Bret Devereaux

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