Chapter 7. Freedom for the Messenians? A note on the impact of slavery and helotage on the Greek concept of freedom Kurt A. Raaflaub 1 In 371 the Thebans defeated a Spartan army at Leuctra and destroyed the myth of Spartan invincibility. [1] In the winter of 370/69 Epameinondas led […]
Chapter 6. The Dorianization of the Messenians Jonathan M. Hall It is an axiom of recent scholarship that the primordial and essential identity proclaimed by an ethnic group may often be a recent and illusory fiction, forged in the context of—and in response to—precise historical circumstances, but this view was actually […]
Chapter 5. The imaginary conquest of the Helots Nino Luraghi In a previous paper, I have questioned the idea that the Helots who worked the land of the Spartiates in Laconia and Messenia were the descendants of free populations who had occupied those areas before the Dorian conquest of Laconia and […]
Chapter 4. Agreste genus: Helots in Hellenistic Laconia Nigel M. Kennell In the aftermath of the battle of Leuctra, Sparta lost a third of its territory, comprising over half its arable land, and the majority of its helots. While their fellows west of Taygetus soon established a free state, Laconian helots, […]
Chapter 3. Conquerors and Serfs: Wars of Conquest and Forced Labour in Archaic Greece Hans van Wees In many parts of the Greek world, the typical agricultural labourer was neither a free man nor a slave, but something in between. The Greeks, for once, did not have a word for it, […]
Chapter 2. Raising hell? The Helot Mirage—a personal review [1] Paul Cartledge The first instalment of Larry Gonick’s idiosyncratic and insufficiently known Cartoon History of the Universe, entitled “From the Big Bang to Alexander the Great”, was published in the dynamic year of 1989. In one particularly teasing cartoon a sexy […]
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Acknowledgments This volume originates from a workshop held at Harvard University on March 16-17, 2001. The majority of the essays in this book were there presented for the first time, in some cases in a significantly different form from that assumed in the end. In an attempt at countering the isolationist tendencies […]
Contributors Benjamin Acosta-Hughes is Assistant Professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Michigan. He specializes in Archaic and Hellenistic poetry, and in the translation of erotic epigram. His publications include Polyeideia—The Iambi of Callimachus and the Archaic Iambic Tradition (Berkeley 2002). He is currently writing a book on the Hellenistic […]
Figures Figure 1: Charioteer by Polyzalos. Delphi Museum. Fifth century BCE. Photo: courtesy of the Greek Archaeological Receipts Fund. Figure 2. Artemision Horse and Jockey. Second century BCE. Athens, National Museum, Br 15177. Photo: G. Hellner. Courtesy DAI Athens 1980/59 (height of jockey 84 cm; length of horse 250 cm). […]