Bret Devereaux

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