The Spartan Mirage: Helots, Landowning Women and the Collapse at Leuctra

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The French classicist François Ollier called it the Spartan mirage: an idealized picture of Lacedaemon written almost entirely by outsiders, since no Spartan accounts of Sparta survive. Set in the Eurotas valley of Laconia between Mount Taygetus and Mount Parnon, Sparta had no city walls, and Thucydides noted that its ruins would never suggest a great power. Its society had three tiers: the Spartiates, full citizens barred from any productive work; the perioikoi, free non-citizens who handled trade and made weapons; and the helots, mostly conquered Messenians who farmed for the Spartiates and outnumbered them by as much as seven to one. After an earthquake in the 460s BC the helots revolted, and the Spartans spent years crushing it.

Fear of the helots shaped everything. Boys entered the agoge at seven, men ate in a mess of about 15, and husbands lived in barracks until 30. Spartan women were educated, ate the same rations as boys, married later and could inherit, eventually holding at least 35 percent of the land. Because citizens who could not pay their mess dues lost their status, numbers fell from about 9,000 to under 1,000. In 371 BC Epaminondas of Thebes won at Leuctra and freed the Messenian helots, and the system collapsed.

• Excavations of the Apothetae chasm have found adult remains but no infants.
• Each autumn the ephors declared war on the helots so young men of the krypteia could kill strong or capable ones without religious pollution.
• The come back with your shield or on it saying is probably an invention, since Spartans buried their dead near the battlefield.
• The princess Cynisca won the Olympic chariot race twice.
• Under Rome, Sparta built an amphitheater so tourists could watch boys flogged at the altar of Artemis Orthia.