Sparta Was Not a Paradise for Women

It is extremely common for people who write about ancient history on the internet to claim that ancient Sparta was, by ancient Greek standards, a paradise for women. I’m frankly sick and tired of this narrative because it is, in many ways, deeply misinformed. It is, of course, dangerous to overgeneralize, but I would argue that a randomly selected woman of unspecified social status in Athens would actually be far more likely to be happy than a similarly selected woman in Sparta.

It’s true that Spartiate women (i.e., women who belonged to the Spartan citizen class) generally had more freedom and privileges than women of the citizen class in most other Greek poleis (i.e., city-states). Nonetheless, life for Spartiate women wasn’t nearly as good as it is often made to sound. Their rights were still severely limited and the rights that Spartiate women had that women in other Greek poleis lacked were actually fairly normal for women in other ancient civilizations, such as Egypt and Rome.

Furthermore, the popular discourse around Sparta almost always completely omits mention of the fact that the overwhelming majority of all women in Sparta were enslaved helots, for whom life was almost certainly an absolute living Hell. While all Greek poleis had enslaved people, in Sparta, they made up a vastly larger share of the overall population than in any other polis and they were notoriously ill-treated, even by ancient Greek standards. Helot women were forced to do an overwhelming amount of manual labor, they lived in constant fear of being whipped or murdered by the krypteia, they were kept perpetually starving and malnourished, people they loved were constantly dying, and many of them were regularly being raped.

A note about sources

Before I say anything else, I feel I should clarify that the surviving ancient sources about life for women in ancient Sparta are particularly problematic. For one thing, nearly all the ancient Greek sources that have survived to the present day were written by men who were at least relatively well off in terms of wealth and social status. There are a few female authors whose writings have survived in significant fragments, such as Sappho of Lesbos (lived c. 630 – c. 570 BCE) and Korinna of Tanagra (fl. c. fifth century BCE), but these authors’ works are fragmentary and they tell us very little about Sparta.

Another problem that applies to Sparta specifically is the fact that very little writing by Spartan authors has survived. As I discuss in this article I wrote in January 2021, there are significant surviving fragments of the poems of two famous Spartan poets: Alkman (fl. c. mid seventh century BCE) and Tyrtaios (fl. c. late seventh century BCE). These poems provide us with some important information, but they can only tell us so much, since they are fragmentary, they come from a very early period of Spartan history, and their authors were both men.

There were other Spartan writers in antiquity whose works have not survived to the present day. Notably, there was a female Spartan poet named Megalostrata. She was a contemporary of Alkman, but nothing she wrote has survived to the present day in any form and her existence is known solely from a reference to her in a fragment of Alkman’s own poetry. There was also a Spartan historian named Sosibios who lived in the third century BCE, but nothing he wrote has survived either.

ABOVE: Third-century CE Roman mosaic depicting the famous Spartan poet Alkman

The vast majority of everything we know about Sparta comes not from the people who actually lived there, but rather from what foreigners wrote about it. You might think that these foreign authors would be prejudiced against Sparta, but, in most cases, it’s actually the opposite; they’re mostly Sparta-obsessed fanboy aristocrats who try to paint an overly glorious portrait of the society they so fanatically adored.

Of the foreign sources about Spartan society that are at our disposal, the most important is probably the Athenian historian Xenophon (lived c. 430 – c. 354 BCE), who was good friends with many prominent Spartans, including the Spartan king Agesilaos II and may have actually lived in Sparta for some time. Xenophon wrote a treatise titled On Spartan Society in which he talks about Spartan life as he viewed it quite extensively, praising Sparta as a model utopia. He also wrote a history of the Greek world known as the Hellenika, in which he talks about Sparta, and a biography of Agesilaos II.

Another important source is the Greek Middle Platonist philosopher, biographer, and avowed Lakonophile Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – after c. 119 CE). He lived in Greece during the time of the Roman Empire, many centuries after Sparta was at its peak, but he had access to older sources written during the Classical Period that have since been lost and he wrote extensively about Sparta using information derived from those sources, which he often cites.

ABOVE: Photograph from Flickr of a bust of the ancient Athenian historian Xenophon that is now held in the Bibliotheca Alexandrina Antiquities Museum in Alexandria, Egypt

Things Spartiate women weren’t allowed to do

Now that we’ve briefly noted the kinds of sources we’re working with, let’s talk about Spartiate women, who, if you remember from earlier, were women belonging to the citizen class. Contrary to the impression that some people might receive from all the hype about Sparta as a supposed haven for women’s rights, the rights of Spartiate women were still highly restricted.

