear too of “Lacedaemonian” wet-nurses being highly valued, and finding
service as far away as Athens, where such a nurse allegedly breast-fed the
ultimate Athenian aristocrat Alcibiades. While not explicitly a helot, it is
hard to imagine a Spartiate or even perioikoi woman taking a position that was
usually held by a chattel slave. The same is true of hereditary “town-criers,
flute-players and cooks” listed by Herodotus (The Histories: 6:60). Because all these functions were important to
the army, I have argued elsewhere that they were not despised professions, but
it is unclear whether the jobs were filled by perioikoi or helots; either interpretation
is possible. Last but not least, although not explicitly mentioned, implicit in
a highly civilized society with a very tiny elite such as Sparta, were people
doing all the menial tasks necessary to keep a developed but still
non-mechanized society functioning. In short, helots most likely did all those
tasks done by chattel slaves in the rest of the ancient world. Someone in
Lacedaemon built roads, dug ditches, cleaned latrines, quarried stones and
extracted ore from mines etc., and I think it is safe to assume that these jobs
were done by helots.
As we look closer at helot society, let’s remember that
rural helots retained a substantial fixed portion (probably 50%) of the produce
of that land they worked. Allegedly, at the time of Lycurgus’ Great Reforms,
there was one adult male helot on each kleros, who tilled the land for the
benefit of himself and the Spartiate “master.” Officially, neither the
Spartiate nor the helot actually owned the land, which belonged to the state.
Both were hereditary “tenants.” As long
as there is only one male heir to each tenant, such a system is more or less
sustainable indefinitely. Unfortunately, however, human demographics do not
produce perfect replacement and even in countries with primogeniture (such as
medieval England) families die out in the male line on average every three
generations. Without primogeniture, however, an excess of heirs rapidly reduces
a family to penury. To avoid these consequences, societies evolve inheritance
and marriage laws to regulate the distribution of wealth over generations.
Stephen Hodkinson in his excellent study Property and Wealth in Classical Sparta
(London, 2000) traces the impact of inherence laws on the concentration of
wealth in Spartiate society, but helots were not land-owners and could not buy
or sell land. Rather, they were transferred with the land from one Spartiate
owner to another. Still, the ancient
historians tell us that some helots were wealthy enough by the end of the 5th
century to buy their freedom. In short, the accumulation of wealth – albeit not land – was clearly
possible even in helot society. Some helots were definitely richer than others.
But how?
The key to understanding this is again demographics. Unlike chattel slaves in the rest of Greece,
helots had family units. In consequence,
the sexual relations and off-spring of helots were not controlled by their
masters for their own purposes, but developed more naturally. In Athens and elsewhere, the off-spring of
slaves were unwanted extra mouths to feed (that also reduced the concentration
and working life of a female slave) and so intercourse between slaves was
prevented to the extent possible. The fact that it was not always possible to
prevent slave women from getting pregnant would not have worried slave-owners
unduly because in ancient Greece it was common to expose unwanted
children – even the legitimate children of citizens. The unwanted children of chattel slaves
would therefore simply have been left to die. And if a slave became superfluous after infancy, it was still easy to dispose of them by selling them on international market. Unwanted Athenians slaves,
therefore, could end up in Persia, Egypt or Italy. In short, Athens did not suffer from a growing slave population, because control of the population was in the hands of the slave-owners, who could keep the slave population under control effectively by the above methods
In Lacedaemon, in contrast, Spartiates could not sell helots
outside of Lacedaemon, and furthermore helots lived in family units. As
everywhere else on earth where families exist, fathers took pride
in at least their male off-spring. Male
children were therefore nourished and raised to adulthood to the extent
possible. Most probably, female children received less attention, food and affection (if
the evidence of societies across the globe is any guide), but enough girls
survived to adulthood to ensure survival of society. Thus, we can hypothesize a growing
helot population from the age of Lycurgus (whenever that was) to the classical
period – that fateful age when the helot population outnumbered the Spartiate
population many times over (though probably not more than serfs outnumbered
noblemen in Medieval Europe, by the way.) This is an important dynamic that
explains why the imbalance between Spartiate and helot populations was so much
greater than the imbalance between the Athenian citizen and slave populations.
