Epistemic Spot Check: This Isn’t Sparta
Conversation
This is well done!
I certainly openly admit to the one-sidedness of the This Isn't Sparta series - it was written on the assumption that the reader is already familiar with the hagiography Sparta often gets in the popular literature.
The main source for the rough outline of Athenian demographics (noted in your outline, not in your main) is M.H. Hansen, Demography and Democracy, but I've made some adjustments on my own. There's also a bit of Beloch in there, as always.
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On the helots, I'd say that the balance of the current scholarship tends towards 'oppressed slave class' as opposed to 'regular serfs' but there is range, both in thinking about treatment to thinking about degree of class-struggle (cf. Cartledge w/ Talbert on that second point).
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Yeah, this is one of those "it was obvious and explicitly said, and I still internalized it more after doing my own checking than before"
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