Like women in other Greek poleis, Spartiate women were legally prohibited from taking part in any of the official processes of the Spartan government. They could not take part in meetings of the apella (i.e., the assembly of all male Spartan citizens over the age of thirty) and they were forbidden from holding any form of public office. Spartiate women almost certainly exerted some political influence, but any influence they had was behind the scenes and not through official, legal channels.

Also like women in other Greek poleis, Spartiate women were officially subject to the authority of their husbands. As we’ll talk about in a moment, they did have more freedom and independence than most women of the citizen class in other Greek poleis, but this freedom was not unlimited. Spartiate husbands could force their wives to do or not do certain things.

Finally, all Spartiate men of military age were legally required to fight in battle on behalf of the polis, but all women were forbidden from doing likewise—even if, for some reason, they desired to do so. (As I discuss in this article from February 2021, this was the case in most civilizations.) Military service, of course, is not something that I suspect most ancient women probably would have been likely to volunteer for, but it was seen as a vital part of active citizenship in the polis, so women’s exclusion from the military was another aspect of their exclusion from the full rights of citizenship.

ABOVE: Detail from Wikimedia Commons of a probable Spartan hoplite depicted on the Vix Krater, dating around 500 BCE. Spartiate women were not allowed to be soldiers.

Spartiate women and freedom of movement outdoors

All this being said, Spartiate women generally did have more freedoms and privileges than women of the citizen class in most other Greek poleis. Notably, Spartiate women seem to have been allowed greater freedom of movement.

Literary sources written by elite male Athenian authors make it sound as though it was considered shameful for an Athenian woman of the citizen class to even go outside the home unless it was for a religious occasion. In Euripides’s tragedy The Trojan Women, which was first performed in Athens in 415 BCE, the character Andromache describes leaving the house as the thing that brings the greatest shame upon women, saying, as translated in lines 666–677 of Diane Arnson Svarlien’s translation:

“I made an effort, when I lived with Hektor,
to practice wise restraint in every way
a woman can. I avoided, first of all,
the thing that causes a bad reputation
(whether or not blame is fixed on women):
when a woman doesn’t stay indoors.
I set aside my longing, and I stayed
at home. I did not open the palace doors
to women and their clever talk; instead
my own mind was my guide—a worthy teacher.
I kept a quiet tongue and placid eye
around my husband.”

In reality, however, this was more of an ideal than a realistic standard, since only women belonging to the very wealthiest of Athenian families could have realistically avoided leaving the home.

The vast majority of Athenian women would have needed to leave the home on a regular basis in order to fetch water from the well and buy goods in the agora because they would not have had enough enslaved people to do all these tasks for them. In many cases, even the literary sources acknowledge this. Notably, the philosopher Aristotle (lived 384 – 322 BCE), who lived in Athens for many years as a metoikos (i.e., resident foreigner), mentions in his Politics 4.1300a that no one can keep the wives of poor men from leaving the home.

There is also significant evidence to suggest that many women in Athens—not necessarily women of the citizen class, although perhaps including some of them—actively worked outside the home in order to raise a livable income.

It’s also worth noting that, as Jeffrey Henderson discusses in his article “Women and the Athenian Dramatic Festivals,” which was published in 1991 in the journal Transactions of the American Philological Association, Vol. 121, pp. 133–147, all our best evidence strongly indicates that Athenian women of the citizen class could and did attend Athenian dramatic festivals. This means that, ironically, Andromache’s speech from The Trojan Women that I just quoted—the one about how it is supposedly shameful for women to leave the home—was almost certainly meant to be delivered in front of a public audience that included women.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of Side A of an Attic red-figure pelike painted by the Pan Painter dating to between c. 480 and c. 470 BCE, depicting a woman working as a street vendor

For Spartiate women, on the other hand, the expectation of staying indoors does not seem to have existed at all. In fact, Xenophon states in his On Spartan Society 1.3–4 that Spartiate women were required to participate in mandatory outdoor physical exercises and hold athletic competitions. He writes, as translated by Richard J. A. Talbert:

“Other Greeks require girls to be sedentary—like the majority of craftsmen—sitting still and working wool. But then how should girls brought up like this be expected to bear any strapping babies? In [the mythical Spartan lawgiver] Lykourgos’s view by contrast clothes could be produced quite adequately by slave women, whereas in his opinion the production of children was the most important duty of free women. So in the first place he required the female sex to take physical exercise just as much as males; next he arranged for women also, just like men, to have contests of speed and strength with one another, in the belief that when both parents are strong their children too are born studier.”