This simple demographic fact may also explain why helots,
who could not acquire land as their Spartiate masters clearly did, would have
become poorer over generations. After all, if all the
descendants of the original helot tenant of a kleros were tied to the same plot
of land, then a finite plot of land would have been required to sustain entire
clans rather than just one nuclear family by the time two hundred years had
passed. In short, each individual would have been much poorer than his
ancestor. While there may have been
a general tendency toward impoverishment, it was clearly not the fate of all
helots or there would have been no wealthy helots able to buy their freedom,
and no one doing all the other jobs noted above.
Instead, it appears that some form of voluntary or
involuntary primogeniture ensured that only one man had the status of
“tenant-in-chief” on each kleros. He
might have many children and many sons, but he had only one “heir.” If there
were no sons, then very likely a son-in-law became the “tenant-in-chief,” and
if there were no surviving children at all, the kleros was “vacant” and the
Spartan state had to find new tenants from a pool of available helots.
In the more common case of a man having more than one son,
the non-heirs (most likely the younger sons) would have been “free” to pursue
their fortune elsewhere. As the property
of the Lacedaemonian state, of course, helots could not leave Lacedaemon, but
to my knowledge there is no reason to think they could not hire themselves out
within the boundaries of Lacedaemon.
Thus younger sons who were lucky or particularly clever
might have been apprenticed to learn a craft scorned by the wealthier perioikoi
and prohibited to the Spartiates. Through apprenticeship to those that had
taken this path before them, they could have become tanners and tinkers,
cobblers and coopers, masons and dyers. As a master craftsman, able to retain
100% of their earnings, these helots would have been in a position to found
families, build houses and accumulate wealth. Meanwhile, young men unable or
unwilling to embark on such a slow, hard career, probably had the option of
hiring out for wages to the Spartan army or state, or to individuals. Thus they
could have become the personal attendants to Spartan hoplites, or worked
directly for wages as teamsters and mule-drivers for the Spartan army or as
construction workers or bath attendants, gardeners and repairmen for the
Lacedaemonian government. Helot girls
unable to find husbands would, like the daughters of the poor in every society
across the globe over the last three thousand years, have found work as nursemaids
and housemaids, waiting on the women and children of those better off than
themselves.
In other words, helot society was more complex than
Spartiate society. On the land there would have been at least three classes of
helots. There would have been
“tenants-in-chief” on the prosperous estates of wealthy (even royal)
Spartiates, who retained a large portion of significant revenues from the
fertile land. Such helots would probably have been able to build substantial
dwellings and to hire domestic help and additional labor when necessary (harvest
etc.) without dividing up the inheritance and so keeping it in tact. They would probably have lived better than
many free men in other societies. (A good example of this pattern is the
wealthy serfs of southwest England who built houses hardly distinguishable from
the manors of the gentry.) At the same
time there would have been helots on poor, run-down or marginal estates that --
like their Spartiate masters -- were constantly on the brink of failure. Very
likely, Spartiate masters living in fear of losing their citizenship or barely
able to make agoge fees were harsh masters, constantly trying to squeeze more
from the kleros or looking for ways to cheat the helots out of their
share. Finally, at the bottom of rural
society would have been the itinerant agricultural workers without homes of
their own, who sold their labor by the day or hour,
But, as I pointed out above, helot society was not
exclusively rural. Here too there would
have been different strata of helots living very different life-styles. Many helots, younger sons and sons of
landless fathers, who were unwilling or unable to learn a craft would have made
a living as unskilled workers, some as attendants to Spartiates others as laborers for the Spartan state and
army. Such helots probably lived in
barracks, on their employer’s estates, or in small rented rooms, and would have
formed a kind of urban proletariat similar to poor craftsmen in Athens and
elsewhere.
However, there would also
have been skilled craftsmen with workshops and stores. While some of these might have barely scraped
by, living in miserable slums or dark attic rooms rented from their more
prosperous neighbors, others – as anywhere on earth – would have had a talent
for business and trade. Exceptional craftsmen would have been able to charge
more for their goods or might have found other ways to make money. These would have been
able to afford apprentices and even slaves of their own. The more they had, the
easier it would be for them to accumulate wealth by investing and lending. Such
men, like the privileged “tenants-in-chief” on the kleros, would have lived in
comparative luxury and would later be in the position to buy their freedom.
In short, in addition to the oppressed, abused and miserable
helots familiar to every student of Sparta, there were also large numbers of
comparatively well-off helots, who enjoyed considerable freedom, a reasonable
standard of living for their age, and were far from discontented with their lot
in life. These helots were what enabled
the Spartan state to function so well throughout the archaic age.
