Lower-class inhabitants of Laconia and Messenia far outnumbered their Spartan rulers, but we know very little about them aside from their relationship to the Spartans. For Greek history in general, far more is known about the upper class. Furthermore, even among the upper class, there is less evidence for women than for men. Like women elsewhere in Greece, and like upper-class Spartan women, their status and reputation probably depended largely both upon the property they possessed and upon the men with whom they were associated. For example, as we have seen in the upper class, the mothers of brave men were respected and the mothers and sisters of cowards were dishonored and shunned like the cowards themselves (see chap. 3). Unfortunately, neither ancient sources nor modern studies have made gender a defining category in discussions of the lower classes at Sparta. Hence this chapter is the shortest in the book.
More is known about helots than about any other non-Spartiates. Helots were Greeks living in Laconia and Messenia whom the Spartans had reduced to servitude early in the archaic period. They performed the work that slaves (and free people) performed in the rest of the Greek world. Moreover, because Spartans, unlike free people in the rest of the Greek world, were not trained to farm or engage in manual labor, helots were more essential to the Spartan economy than slaves were elsewhere.
Helots belonged to the state and could not be sold away from Sparta.1Unlike the families of slaves, whose liaisons had no legal status and who did not own their children, the families of helots were much less likely to be broken up by sale or testament, or by the caprice of an individual owner. They lived in family groups in houses designated for them.2More than one helot family was assigned to a kleros (country estate: Xen.Hell. 3.3.5).They farmed in Laconia and Messenia and were required to send a fixed portion of produce to the Spartan man to whom their kleros had been allocated.3 Helotage was fundamental to the kleros system, but because the entire system of land tenure at Sparta is not well understood and changed over time (see chap. 4), the details of helotry are not clear. It is reasonable to assume, however, that since Spartan women were landowners, they supervised the work of helots on their property, riding or driving out to visit them as men did (Xen. Hell. 3.3.5).
Helots also supplied domestic labor for Spartan homes.4 Xenophon’s comment on domestic weaving (see chap. 1) and Plutarch’s report on Timaea, wife of Agis II, indicate that female helots were included in this obligation.5 Plutarch (Ages. 3.1 = Duris FGrH 76 F 69) represents Timaea not only conversing with her female helots, but also trusting them enough to tell them that the child she was bearing had been fathered by Alcibiades, not by her husband. Since Agis was unsure about the child’s paternity, Timaea must have been having intercourse with both her husband and her lover in the same period of time. Because it is impossible to keep secrets from domestics, the helots must have known that she was having intercourse with both. Inasmuch as Timaea was the only person who actually knew who the child’s father was, she was probably using contraception during intercourse with her husband.
By the fourth century, with the rise of private property in Sparta, helots were thought (at least by some non-Spartan commentators) to belong to individuals and in some respects to be the equivalent of slaves. Thus Xenophon (Lac. Pol. 6.3) speaks of Spartans lending helots to other Spartans who needed them. At this time, there were probably slaves of non-helot origin in Sparta as well (see below).
There were several other categories of non-Spartiates living in Sparta. These included the perioikoi (dwellers about) who were free, but not citizens. They seem to have lived in poleis and had some sorts of civic organizations like other freeborn people in the Greek world beyond Sparta. Though some worked as farmers, the perioikoi as a whole shouldered a disproportionate share of craft and commercial endeavors, since Spartan men were trained to work only in the military and government,6 though, as we have mentioned, they did supervise their country estates. Perioikic men worked as craftsmen and merchants and did the jobs that male Spartans were not permitted to do. Perioikic men also served in the army, some holding positions of command. Presumably most perioikic women lived like other Greek women (but not like upper-class Spartan women), raising children, managing their households, and performing domestic labor in their own homes. Some probably worked in service jobs like baby nursing and prostitution (see below).