It’s worth emphasizing that Xenophon makes it sound like these outdoor exercises are mandatory, meaning how much you’d enjoy it as a Spartiate woman might depend somewhat on how much you enjoy physical exercise outdoors and participating in “contests of speed and strength.”

We’ll come back to some of the things Xenophon says in this passage about Spartiate women bearing children in a little bit.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a bronze statuette of a girl wearing a Spartan-style dress running, perhaps in a footrace, dating to between c. 520 and c. 500 BCE, originally found in Prizren, currently held in the British Museum in London

Spartiate women and land ownership

Another advantage that Spartiate women definitely had over Athenian women is land ownership. Women in most ancient Greek poleis, including Athens, could own small amounts of property and engage in small trades without the approval of their male guardians, but they could not legally own land in their own names. Quite unusually, however, women in Sparta could own land in their own names. Aristotle expresses shock and dismay in his Politics 2.1270a at just how much of the land in Sparta was owned by women. He writes, as translated by H. Rackham:

“But, as was also said before, errors as regards the status of women seem not only to cause a certain unseemliness in the actual conduct of the state but to contribute in some degree to undue love of money. For next to the things just spoken of one might censure the Spartan institutions with respect to the unequal distribution of wealth.”

“It has come about that some of the Spartans own too much property and some extremely little; owing to which the land has fallen into few hands, and this has also been badly regulated by the laws; for the lawgiver made it dishonorable to sell a family’s existing estate, and did so rightly, but he granted liberty to alienate land at will by gift or bequest; yet the result that has happened was bound to follow in the one case as well as in the other.”

“And also nearly two-fifths of the whole area of the country is owned by women, because of the number of women who inherit estates and the practice of giving large dowries; yet it would have been better if dowries had been prohibited by law or limited to a small or moderate amount. . .”

“But as it is he is allowed to give an heiress in marriage to whomever he likes; and if he dies without having made directions as to this by will, whoever he leaves as his executor bestows her upon whom he chooses. As a result of this, although the country is capable of supporting fifteen hundred cavalry and thirty thousand heavy-armed troopers, they numbered not even a thousand.”

We must bear in mind, however, that, when we look at the broader ancient world, women being able to own land in their own names was not at all a uniquely Spartan phenomenon. While this phenomenon was indeed highly unusual in the Greek world, but it was not especially unusual in the ancient world at large. Notably, Egyptian and Roman women could legally own land in their own names. Sparta really only looks good here in comparison to other Greek poleis.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of land along the Eurotas River near Sparta. By the fourth century BCE, Spartiate women owned much of the land in Sparta.

Spartiate marriage: a mixed bag

Spartiate marriages are a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, fans of Sparta are correct to point out that Spartiate women generally tended to marry at a more mature age than Greek women in most poleis.

Girls in most Greek poleis were usually forced to marry when they were in their mid-to-late teenaged years, usually to men who were much older than themselves. Aristotle writes in his Politics 7.1335a that the best age for a woman to marry is when she is eighteen years old and the best age for a man to marry is when he is thirty-seven. These ages seem to have been fairly typical for Athenian brides and grooms respectively. In Sparta, by contrast, ancient authors tell us that women married at an age when they were mature enough to enjoy sex and they were married to men who were usually not much older than themselves.

Spartiate marriages, however, had some uniquely unpleasant features that were not found in marriages in other Greek poleis. In most ancient Greek poleis, marriage were arranged between the prospective groom and the parents of the prospective bride, with the bride having little to no formal say over who she married. This was also the case in Sparta, but Spartan marriages were even more horrifying because the actual marriage ceremony itself totally dispensed with even the pretense of the bride giving consent and instead took the form of the ritualized abduction and rape of the bride.

