Bret Devereaux

The biggest thing I think the post can't really convey is the range of uncertainty in the population estimates and the way those estimates get generated. demography for ancient Greece is in a lot rougher spot, evidence wise, than for Roman Italy. 1/18

In Roman Italy, we have some 'fixed points' - preserved census data - to bicker about, so the basic outlines of reasonable estimates (sorry High Counters, I still love you, but you are wrong) have been set for decades. Greece has none of that. 2/18

So you can estimate from the one set of reliable numbers we do have - citizen army deployments (e.g. Beloch), but that just clues you into citizen numbers. You can estimate from 'carrying capacity' - how many people can the land support... 3/18

But first, that's hard to calculate (and there are all sorts of problems with just assuming 19th century Greece is a good proxy, as is often done) and second, some areas we know to have been above capacity (Athens) and other were probably below it. 4/18

To top it off, the field tends to be 'downstream' of the same debates for Roman Italy, which leads to importing a lot of Roman assumptions about farm productivity, etc (in part because the evidence for Roman agriculture is much better). 5/18

That's not to say this scholarship is bad, just that it is hard by nature. I try to give some sense - in my super-sized captions - to the range of estimates that might exist. 6/18

What I do want to stress is that there is no feasible estimate where the helots don't outnumber the Spartiates by at least something like 4:1. I think the real number is higher - the low estimates don't take into account helots with non-grain-farming jobs. 7/18

So while Greek demography is still very much a guessing game and you can make the figures say *almost* anything you want, you cannot make them say that Sparta has anything like a typical labor distribution. 8/18

On helot life - I suspect there will be Sparta-bros arguing with me on this eventually - 'oh it wasn't that bad.' I think this argument runs afoul of two sets of logical contradictions. The first is the exceptionalism of Sparta: 9/18

Taking out all of the cruel things Sparta does in our sources renders it a largely unexceptional Greek oligarchy, no more worthy of praise or admiration than Tegea or Elis or a dozen other poleis you've never heard of. 10/18

The second contradiction is in the treatment of the sources: if our - generally pro-Spartan - sources do not know, do not understand, or are not honest about Spartan customs, why on earth would we believe their praise of the Spartan system? 11/18

I saw this line with the agoge - "Oh, the agoge wasn't that bad." Ok, then it was boring, unexceptional and uninteresting Greek education? "Oh no, it was the coolest, bestest Greek education." But the only thing exceptional about it was *how bad it was.*" 12/18

That's practically the sum total of evidence we have about it! The same is true for the helots. There's no way to sanitize this society without reading the helots out of it, which is why that is exactly what treatment after treatment does. 13/18

Or else the violence of what is being related in the sources is covered over with bloodless phrasing - one textbook "the system of helotry...the only polis with an economic system totally dependent upon geographical and social distance between landowners and workers" 14/18

(Points for those who guess which commonly used college textbook that quote is from). But - no mention of the murders, the violence, the cruelty. And no undergraduate is going to know enough to realize that "social distance" here means "Gulag-esque brutality" 15/18

We need to be honest about this society. And if that turns some stomachs - GOOD. It should turn some stomachs - even if you think it achieved equality for the citizens who sat atop their mountain of brutalized slaves. And, to be clear, it didn't. 16/18

This post, of all of these posts, I most want to find its way into the hands of high school world history teachers everywhere - just because their state-mandated textbook ignores the helots doesn't mean they have to. 17/18