As I mentioned in my previous post, this week I’m working on a bit of my introduction in which I explain why I will not be considering helots in my study of manumission. On the one hand, this move is not particularly controversial. In her book on Greek manumission, Rachel Zelnick-Abrmovitz excludes all mentions of helots. On the other hand, it is worthwhile to ask why bother separating these two groups, especially in light of two phenomena that quickly become apparent when reading the ancient texts:
1) The Greeks themselves were hazy on the distinction between slaves and helots and frequently referred to helots as slaves.
2) When the Spartans needed more manpower, they consistently freed a number of helots in order to help them fight.
My reply to these two main points is generally as follows:
1) The Greeks were hazy on a lot of things, but that didn’t mean the distinction wasn’t important.
2) The Spartans only ever freed helots under threat of war as the evidence currently bears out. As far we know, the Spartans never freed the helots without extreme duress.
I’m also going to focus on two pieces of evidence that as I far as I can tell tend to get overlooked in the discussion of helots:
A) There is at least one testimony that the Spartans enslaved helots in order to sell them (Pausanias 8.51.3). This procedure obviously suggests that the helots were distinct from slaves. There are some problems with this bit of evidence as it is again of a time in crisis in Sparta (though to be fair, pretty much after 370/69 BCE Sparta was always in crisis). It is also possible that the writer, Pausanias, is being a bit sloppy.
B) There is evidence that the Spartans owned slaves in addition to helots.
I have two distinct but related arguments for making this case.
B1) In some sources, for example Xenophon’s Spartan Constitution, he uses a number of Greek words normally reserved for slaves (douloi, oiketai, 1.4, 6.3, 7.5). Now we could simply assume that Xenophon means helots, but elsewhere in the essay Xenophon does use the word helot elsewhere in this essay.
B2) For a long while modern scholars assumed that in Archaic and Classical Sparta, the government had complete control over all property, most especially the distribution of land. This view has always had problems, the most basic being that there are a number of pieces of evidence for the existence of rich Spartans, for example Spartan who won chariot races. This is a good example because chariot races required one to own four horses. Owning four horses requires that you feed those horses, which in turn suggests that there were Spartans who had the land and the labor to work that land in order to create food to feed those horses. Modern confusion over Spartan property arouse because the ancient Spartans were themselves confused. The Spartans had a legendary law-giver named Lycurgus, to whom they credited a number of practices, including their penchant for oral rather than written laws. Over time one of the Spartans, and other Greeks, assigned to Lycurgus the idea that the Spartan state should have complete control over how to divide up land. This idea eventually became so popular that in the third century BCE a Spartan king, Cleomenes, actually made it law. This proposal did not last long, but it lasted long enough that it was easy for both the Spartans and those who studied them to assume that it was how they had organized their property for many centuries.