helots

Sparta maintained a 10:1 ratio of helots to Spartans, and that was in the early iron age.

At least Helots got to live quasi-normal lives, keeping some of their produce, raising families, having homes.

Everything's easier when you have a class of helots around to push all the costs onto.

Even Helots (slaves from conquered enemies) usually lived materially richer lives than Spartans.

It's about as meaningful as claiming that Spartan aristocracy represented helots or Messenians.

It's like calling ancient Spartan oppression of helots racism, or the British discrimination against the Irish sexism, or South African apartheid transphobia; it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what those words mean.

The Spartan army at Thermopylae included helots, for example.

Are you comparing the ai ceos to helots?

Were there not helots with the Spartans too?

> no one should have to control some one, until they become a threat The Helots were a threat to Spartans.

> more like in ancient Sparta where avery many should be a hero You can't have a Sparta without the helots.

A lot of focus is placed on their extreme lifestyles while a lot less is placed on their massive community of slaves (helots) and their secret police to manage them.

But hey, you are the "Big Idea" people, the rest of us are little helots.

People are treated like helots and given more work, among other reasons, precisely because they "don't want to work for their leisure".

An adult male Spartan owned some land, which was farmed by Perioikoi or Helots, and he was responsible for providing his share of food to the barracks in which he lived, but he could not "profit", ever.

As for the Spartans and the Helots, isn't it interesting you have to go back 2000 years to a society of which very little is known?

The Spartan economy, operated by the Perioikoi and Helots, was strong enough, but it relied on there being a critical mass of adult male Spartans to maintain it.

Whenever I read about how black people were terrorised in the Southern US, the tactics used remind me of how the Spartans treated the Helots.