The contemporary Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BCE) seems to allude to this abduction ceremony in his Histories 6.65, but the earliest detailed description of it comes from Ploutarchos in his Life of Lykourgos 15.3–5. His description reads as follows, as translated by Richard J. A. Talbert:

“The custom was to capture women for marriage—not when they were slight or immature, but when they were in their prime and ripe for it. The so-called ‘bridesmaid’ took charge of the captured girl. She first shaved her head to the scalp, then dressed her in a man’s cloak and sandals, and laid her down along on a mattress in the dark. The bridegroom—who was not drunk and thus not impotent, but was sober as always—first had dinner in the messes, then would slip in, undo her belt, lift her and carry her to the bed.”

“After spending only a short time with her, he would depart discreetly so as to sleep wherever he usually did along with the other young men. And this continued to be his practice thereafter: while spending the days with his contemporaries, and going to sleep with them, he would warily visit his bride in secret, ashamed and apprehensive in case someone in the house might notice him.”

It’s hard to deny that this marriage ritual sounds deeply traumatizing for the bride. What must have been even more traumatizing for Spartiate women, however, is the fact that Spartiate men could legally loan out their wives to other men in order for them to impregnate them, without any apparent need for the wife’s own consent. Xenophon describes this process in his On Spartan Society 1.7–8. He writes, as translated by Talbert:

“[The Spartan lawgiver Lykourgos] observed, however, that where an old man happened to have a young wife, he tended to keep a very jealous watch on her. So he planned to prevent this too, by arranging that for the production of children the elderly husband should introduce to his wife any man whose physique and personality he admired. Further, should a man not wish to be married, but still be eager to have remarkable children, Lykourgos also made it lawful for him to have children by any fertile and well-bred woman who came to his attention, subject to her husband’s consent.”

Notice how Xenophon says that only the husband’s consent mattered. The woman’s consent is simply never even taken into account. Xenophon goes on to claim that women always liked it when their husbands loaned them out to be impregnated by strange men, because this allowed them to gain power over two households. I think that most people, however, will agree that this seems rather dubious.

Spartiate women as baby-making machines

But what about the popular reputation of Spartiate women as absolute badasses spitting off savage one-liners? As it turns out, this reputation is largely the result of a single work titled Sayings of Spartan Women, which was written by Ploutarchos of Chaironeia, the same much later moralist and biographer whom I mentioned earlier.

The Sayings of Spartan Women is, as the title suggests, a collection of famous anecdotes about sayings attributed to Spartiate women. The specific anecdotes recorded in the collection are most likely all apocryphal, but they nonetheless exemplify traits that the Spartans considered ideal in women.

Here is an anecdote Ploutarchos tells about Gorgo, the wife of King Leonidas I, in his Sayings of Spartan Women 3.5, as translated by Richard J. A. Talbert:

“When asked by a woman from Attike: ‘Why are you Spartan women the only ones who can rule men?’, she said: ‘Because we are also the only ones who give birth to men.’”

As I note in my article I wrote in November 2019 debunking the movie 300, many people read stories like this one and think they’re really feminist and badass, but they completely miss the fact that, time and time again, throughout the anecdotes there is one big recurring theme, which is that Spartiate women were valued exclusively for their ability to produce strong sons who would eventually be able to fight in battle on behalf of the polis.

Nearly every single story Ploutarchos records either involves a Spartiate woman demonstrating her dedication to bearing as many strong, healthy sons as possible at all costs, a Spartiate mother ensuring that her son will fight bravely in battle and face death without fear, or a Spartiate mother refusing to mourn her son who died in battle because he fought bravely and she therefore considers his death a good thing.

The idea that Spartiate women needed to pump out as many sons as possible at all costs left ideal women no room for emotions or grief. Ploutarchos tells another story in his Sayings of Spartan Women 3.6 that, when Leonidas left to go to Thermopylai, Gorgo asked him what she should do if he happened to die in battle. Ploutarchos tells us that his only response was: “Marry a good man and bear strong children.”

ABOVE: A Spartan Woman Giving a Shield to Her Son, painted in 1805 by the French painter Jean-Jacques-François Le Barbier, illustrating an anecdote from Ploutarchos’s Sayings of Spartan Women

How Spartan attitudes towards women compare with other poleis

Ironically, even though the rights of women belonging to the citizen class in other Greek poleis were generally more restricted, most other poleis arguably had more progressive attitudes toward the value of women overall. People in all Greek poleis generally believed that the primary purpose of a woman was to bear and raise children (preferably sons), but, in most Greek poleis, women belonging to the citizen class were also valued for their contributions to the household economy.

