Bret Devereaux

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