Bret Devereaux

well we think it happened is the point. Slaves could have been a lower %. Single shot guns were sufficiently superior that slave owners preferred them to spears. revealed preference is the key here.

They literally couldn't have been for the reasons I already mentioned: spartiates are legally barred from engaging in farming, but own most of the land, and require helots to farm that land in order to eat.

In any event, your assumption that a society couldn't push over 50% enslaved is just obviously, comically false. Haiti was 89% enslaved prior to its revolution and had been that was for decades before it produced the eventual successful revolt.

Right but in Haiti's case it needed guns and it failed. I'm not saying Sparta is impossible. More likely the healots weren't treated as badly and were more like a medieval peasant those ratios were enormous as well

Again, you are presuming the efficacy of guns in a firearms context is greater than the efficacy of contact weapons in a context without firearms and that just isn't correct. By way of example, finding themselves in a non-firearms environment dealing with being massively...

...outnumbered, Spanish conquistadors found their swords&pikes far more useful than their matchlock firearms & relied on contact weapons over missile weapons. On this point, see J.F. Guilmartin, "The Cutting Edge" in K.J. Andrien and R. Adorno, Transatlantic Encounters (1991).

wondering what Russian peasant ratios were as well. In pitched warfare I do not doubt Spartan spears crushed rebellions, captured slaves and maintained order, that isn't my point.

I'm considering the average day to day life where 50 slaves overwhelm 1 slave owner. It happened in the South and if the treatment was bad enough would have happened in Sparta