The latest advances in the study of ancient Sparta demolish assumptions held for centuries. According to recent historical and archaeological research, Spartan society came to be compartmentalized into five categories during the classical period. At the top of the estate were the espacatas, citizens with full rights.
These, in reality, called themselves the hómoioi, the “pairs”. With this they not only sought to signify that they were equal to each other, but to connote that the others were not. Only they could participate in citizen assemblies and hold public responsibilities. The famous hoplite infantry, the agogé (the Spartan education system) and the sisithias (the characteristic collective banquets for men), all these institutions were led exclusively by homoioi.
In return, the Spartans had to help maintain that order. They did it in a very specific way. They delivered a monthly quota of food. For this, each “pair” owned a parcel, the kleros. The helots, the slave labor at the base of that society, took care of their planting, care and harvest.
But, apparently, the equality between the homoioi was more theoretical than apparent. In the Peloponnesian kingdom, there would have been neither much egalitarianism in land ownership nor tight public control in ensuring that this was the norm. Nor would there have been a Spartan differential factor with respect to the rest of Greece in this case.
The kleros, the plot of each citizen, would have been privately owned and disposed of freely. In this, Sparta would have resembled the other polis, not as has usually been told. Furthermore, this was not a late phenomenon, since the legendary redistribution of land ordered by Lycurgus, a figure of increasingly dubious historicity, would not even have taken place.
The lots, on the other hand, would not have been of a similar size from one spread to the next. Its dimensions would have varied significantly since time immemorial. Regarding the intervention of the State, more surprises: it was conspicuous by its absence. Although the citizens could not sell the properties, as has been traditionally commented, they were empowered to leave them to their children or other heirs. In short, there never seems to have been any exactly the same kleroi assigned at birth and prohibited from alienation under strict institutional supervision.
This irregular and free distribution of land gives meaning to the unbalanced concentration of wealth that was observed after the Peloponnesian and Corinthian wars. If at the beginning of the Medical wars, a century before, or the beginning of the V a. C., there were about eight thousand homoioi, in the first third of the IV a. C., their number had dwindled to less than a thousand.
This was due to the gradual formation of a landed oligarchy. This would have become rich enough to compete in the very expensive chariot races and, furthermore, to establish links and share interests with magnates from remote regions, both Hellenic and the Persian Empire. Archaeological evidence attests to this, from celebratory epigraphic stelae of triumphs to dedications in distant temples and sanctuaries, as well as in praise of wealthy citizens, written by Lacedaemonian poets.
The Spartans, who apparently vanished throughout that century, did not really disappear: they became impoverished. The less fertile, worse located or poorly irrigated plots would have diminished from generation to generation. The decline of their owners would have been aggravated by not being able to carry out convenient marriages and being forced to limit their progeny. Increasingly excluded from decision-making circles to do good business, they ended up being prevented from contributing to the sisitia, with which they lost their rights, including citizenship.
The unfortunate ones went on to swell, thus, the category of hypomeions, the “inferior” ones. To these outcasted homoioi to a greater or lesser extent, depending on each case, other marginalized from the ruling class were added. Among them, the offspring of the exiles, those convicted of serious offenses and the Spartans who had not completed the agogé, the educational system.
Their situation was quite ambiguous: they were unable to participate in the important community banquet, but, at the same time, they continued to keep their kleros, including the helot farmers who worked it. The “inferior” did not lose their place in the army either, although they could be relegated to subordinate units. However, their awkward position in society meant that these degraded Spartans were sometimes posted to distant colonies, such as those in Asia Minor.
The periecos, the non-Spartan free population of Laconia and Mesenia, traditionally less studied, have also benefited in recent years from advances in their knowledge. They were much more integrated in Sparta than previously thought. They shared with the Spartans a clear identity, that of Lacedaemonians. This collective word, which was the official name of the kingdom, included both groups without distinction.
