SOURCE: Cartledge, Paul. “Helots and Perioikoi.” In Sparta and Lakonia: A Regional History 1300-362 BC., Second Edition, pp. 138-68. London: Routledge, 2002.

In the following excerpt from his monograph originally published in 1979, Cartledge studies the class system of ancient Sparta and its relationship to labor, agriculture, and land, concentrating on the social and economic status of the Helots and Perioikoi.

I

Plato had occasion to remark that the Helots afforded the subject for the liveliest controversy in Greece; the remark was noted and repeated some six centuries later by the learned Naucratite Athenaios. The controversy was not of course conducted primarily on the moral plane, for the number of Greeks who argued that slavery was not merely not in accordance with nature but actually contrary to it and wrong was small; slaves found a place even in some of the literary utopias which envisaged a general liberation from backbreaking...