There were other free people at Sparta distributed in a number of categories that exceeded anything we know about social distinctions in any other Greek polis. This mass of people included helots who had been freed for performing good service (neodamodeis); mixed-blood members of the lower class who had been through the agoge and were elevated above the class they had been born into (mothakes); bastards born of helot mothers and Spartan fathers (nothoi: Xen. Hell. 5.3.9); and, at the top of these inferior ranks, those who had been born into citizen status but had been demoted for non-payment of the dues owed to their syssition (hypomeiones). 7 The men in all these categories were free and (with the exception of the neodamodeis) had been educated in the agoge, so they were able to undertake military service and thus compensate for the ever-dwindling supply of Spartiate men. Because they were Greeks and not foreign born, it was doubtless easier to grant them some social mobility. Thus, for example, helots might be given their freedom by the state in return for military service. We do not know if their wives were simultaneously liberated at all such occasions, but Thucydides (1.103.3) notes that after the helot rebellion in the 460s, rebels were free to leave Spartan territory, taking their wives and children. Helots could own private property and could purchase their freedom when the state offered them an opportunity.
Especially at times when the state needed funds, helots were encouraged to purchase their freedom at a set price,8 but we do not know if they had to pay for their wives as well, and whether the price was the same. Slaves in the rest of the Greek world also had opportunities to purchase their freedom, but they were not regarded as equals: the prices varied and had to be negotiated for each individual man, woman, or child.
Because precious metals and useful money did not circulate in archaic and classical Sparta, and because Lycurgus had imposed a strict moral regime, there was no prostitution (Plut. Lyc. 9.3).Non-Spartiates,however,were not subject to such a stringent discipline. Spartan women were forbidden to wear gold and cosmetics, but hetairai could adorn themselves.9 Before the end of the fifth century, patrons might surreptitiously use foreign money, but when large amounts of gold and silver began to be available to private citizens, prostitutes became more accessible. A few were notorious and wealthy.10 In 397, the ephors and some members of the Gerousia gave orders to Cinadon, who was suspected of fomenting a conspiracy, that he was to go to Aulon, a perioikic community in northwest Messenia on the border between Messenia and Elis, and bring back a particular woman reputed to be the most beautiful, for she had been corrupting Spartans of all ages who came there (Xen. Hell. 3.3.8). The Hellenistic geographer Polemon (fl. ca. 190) reports that he saw the bronze sculptures dedicated by the hetaira Cottina.11
After the death of his wife, Cleomenes took a freeborn woman of Megalopolis as his concubine (paidiske: Plut. Cleom. 39.2) She may have borne him a child, for he had one son by Agiatis (Plut. Cleom. 22.8), but more than one of his children accompanied his mother to Egypt and died there.12
Spartan nurses were highly praised. Plutarch (Lyc. 16.3), who was especially interested in the rearing and education of children, points out that Spartan nurses did not apply swaddling bands. They were famous for raising children to be happy, not discontented or finicky about their food or afraid of the dark or of being left alone. The devotion of a nurse who carried her ugly charge daily two miles uphill to the Menelaion so that Helen would make her beautiful is noteworthy (see Conclusion). For these reasons, foreigners sometimes acquired Spartan nurses for their own children. Plutarch uses oneomai (purchase), which indicates that the nurses could not have been helots, since helots were not sold to foreigners.13 Their status is not clear: the spotty evidence suggests that they were drawn from helots as well as from other groups of non-Spartiate women. In his comedy Helots,Eupolis mentions a special festival in which Spartan nurses participated.14 He might have heard about such an occasion from a Spartan nurse living in Athens. Plutarch notes that non-Spartans purchased Spartan nurses because of their care and skill, and goes on to report that Amycla, who nursed (tittheusasan) Alcibiades, was said to be a Spartan (Lyc.16.5, see also Plut. Alcib. 1.2). The participle refers to wet-nursing. An Athenian inscription of the fourth century commemorates Malicha of Cytheria, nurse (titthe) of the children of Diogeitus, an extremely righteous woman who came from the Peloponnesus. 15
Helots and other members of the lower classes shared the same religion with their masters. Shrines for the various gods have been found throughout Laconia and Messenia, presumably, for the most part, created for the use of the local inhabitants.16 Archaeologists have verified the existence of many religious sites described by Pausanias and others. Some women dedicated altars. The humble nature of their offerings indicates that they were not wealthy.17 A few religious occasions were directly connected with social status. Children’s nurses participated in the festival called Tithenidia in honor of Artemis. They brought boy babies to a temple for Artemis Corythalia by a river (see chap. 6). The nurses enjoyed a varied and sumptuous feast. In addition to the regular celebration of “The Cleaver” (kopis), which included the sacrifice of goats, and eating cakes, cheese, sausage, figs, and beans, they also sacrificed suckling pigs and bread, and celebrated by dancing and wearing masks.18