Textual sources of the time, such as the Athenian historian Thucydides, also confirm the deep rapport between “peers” and “peripherals”. Two international projects have come to endorse the close affinity between the homoioi and the perioikoi. This is an ambitious multidisciplinary investigation by the Polis Center in Copenhagen and the archaeological mission in Geraki, ongoing since 1995, led by the University of Amsterdam, active at this site twenty-six kilometers from Sparta until the interruption due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
According to his information, the polis of the Periecos would have been highly autonomous, true city-states, although, in the last instance, they owed allegiance to the Sciatic capital. The perioikoi would not only have been in charge of cottage industries, trade and other lucrative tasks, proscribed for the hómoioi. They would also have had their main socioeconomic foundation in agricultural activities, such as the “peers”, including the corresponding helot laborers. This, in addition to being able to freely manage their trades and religious festivals and, likewise, the most popular aspect of the Spartans: their very famous dedication to war.
Much less sympathy was shown to the Peloponnesian kingdom by the helots. Very understandably. Well, these descendants of the locals subjected by the invading Dorians who founded Sparta made up its long-suffering servants.
Conventionally, helots were viewed not as privately owned, tradeable slaves, but rather as a Greek version of medieval serfs. That is to say, as workers rooted, immovably, in the plot they tilled. As a singular Spartan twist, the property of these did not correspond to a lordship or its lords, but to the polis.
In the traditional account, the existence of a great oppressed mass, distributed throughout Laconia and Messinia, would have forced the Spartans to develop a militarized state, controlled inch by inch. However, recent research dismantles these and other theories.
According to the comparative analyzes of the new technologies, most of the texts of the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. C., that is, the classics, refer to the Spartan serfs as privately owned, not publicly owned, although the polis often influenced the fate of these labor forces.
Another habitual notion that collapses is that of the apparent homogeneity of helotism. Already in Antiquity it was pointed out that helots could own goods, from coins to boats. Now, in addition, it is being considered that the tribute in kind that they paid periodically to the Spartans has not been completely abusive. It would have been estimated at half of what was harvested for the owner of the kleros and the other half for his worker.
Had this been the case, those helots in charge of more fertile lands would have been able to accumulate surpluses for their benefit. Since they used to stay on the same lot for generations, their children and grandchildren would have continued to thrive on that site. Which, over time, would have singled out some Helot families over others.
Because the Spartan regime was so convenient to these leaders of their community, they would have worked to maintain it. This very plausible sequence would have led, as current researchers defend, to the novelty that the Spartan domain of the helots could have been supported by collaborationists.
This would have occurred, above all, in remote regions, where, without the voluntary cooperation of some natives, the prolonged hegemony of the Hómoioi cannot be explained. Reinforcing this thesis, in the 2000s a series of archaeological evidence of very dissimilar helot settlements was found. The helots of the far west, distant and perhaps intermittently supervised, could have organized themselves with greater autonomy.
Another surprise of a new kind reveals that under the hegemony of the Hómoioi, a Messenian identity would never have taken shape, sufficiently consolidated for the helots to make an effort to reverse the imposed order. The most notable exception was the revolt of 460 BC. C. However, it ended up deflated due to the departure of many of its actors abroad. In addition to having been directed, another novelty, by disgruntled parakeets and not by helots.
As has been considered for some time, the Spartans could have found an escape valve to alleviate inter-ethnic tensions in their town. In this sense, they began to enlist helots in exchange for their freedom. This experiment produced such good results that it led to the founding of entire columns of neodameis, “new citizens,” or manumitted helots, in the first decade of the following century.
The relationship between the Spartans and their slaves was as complex as it was nuanced, as reality usually is. But its proven features overturn the idea of ??the famous helot threat. With which also falls the main argument of the permanent state of alarm in which, for conventional historiography, the “peers” would have lived to keep their servants at bay.
Theses like this and others increasingly accepted in the academic world decaffeinate the typical militarized image of Sparta. It’s more. For Stephen Hodkinson, director of the Center for Spartan and Peloponnesian Studies at the University of Nottingham, one of the current references in the matter, “the Spartans themselves were so little concerned about their daily security that, although outnumbered, they lived their daily lives unarmed.”
They took routine precautions, of course, but it doesn’t seem any more so than other slave cops. It was not, therefore, any perpetual regime of terror, nor the consequent barracks society, but another Sparta, quite similar to the rest of Greece. At least, that is known so far in a science, like all, in constant rewriting.
This text is part of an article published in number 643 of the Historia y Vida magazine. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at redaccionhyv@historiayvida.com.
