The Contribution of Helots
Their labor made helots valuable to the Spartans. Laconian and Messenian
helots alike primarily farmed plots of land that the state had originally
allotted to individual Spartan households for their sustenance. Some helots
also worked as household servants. By the fifth century, helots would also
accompany Spartan hoplite warriors on the march to carry their heavy gear and armor. In
the words of the seventh-century B.C. poet Tyrtaeus, helots worked
“like donkeys exhausted under heavy loads; they lived under the
painful necessity of having to give their masters half the food their ploughed land
bore.”1 This compulsory rent of fifty percent of everything produced by the
helots working on each free family's assigned plot was supposed to amount
to seventy measures of barley each year to the male master of the household and twelve
to his wife, along with an equivalent amount of fruit and other produce. In all, this
food was enough to support six or seven people. The labor of the helots
allowed Spartan men to devote themselves to full-time training for hoplite warfare in
order to protect themselves from external enemies and to suppress helot
rebellions, especially in Messenia. Contrasting the freedom of Spartan citizens from
ordinary work with the lot of the helots , the later Athenian Critias
commented “Laconia is the home of the freest of the Greeks, and of the most
enslaved.”