The most important non-childbearing-related duty of women belonging to the citizen class in most Greek poleis going all the way back to the earliest written records was to produce textiles for the household through spinning and weaving. In the Odyssey, Odysseus’s wife Penelope spends most of her time weaving at her loom and all evidence suggests that most women in most Greek poleis did this as well.

ABOVE: Black-figure lekythos dating to between c. 550 and c. 530 BCE, depicting two women working at an upright loom to make woolen cloth

Women of the citizen class also, however, had other noteworthy responsibilities. Xenophon, the same Athenian historian whom I have mentioned several times already for his writings about Sparta, also wrote a Socratic dialogue about household management titled Oikonomikos or The Estate Manager.

In the dialogue, Socrates seeks out a wise Athenian aristocrat named Ischomachos, who is particularly skilled at managing estates, and Ischomachos gives Socrates what is essentially a crash course in managing households. One area that Ischomachos describes in great detail is the wife’s important role in this undertaking.

Ischomachos’s attitude toward women can perhaps be best described as a “complementarian” or “separate spheres” outlook. He holds that men and women are equally talented, but their talents lie in different areas. He says that men are naturally physically stronger than women, braver, and better at working outdoors, but women are naturally physically weaker than men, more cowardly, and better for working indoors. He says in his Oikonomikos, chapter 7, as translated by Robin Waterfield:

“Just as the deity has made men and women share in procreation, so society makes them share in estate-management. Moreover, where the deity has implanted in either sex greater ability, there custom gives its blessing. For it is better for a woman to stay indoors than to go out, but it is more reprehensible for the man to stay indoors than to look after the outside work. And if a man acts contrary to the talents the deity has implanted in him, then the chances are that the deities notice his disobedience and punish him for neglecting his own duties or doing the woman’s work.”

Ischomachos goes on to declare that the wife is the “queen bee” of the household and that, although she should remain in the house at all times, she should be in charge of all matters that take place under its roof, including managing the enslaved people who work there, ensuring the distribution of grain and the manufacture of clothes, and tending to members of the household who are ill.

Thus, if we take Xenophon’s account as representative, it seems that Athenian women of the citizen class had enormous responsibilities and it was partly by performing these responsibilities that they earned their position within the home. Of the responsibilities Athenian women had, however, Spartiate women only had the responsibility of managing enslaved people who worked for them. Spartiate women were not even expected to weave textiles because, as Xenophon mentions in a passage I quoted earlier, this was considered beneath their station, a job reserved exclusively for enslaved helots.

The fact that Spartiate women had less work to do may seem like a good thing, but the result of it was that, in the eyes of Spartan society, bearing strong, healthy sons became essentially a Spartiate woman’s only purpose. Ploutarchos actually tells a story that neatly illustrates the contrast between how citizen women in other Greek poleis were valued compared to Spartiate women in his Sayings of Spartan Women 6.9. Ploutarchos writes, as translated by Talbert:

“When an Ionian woman was priding herself on one of the tapestries she had made (which was indeed of great value), a Spartan woman showed off her four most dutiful sons and said they were the kind of thing a noble and good woman ought to produce, and should boast of them and take pride in them.”

Thus, we see that the Ionian woman is valued for her skill in weaving beautiful tapestries. This is a skill that she has surely worked to cultivate; we might describe her as a skilled worker, or even an artist. The Spartiate woman, on the other hand, is valued solely as a baby-making machine.

If the Spartiate women in Ploutarchos’s Sayings of Spartan Women are really badasses like so many people seem to think, they certainly aren’t badass feminists; instead, they’re badass defenders of the patriarchy.

ABOVE: Image from Wikimedia Commons of an Attic white-ground oinochoë by the Brygos Painter dating to c. 490 BCE, depicting a woman spinning

Helot women: the vast majority of women in Sparta

Another problem with the popular narrative that Sparta was a paradise for women compared to the rest of the Greek world is that this narrative focuses exclusively on Spartiate women, but these women were actually an extremely tiny fraction of the overall female population of Sparta.

The overwhelming majority of all women in Sparta were helots, a class of enslaved serfs who differed in many respects from enslaved people held elsewhere in the Greek world. Helots were at least officially owned by the state rather than by individuals, they generally lived in family units, and they were often tied to the land.

As I previously emphasized in this article I published in August 2020, slavery in ancient Greece was always a brutal, dehumanizing, and cruel institution—no matter which polis a person happened to be enslaved in. Nonetheless, helots in Sparta seem to have had it much worse than enslaved people in most other poleis.

