Bret Devereaux

I should point out first of all that this series is really good overall. It's well-read, incisive and funny. It's really helpful to see someone make an informed assault on a massive pop-history chimera. Kudos &c. But. 2/

The other piece of pushback I've heard on this series was @BretDevereaux 's characterization of Spartan slavery as worse than their contemporaries'. Do you have any thoughts on that?

That is based on direct explicit claims by ancient authors, so it is in principle unassailable. The question is whether we want to quibble over whether some forms of enslavement are more bearable than others (I don't).

On this point, I was mostly concerned to dismantle the frequent argument that helotry was somehow not 'real' slavery. Once the basic abhorrence of helotry is established, the demographics of Sparta do the remaining work...

...a society that is anywhere from 66% (Figueira's figures) to 85% (my own working estimate explained in the giant caption on the Sparta box chart) brutalized enslaved people - that is a pretty uniquely bad society.

I actually struggled to find any point of comparison. South Carolina - the least free U.S. state in 1860 - was 57.2% enslaved (only two states prior to the civil war had majority enslaved populations, S. Carolina and Mississippi).