On the second day of the Hyacinthia, citizens offered dinner to everyone they knew, including helots.19 Dining together was a rite of inclusion expressing the solidarity of the entire population.20 Hierarchies were also temporarily dissolved, not only in dining, but also in the Spartan ceremonies of mourning for the king. When a king or other dignitary died, helots and their wives were obliged to mourn, and the women to wear black or suffer the death penalty Though the mourning was imposed, and may be the Spartans’ equivalent of the paid professional mourners found in Athens, it may also show that the helots were conceived of as members of the large fictitious Lacedaimonian family.21
The development of private property raises the question of the status of the doulai (slave women) whom Xenophon mentions in the Spartan Constitution (Lac. Pol. 1.4).Xenophon reports that Lycurgus thought that doulai were capable enough of producing clothing so that freeborn women could devote their energies to motherhood. In the archaic period, these doulai were doubtless helots; by the fourth century, they may also have been slaves whom Spartans purchased with their newly acquired wealth and who catered to their taste for luxury goods and conspicuous consumption. Helots belonged to the state, whereas slaves constituted part of the private property of the oikoi. Xenophon uses the word heilotes in other contexts,22 but he does not carefully distinguish between the two statuses when describing the women to whom the weaving was delegated in his time. Elsewhere in the Spartan Constitution (Lac. Pol. 6.3),Xenophon speaks of private property as including hounds, horses, chariots, and oiketai (household slaves). He died long after the battle of Leuctra and may have continued to work on the Spartan Constitution until after the emancipation of the Messenian helots.23 After the loss of part of Messenia, when the need for purchased slaves would have increased and there was money to buy them, there is a strong possibility that many of the women who worked in the Spartan household were slaves, though Laconian helots continued to be available.24 Accordingly, both statuses are possible in the fourth century and the Hellenistic period, at least until the helots were liberated in the time of Augustus.
Helots seem to have had no problem with reproduction, though there were constant forces depleting their number: Spartiates could kill them individually and en masse with impunity, and Athens offered asylum to those who rebelled. At any rate, they continually outnumbered their masters. Although there are no census figures for the helot population, there is some basis on which to compare the number of helots to Spartiates in three successive centuries. Among those who served at the battle of Plataea, helots outnumbered Spartans by at least seven to one (Herod. 9.28–29). Early in the fourth century, approximately 80 Spartiates and 4,000 others milled about in the Spartan agora (Xen. Hell. 3.3.5). In other words, the Spartans were outnumbered 50 to 1.The helot population at this time has been estimated at 170,000–224,000, including women.25 Around 240 B.C.E., some Spartans considered the helots too numerous (Plut. Cleom. 18.3).
As we have mentioned, helots lived on farms with their families, though we know little about them. In any case, there was no need to have single-sex dormitories with a bolt on the women’s door, as Xenophon describes for the slaves in the Oeconomicus (9.5), to prevent the males from gaining access to the females. Unlike slaves, whose numbers could be increased by purchase or conquest, helots themselves were the only source of the helot population and of other segments of the lower classes as well. It was essential for the Spartan economy that helots reproduce.26 Both men and women helots had a strong incentive to have as many children as possible, although they were constrained by their limited access to arable land. Since the men were constantly vulnerable to murder by the cryptoi (secret hunters [of helots]), and to being killed when they served in the Spartan army, for them there was strength in numbers. David Hume astutely observed that helots were the only ancient servile group to reproduce, and argues that this success was the result of their living apart and being public slaves rather than the property of individuals.27
Helots were subjected to what amounted to a kind of eugenics, or better, dysgenics, which the Spartans probably learned from breeding animals, and also understood in terms of the Greek belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The crypteia was instructed to kill the strongest men (Thuc. 4.80.3–4) so that those who were more servile and might be more easily domesticated would survive to reproduce. Nevertheless, helots served in the military. The wives and children they left behind doubtless were hostages for their good behavior.