The Spartiates forced the helots to do nearly all the difficult and unpleasant manual labor in Sparta on their behalf, under threat of torture and murder if they weren’t submissive enough. The Spartan poet Tyrtaios, whom I mentioned at the beginning of this article when I talked about sources, wrote a poem in which he described the helots’ miserable condition. His description reads as follows, as translated by M. L. West:

“…like donkeys suffering under heavy loads,
by painful force compelled to bring their masters half
of all the produce that the soil brought forth.”

The fact that Tyrtaios compares the helots to donkeys reveals the sheer extent to which the Spartiates dehumanized them, seeing them as merely beasts of burden rather than actual people.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an Attic rhyton shaped like the head of a donkey painted by the Bordeaux Painter, dating to c. 460 BCE, originally found at Nola, now on display in the British Museum in London

Not only were the helots generally worse off than enslaved people in many other parts of the Greek world, they also made up a vastly larger percentage of the Spartan population than enslaved people did in any other Greek polis. The ancient sources consistently emphasize that the helots vastly outnumbered not only the Spartiates, but all free social classes in Sparta combined, by an enormous margin.

Herodotos reports in his Histories 9.10 that, at the Battle of Plataia in 479 BCE, there were five thousand Spartiates, with seven helots for every Spartiate. The actual ratio of helots to Spartiates, however, was probably much higher, considering that the helots who were present at the battle were most likely recruited solely from the immediate region of Lakonia around Sparta, while the largest number of helots lived in the neighboring region of Messenia.

The historian Bret Devereaux, who is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Department of History at North Carolina State University, estimates in a post on his blog “A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry” that, in around 480 BCE, helots comprised somewhere around 85% of the total population of Sparta, free non-citizens comprised somewhere around 7.5% of the total population, and members of the citizen class comprised the remaining 7.5%. This would suggest that helot women made up something like 43% of the total population of Sparta. There were at least three times as many enslaved women in Sparta as there were free humans of all genders and all social classes combined.

The fact that helots made up the overwhelming majority of all people in Sparta is extremely unusual. As far as I am currently aware, there was no other Greek polis in the ancient world in which enslaved people even made up the majority of the population, let alone a massive supermajority.

Athens had a larger enslaved population than Sparta in terms of sheer numbers, but it also had a much larger population than Sparta overall, so that enslaved people made up a much smaller percentage of the total population. As I discuss in this article I wrote in January 2021 about why Athenian democracy was severely flawed, the scholar John Thorley estimates in his book Athenian Democracy, on page 74, that, out of Athens’ total population of between 250,000 and 300,000 people, somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 people were enslaved.

This means that, at any given time, enslaved people only made up somewhere between 27% and 40% of the total Athenian population. This means that enslaved women in particular made up a larger percentage of the population of Sparta than enslaved people of all genders made up of the population of Athens.

ABOVE: Attic black-figure neck-amphora painted by the Antimenes Painter, dating to c. 520 BCE, depicting people (probably slaves) harvesting olives

The Spartiates’ murder and cruelty against the helots

Because the helots made up such a large share of the population, the Spartiates were constantly paranoid about them rebelling and they went to extraordinary lengths to terrorize the helot population to keep them in obedient submission.

Ploutarchos records in his Life of Lykourgos 28.2–3 that young Spartiate men often served in a kind of secret police force known as the κρυπτεία (krupteía). Members of this force were ordered to sneak out into the countryside at night in order to sadistically murder and terrorize helots. He says that they would especially target helots who looked especially strong who would be natural fighters in the case of a rebellion. Ploutarchos writes, as translated by Bernadotte Perrin:

“The magistrates from time to time sent out into the country at large the most discreet of the young warriors, equipped only with daggers and such supplies as were necessary. In the day time, they scattered into obscure and out of the way places, where they hid themselves and lay quiet; but in the night they came down into the highways and killed every helot whom they caught. Oftentimes, too, they actually traversed the fields where helots were working and slew the sturdiest and best of them.”

As I mentioned earlier, Ploutarchos was an avowed fan of all things Spartan and he was probably a slaveowner himself. As such, he was determined to represent Sparta in the most positive possible light. Nonetheless, even he denounces the krypteia as an abomination and expresses disbelief that such a horrific institution could have been instituted by the mythical Spartan lawgiver Lykourgos.

