=The Helots.=—­The Helots dwelt in the cottages scattered in the plain and cultivated the soil.  But the land did not belong to them—­indeed, they were not even free to leave it.  They were, like the serfs of the Middle Ages, peasants attached to the soil, from father to son.  They labored for a Spartiate proprietor who took from them the greater part of the harvest.  The Spartiates instructed them, feared them, and ill treated them.  They compelled them to wear rude garments, beat them unreasonably to remind them of their servile condition, and sometimes made them intoxicated to disgust their children with the sight of drunkenness.  A Spartiate poet compares the Helots to “loaded asses stumbling under their burdens and the blows inflicted.”

=The Perioeci.=—­The Perioeci (those who live around) inhabited a hundred villages in the mountains or on the coast.  They were sailors, they engaged in commerce, and manufactured the objects necessary to life.  They were free and administered the business of their village, but they paid tribute to the magistrates of Sparta and obeyed them.

=Condition of the Spartiates.=—­Helots and Perioeci despised the Spartiates, their masters.  “Whenever one speaks to them of the Spartiates,” says Xenophon,[62] “there isn’t one of them who can conceal the pleasure he would feel in eating them alive.”  Once an earthquake nearly destroyed Sparta:  the Helots at once rushed from all sides of the plain to massacre those of the Spartiates who had escaped the catastrophe.  At the same time the Perioeci rose and refused obedience.  The Spartiates’ bearing toward the Perioeci was certain to exasperate them.  At the end of a war in which many of the Helots had fought in their army, they bade them choose those who had especially distinguished themselves for bravery, with the promise of freeing them.  It was a ruse to discover the most energetic and those most capable of revolting.  Two thousand were chosen; they were conducted about the temples with heads crowned as an evidence of their manumission; then the Spartiates put them out of the way, but how it was done no one ever knew.[63]

And yet the oppressed classes were ten times more, numerous than their masters.  While there were more than 200,000 Helots and 120,000 Perioeci, there were never more than 9,000 Spartiate heads of families.  In a matter of life and death, then, it was necessary that a Spartiate be as good as ten Helots.  As the form of battle was hand-to-hand, they needed agile and robust men.  Sparta was like a camp without walls; its people was an army always in readiness.

EDUCATION