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Updated: June 18, 2025
Now these same Helots, though forced into the field by the arbitrary authority of the chieftains under whom they hewed wood and drew water, were in general very sparingly fed, ill dressed, and worse armed.
Heading the search, I pretended to catch a glimpse of the goatskin ever and anon through the trees, and I stayed not the pursuit till night grew dark, and I judged the victim was far away." "And he escaped?" "He did. The crypteia ended. Three other Helots were slain, but not by me. Nay, it may be that I have loved them better than the Dorian."
Pausanias will be recalled perhaps his life endangered." "Endangered!" echoed several voices. "Yes. What is that to you what care you for his danger? He is a Spartan." "Ay," cried one; "but he has been kind to the Helots." "And we have fought by his side," said another. "And he dressed my wound with his own hand," murmured a third. "And we have got money under him," growled a fourth.
From these strangers the Imperial geographer has accurately distinguished a domestic, and perhaps original, race, who, in some degree, might derive their blood from the much-injured Helots.
In the year B.C. 461 their capital was visited by an earthquake which laid it in ruins and killed 20,000 of the citizens. But this was only part of the calamity. The earthquake was immediately followed by a revolt of the Helots, who were always ready to avail themselves of the weakness of their tyrants. Being joined by the Messenians, they fortified themselves in Mount Ithome in Messenia.
As for Lykurgus, whose city was clear of strangers, and whose land was "unstinted, and with room for twice the number," as Euripides says, and who above all had all the Helots, throughout Lacedaemon, who were best kept employed, in order to break their spirit by labour and hardship, it was very well that his citizens should disdain laborious handicrafts and devote their whole attention to the art of war.
Those men who bore the burden and heat of the day were, the girl knew, helots now, but there was in them the silent vigor and something of the somberness of the land of rock and forest they came from, and a time would come when others would work for them.
This district had been given by its Lacedaemonian owners to the expelled Aeginetans to inhabit, in return for their good offices at the time of the earthquake and the rising of the Helots; and also because, although subjects of Athens, they had always sided with Lacedaemon.
To books, then, I betake myself, to books, "the immortal children" of "the understanding, courage, and abilities" of the wise and good, ay! and to inane, drivelling, doting books, the bastard progeny of vanity and ignorance, books over which one dawdles in an amusing dream and pleasant spasm of amazement, and which teach us wisdom as tipsy Helots taught the Spartan boys sobriety.
A conflict between the negroes and the planters in modern times may not be unanalogous to that of the helots and Spartans; and it is often a fatal necessity to extirpate the very men we have maddened, by our own cruelties, to the savageness of beasts.
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