Helots not only did work that was normally done by citizens in other Greek states, but they also were forced to become parents of half-Spartan children. Women were regularly used for this purpose: men perhaps only once. The Spartans exploited the reproductive capacity of helots to produce mixed-breed offspring who filled the lower niches of Spartan manpower. The story about the founding of Tarentum by children born of Spartiate women and helots is relevant here.28 More credible is the evidence for the inclusion of mothakes in Spartan manpower. The definition of mothakes is controversial, but they seem to have been children of Spartan fathers and helot mothers who were not reckoned as Spartiates but were free. Apparently, practical considerations outweighed theoretical eugenics in these arrangements. Xenophon (Hell. 5.3.9) reports that the bastards (nothoi) of Spartan men had experienced the benefits of the state and were fine-looking. This remark lends credence to the view that the helots and Spartans were not originally ethnically distinct, but that their statuses evolved as a result of political and economic developments. In any case, wealthy Spartan men reared mothakes alongside their legitimate sons, and they passed through the agoge together. The mothakes seem to have been given some modified form of citizenship if they completed the agoge. 29 Indeed, the generals Lysander and Gylippus were said to have been mothakes. The Lawcode of Gortyn, Crete, offers some examples of free children born of intercourse between serfs and free men and women.30 Therefore it is appropriate to ask whether Spartan women had liaisons with lower-class men, although, considering the sex ratio in the Hellenistic period and Greek reluctance to submit women to hypergamy, it is unlikely that Spartiate women were given in marriage to lower-class men (aside from the incident concerning the founding of Tarentum and the outrages perpetrated by Nabis [see chap. 4]). Lower-class female infants may have been subject to infanticide, since the deliberate production of babies of mixed parentage served primarily to create more soldiers to fill the Spartan ranks.31 Otherwise such women probably bore additional generations of children of mixed parentage.32 In any case, the use of helot women for the production of mothakes must have increased the rebelliousness of helot men, especially if the liaisons were the result of individual choice and longlasting, rather than brief encounters (like those in Spartiate husband-doubling) encouraged by the state.
There is no evidence for slave breeding in other parts of the Greek world.33 Hesiod (WD 602–3) advised the novice farmer to get a slave woman without a baby to nurse. Xenophon (Oec. 9.5–6) allows slaves to reproduce only as a reward for good behavior. Slave reproduction compromised productivity. Pregnancy and childbirth jeopardized the slave’s health or even her life, and the baby might not survive anyway. The Spartans were unique and innovative in exploiting the reproductive potential of servile women.
In sum, the Spartans, who were notorious for their innocence of business matters, had devised a reproductive calculus as early as the constitution attributed to Lycurgus. Even if several of the practices reviewed above and in chapter 3 were temporary, or not widespread, or invented in the Hellenistic period and attributed to Lycurgus, or part of the mirage, it is clear that Sparta served as a kind of laboratory for demographic ideas or actual experiments in which the state and private individuals made investments in order to reap dividends in the form of human capital.
1. Nino Luraghi,“Helotic Slavery Reconsidered” (paper delivered at the Celtic Conference in Classics, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Sept. 8, 2000), argues that they could be sold or lent within Sparta.
2. Diod. Sic. 12.67.4; Strab. 8.5.4 (365); Xen. Hell. 3.3.5.
3. The amount apparently varied through the centuries from one-half, according to Tyrtaeus 5 (quoted by Paus. 4.14.4–5), to the fixed amount described by Plutarch (see chap. 3 n. 8).
4. E.g.,Xen. Hell. 5.4.28 (attendants of Agesilaus); Xen. Lac. Pol. 7.5; Herod. 6.63 (attendants of King Ariston); Polyb. 4.81.7, 5.29.9 (attendants of King Lycurgus); and the mothakes who were raised in Spartan homes (see below).
5. For nurses, see below.
6. See further P. A. Cartledge, Sparta and Lakonia: A Regional History, 1300–326 B.C. (London, 1979), 182–85.
7. For additional categories including trophimoi and offspring of foreigners, and discussion of the definition of each status, see J. Ducat, Les hilotes, BCH suppl. 20 (Athens, 1990), 166–68. The definitions remain controversial; e.g., S. Hodkinson, Property and Wealth in Classical Sparta (London 2000), 198, 355–56, considers mothakes as sons of poor or demoted citizens.
8. According to Plut. Cleom. 23.1–5, to fill his war chest in 223 Cleomenes raised 500 talents by selling freedom to about 6,000 helots, charging five Attic minas per man.
