The helots and the krypteiaεἵλωτες

Sparta's citizens could spend their lives training for war because someone else grew their food. That someone was the helots: a whole conquered population, bound to the land, handing over half of every harvest. They far outnumbered their masters, and the Spartans never forgot it. Each year, according to Aristotle, Sparta's magistrates formally declared war on them, so that killing a helot would not stain a Spartan with blood-guilt.

Half of every harvest

The helots were not bought and sold like slaves elsewhere in Greece. The Spartans treated them as a kind of public property: they lived in their own families on the land of Laconia and Messenia, and worked it for Spartan masters. Most of them, Thucydides says, were descendants of the Messenians enslaved of old, a neighbouring people conquered in the eighth and seventh centuries BC. The poet Tyrtaeus, who composed songs for Sparta during the second of those wars, described what conquest meant for them.

How many?

Debated among scholars Herodotus says that at Plataea in 479 BC the five thousand Spartans in the army were attended by thirty-five thousand light-armed helots, seven to each man. Whether that ratio held at home is unknown, but ancient writers assume that the helots greatly outnumbered the citizens, and modern estimates agree that they did.

Fear

Thucydides, writing of 424 BC, makes an observation that explains much of Spartan life.

He follows it with the worst story he tells about Sparta. The Spartans announced that helots who had served them best in war should come forward to be freed. About two thousand did.

Debated among scholars Thucydides gives no date for the massacre, only that it happened before 424. How the two thousand died, as he says himself, no one ever knew.

The krypteia

The krypteia, the "secret service", is described very differently by different ancient writers.

Ancient tradition / legend Plutarch, drawing on Aristotle, says that the magistrates sent out the most promising young men with daggers and a little food. By day they hid; by night they came down to the roads and killed any helot they caught, and they sometimes walked through the fields killing the strongest workers.

In Plato's Laws, by contrast, a Spartan describes the krypteia only as a hard training in endurance, going barefoot in winter, sleeping without blankets, roaming the countryside by night and day. Plato says nothing about killing.

Debated among scholars Modern historians still argue over what the krypteia was: a rite of passage for young Spartans, a form of terror against the helots, or something that changed from one to the other over time. Plutarch himself doubted that it went back to Sparta's lawgiver Lycurgus.

The hatred went both ways

In 399 BC a Spartan called Cinadon plotted a revolution. An informer told the magistrates how Cinadon had described the mood of Sparta's underclasses, helots among them.

Revolt and freedom

After a great earthquake in the 460s BC the helots of Messenia rose and held out for years on Mount Ithome. They were finally freed in 369 BC, when the Theban general Epaminondas invaded the Peloponnese and refounded Messene as a free city. Sparta never recovered its old power.

1. 8th–7th c. BCSparta conquers Messenia; its people become helots.
2. 479 BCAt Plataea, Herodotus counts seven helots for every Spartan. Debated among scholars
3. 460s BCAfter an earthquake the Messenian helots revolt and hold Mount Ithome.
4. Before 424 BCTwo thousand helots, promised freedom, disappear.
5. 399 BCThe conspiracy of Cinadon.
6. 369 BCEpaminondas frees Messenia and refounds Messene.