SPECIAL REALLY BETWEEN FREE MEN AND SLAVES?
There are at least two reasons why this debate matters. First, it has consequences for how we understand the ‘on the ground’ operation of Helotage. If one takes the serfdom view, then Helots, for all the ways in which they were oppressed, could at least enjoy a stable family life by being assigned to a single Spartan, living on his land in the secure knowledge that their families would not be broken up by gift or sale. If the Helots were slaves, then their prospect of an unbroken family life was not secure. Secondly, it matters for how historians of ancient Greece think about slavery. Was slavery in the Greek world basically like the system of slavery that existed in Athens, which relied on the slave trade to keep up numbers and drew on numerous non-Greek regions for its slave supply? Or was it far more diverse, with major structural differences existing at the regional level?
The debate over Helot status forms part of a wider trend in recent scholarship on Sparta that interrogates our sources to track change over time. In antiquity, it was a commonplace that Sparta’s package of distinctive institutions was the brainchild of Lycurgus, who at some early time rescued Sparta from a period of civil strife by introducing a new austere and disciplined system. This ‘Lycurgan’ system, so the story went, did not change over time (e.g. 63); periods of political misfortune at Sparta could therefore be explained by lapses from the strict discipline imposed by Lycurgus, as clearly presented in Plutarch’s , written around AD 100. Most of what most people think that they know about Sparta originates from this text. Plutarch also claims that each Spartan child was examined at birth by tribal elders and, if judged sound of limb, assigned a plot of state-owned land ( 16), of which there were 9000 ( 8), which would support him materially during his life as a citizen-warrior. Just as Plutarch claimed that the Spartan state owned the land, two late writers, Strabo (8.5.4) and Pausanias (3.20.6), working within a century either side of Plutarch, claimed that the Helots also belonged to the Spartan state. The natural conclusion that many modern historians arrived at from reading these sources was that a certain number of Helots would therefore have been assigned to the Spartan child to work on his state-owned plot of land. Another late author, Pollux, even claims that the Helots were between free men and slaves. Since neither land nor Helots were the private property of the Spartan to whom they were assigned, they could not be sold – hence the modern idea of thinking about the Helots as state-owned serfs.
