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Short description

Skilled with the sling from boyhood, these Helots were deployed in battle as skirmishers, tasked to harass the enemy phalanx with stones.

Description

The Spartan helots were conscripted for service in the armies of Sparta, serving their Spartiate masters as camp followers, porters, and labourers. In battle, they were deployed as skirmishers, tasked to harass the enemy phalanx with javelins and stones. Commoners who eked out a living as farmers and pastoralists were typically skilled with the sling from boyhood. The slingers wore only a simple tunic (chiton), with a sling and pouch for holding specially made lead bullets or shot, and perhaps a small knife or dagger. They were unable to withstand close combat for any length of time, lacking both proper arms and training.

Generally, Greek slingers used a long sling, and in war the ammunition was usually lead shot, weighing around 0.7-1.05 ounces (20-30 grammes) but occasionally up to 1.9 ounces (55 grammes). Xenophon reports that the lead shot of the Greek slingers easily outranged the stone shot of the Persian slingers. Livy mentions that Achaian slingers practised with seashore pebbles.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The Spartans conquered the southern Peloponnese in c. 950 BC, probably immigrating from north-western Greece, and they reduced the native population to one of two sharply distinct types of subjection. Some became helots, state-serfs, forcibly attached to particular estates. Other peoples became the perioikoi, the ‘livers-around’, peasants, fishermen, craftsmen, miners and traders, who led relatively free lives in their small towns and villages. In the eighth century BC the Spartans conquered neighbouring Messenia, and reduced its entire population to helot status (cf. Thucydides, 1.101); yet these ‘new’ helots retained some distinct features of their ethnic identity and desire for independence.

The helot-system made Sparta powerful and its citizens (Spartiates) formed a wealthy elite, a landed ruling class. But this system of dependant labour created the conditions of insecurity and permanent threat that forced the Spartans to transform most aspects of their state. These changes, which led to the creation of the classical Spartan economic, political and social systems, were attributed by most Greek authors to a single lawgiver named Lykurgos (cf. Herodotus, 1.65ff). ‘The single most important reason underlying all these changes was probably the perceived need to maintain control over a very large, and to a great extent permanently disaffected and cohesive, labour force, the helots, and above all, the Messenian helots. The result was that Sparta became more and more like an ‘armed camp’ of its citizens […]. In the sense that they had been able to remove themselves completely from the need to perform any productive labour, the Spartiates were, as their Athenian admirer Critias said, ‘the most free of all the Greeks’, as the helots were ‘the most enslaved’; but in the self-imposed discipline and homogeneity of their lives and culture such ‘freedom’ might seem intolerably constricting and repressive.’( N.R.E Fisher, Slavery in Classical Greece, Classical World Series, Bristol Classical Press, London, 2003, p. 24).

The relative numbers of Helots and Spartiates cannot be known with any accuracy, but at the time of the Persian Wars Sparta probably had only around 8,000 male Spartiates in all (Herodotus, 7.234). The population of subject helots and perioikoi must have numbered many tens of thousands. While the main function of helots was to serve as agricultural labour on the estates to which they were tied, they were also conscripted to serve as light-armed troops and attendants on Spartan military campaigns; Herodotus claims that the Spartiates were outnumbered 7:1 by their helots at the battle of Plataea in 479 BC (9.10, 28-29, 61, 80, 85).

In order to maintain their control over the helot masses, the Spartiates engaged in well-organised acts of terror and division – and on at least one occasion an organised massacre. Plutarch tells us of the Spartan custom of krypteia (‘secret operation’), which regularly ‘culled’ the helot population. Young Spartiates were sent into the countryside, and ‘at night they came down into the roads and slaughtered any of the helots they caught. Often too they journeyed into the fields and did away with the strongest and bravest of them’ (Plutarch, Lykurgos, 28). According to Aristotle, the Spartan ephors annually declared war on the Helots, thereby allowing Spartiates to kill them without fear of religious pollution. Even larger culls of the Helot population were organised by the Spartiates. In 425 BC some 2,000 helots were massacred in a carefully staged event: ‘The helots were invited by a proclamation to pick out those of their number who claimed to have most distinguished themselves against the enemy, in order that they might receive their freedom; the object being to test them, as it was thought that the first to claim their freedom would be the most high-spirited and the most apt to rebel. As many as two thousand were selected accordingly, who crowned themselves and went round the temples, rejoicing in their new freedom. The Spartans, however, soon afterwards did away with them, and no one ever knew how each of them perished’ (Aristotle, frag. 538 Rose = Plutarch, Lycurgus 28.7).

The Spartan elite ruled a slave state, a state that relied on the systematic maltreatment of the subjugated helots: degradation, demoralisation and reminders of permanent inferiority were the objective of these practices, such as the requirement that helots wear distinctive and inferior clothing, and be subjected to regular beatings even if they had done no wrong ‘so that they should never forget that they were slaves’ (Plutarch, Lykurgos, 29). In a celebrated passage, Thucydides stresses that ‘most Spartan institutions have always been designed with a view to security against the Helots’ (4.80.3). Aristotle compares them to ‘an enemy constantly sitting in wait of the disaster of the Spartans’ (Politics 1269 a 37-39). Thus, fear seems to be an important factor governing the relations between Spartiates and Helots. According to tradition, the Spartiates always carried their spears, undid the straps of their bucklers only when at home lest the Helots seize them, and locked themselves in their homes (Critias, Frag. B 37; see also Xenophon, Rep. Lac. 12, 4). They also took active measures, subjecting them to what Theopompus describes as ‘an altogether cruel and bitter condition’ (FGH 115 F 13). The Spartan treatment of the Helots was a kind of ideological warfare, designed to condition the Helots to think of themselves as inferiors.