9. Xen. Lac. Pol. 5.8; Plut. Lyc. 1.4.4;Athen. 15.686–67; Clement of Alex., Paid. 2.10.105.
10. On foreign coinage: Plut. Lys. 17.1–4,Ephorus FGrH 70 F 193, and see further G. L. Cawkwell, “The Decline of Sparta,” CQ 33 (1983), 385–400, esp. 395–96.
11. Athen. 574c–d and see chap. 6 n. 70.
12. Plut. Cleom. 38.3. See further G. Marasco, Commento alle biografie Plutarchee di Agide e di Cleomene, 2 vols. (Rome, 1981), vol. 2, 589, and chap. 4, above.
13. On the status of Spartan nurses, see most recently Valerie French,“The Spartan Family and the Spartan Decline,” in Polis and Polemos, ed. C. Hamilton and P. Krentz (Claremont, Calif., 1997), 241–73, esp. 260–61, where French suggests that though most Spartan nurses were slaves or helots, they may also have been freeborn women of lower status (hypomeiones).
14. See chap. 6 n. 15.
15. IG II3.3111. For the date: Kaibel, Epigr.Graec., p. 17, no. 47.
16. On the continuity of religion in Messenia even after liberation from Spartan rule, see Thomas J. Figueira, “The Evolution of the Messenian Identity,” in Sparta: New Perspectives, ed. S. Hodkinson and A. Powell (London, 1999), 211–44, esp. 229.
17. M. N. Tod and A. J. B. Wace, Catalogue of the Sparta Museum (Oxford, 1906), p. 21; p. 63, no. 427; p. 69, no. 528; pp. 70–71, no. 546; p. 74, no. 618.
18. Athen. 4.139a–b, citing Polemon (Preller, pp. 136–40, para. 56); Hesych. s.v. koruthalistriai 3689 and s.v. kurittoi 4684 (Latte); and see further M. Pettersson, Cults of Apollo at Sparta: The Hyakinthia, the Gymnopaidiai, and the Karneia (Stockholm, 1992), 14–17.
19. Polycrates (before 1st cent. b.c.e.) = FGrH 588 3B F 1 = Athen. 4.139f, who mentions douloi (slaves) not helots; but this was an old custom and probably included helots. In Plut. Am. narr. 775d–e, Spartan women dine with oikeioi (see chap. 6).
20. See further Pettersson, Cults of Apollo, 18.
21. Tyrtaeus fr. 5;Herod.6.58.2 (perioikoi and helots). See further Sarah B. Pomeroy,Families in Classical and Hellenistic Greece (Oxford, 1997), 51.
22. F. W. Sturz, Lexicon Xenophonteum, 4 vols. (1801, repr. Hildesheim, 1964), vol. 2, s.v.
23. Chap. 14,which is critical of Sparta and seems to undermine much of the treatise, may have been written after Leuctra.
24. Ducat does not discuss Lac. Pol. 1.4, but in Les hilotes, 21 n. 9 and 46, he argues that Xenophon uses douloi and oiketai indiscriminately of slaves and helots.
25. P. A.Cartledge, Agesilaos and the Crisis of Sparta (London, 1994), 174, and personal communication Oct. 16, 1999.
26. See further M. Whitby, “Two Shadows: Images of Spartans and Helots,” in The Shadow of Sparta, ed. A. Powell and S. Hodkinson (London, 1994), 87–125, esp. 110.
27. “Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations” (1742), in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (Oxford, 1963), 381–451, esp. 393.
28. See chap. 2 n. 44.
29. Phylarchus, FGrH 81 F 43 = Athen. 6.271e–f.
30. R. F. Willetts, The Law Code of Gortyn, Kadmos supp. 1 (Berlin, 1967), p. 15 and cols. VI.55–VII.2.
31. Thus C. J. Tregaro,“Les bâtards spartiates,” in Mélanges Pierre Lévêque, ed. M.-M.Mactoux and E. Geny (Paris, 1993), esp. 37–38.
32. Thus D. Ogden, Greek Bastardy (Oxford, 1996), 223.
33. See further Sarah B. Pomeroy,Xenophon, Oeconomicus: A Social and Historical Commentary (Oxford, 1994), 297–300.