In addition to the krypteia’s frequent raids, the Spartiates had other methods of killing helots to prevent them from rebelling. The Athenian historian Thoukydides records in his book Histories of the Peloponnesian War 4.80.3–4 that, in around 425 BCE or earlier, the Spartiates issued a proclamation that the helots should select those among themselves who had distinguished themselves in battle against Sparta’s enemies so that the Spartiates could set them free.

Two thousand helot men were selected. They crowned them with laurels and paraded them around the various temples. Then, once the celebration was over, the Spartiates quietly slaughtered every last one of the helots who had been selected. The decree about granting them their freedom had been a trick from the very beginning, designed solely to fool the bravest of the helots into revealing themselves so they could all be slaughtered without mercy.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a plaster cast of a Roman bust intended to represent the ancient Athenian historian Thoukydides, who records the notorious account of the Spartiates’ massacre of two thousand helot men

What we can say about ordinary life for helot women

Unfortunately, as I have already mentioned, nearly all the surviving ancient sources were written by elite men who were obsessed with writing about other elite men. These men were generally not very interested at all in writing about women or enslaved people and were least of all interested in writing about enslaved women, who were, in their minds, the least significant people in all of society.

Consequently, the surviving sources about Sparta mention almost nothing whatsoever about helot women, even though they certainly comprised a very large percentage of the Spartan population. The sources only even mention the existence of helot women offhand on a few occasions while they’re mainly talking about Spartiate men.

The best source I’ve found on the lives of helot women is this article by Bret Devereaux. Devereaux combines information about what life was generally like for peasant women in the pre-modern world with what little specific information is known about helot women in Sparta in particular to draw a truly harrowing portrait of what life for helot women must have been like.

Devereaux estimates that supporting a peasant household of five individuals in the pre-modern world require at least one hundred hours of textile work (i.e., spinning, weaving, etc.), food preparation, laundry, and cleaning. These are all chores that were traditionally done by women. In addition to these basic tasks, peasant women were also expected to bear and raise children, which, of course, required many more hours of labor. Women were also usually expected to assist with agricultural labor during the sowing and harvest seasons.

The Spartan system, however, imposed additional burdens on helot women. Notably, Spartiate women did not do any textile work and they forced helot women to do all their textile work for them, in addition to their own. Furthermore, Xenophon explicitly tells us that the meals that were served in the syssitia (i.e., the public mess hall for Spartiate men) were prepared by helot women. Many helot women were probably also forced to do domestic chores for individual Spartiate households.

Devereaux goes on the discuss the fact that ancient agriculture was highly unreliable. During some years, harvests were good and families could have enough to eat through the winter. During other years, however, harvests were poor and families were forced to ration food in order to survive. During bad years, everyone went hungry, malnourished, and miserable.

Although adults of reproductive age could usually survive during bad years on meagre rations, young children, pregnant women, and the elderly frequently died of starvation and/or malnutrition. Nonetheless, the peasant population would remain stable, despite so many deaths, because the deaths were usually people who were not of reproductive age and the people of reproductive age who survived could make more offspring during the good years who could go on to have offspring of their own. The result is what Devereaux calls a “sad equilibrium” of people dying off only to be shortly replaced.

Tyrtaios and other sources record that the Spartiates took one half of all the crops the helots grew. This means that, in order to survive, the helots needed to grow at least twice as much as they otherwise would have. This means that, practically speaking, for the helots, there were never truly good years, because, even if the harvest was good, the Spartiates took so much of it that the helots were always hungry and malnourished and they always needed to carefully ration what little they had left. It also means that bad years were much, much worse than they otherwise would have been, resulting in more deaths and more overall suffering.

The fact that pretty much all helot women must have been perpetually starving and malnourished would have only made it even harder for them to do the arduous labor that the Spartiates demanded of them. And, of course, if they couldn’t keep up with all the labor, their overseers would certainly whip them—or worse.

Unfortunately, what I have said so far is not even the worst of it.

ABOVE: Early twentieth-century illustration showing how the artist imagined a scene of Spartiate masters whipping helots might have looked

How Spartiate men raped helot women on a routine basis

In any culture where people are enslaved, there are always men who like to rape enslaved women. The problem was almost certainly much worse in Sparta than in other places, given the fact that the Spartan state literally sent young, unmarried Spartiate men out into the countryside as members of the krypteia, armed with weapons, with the explicit purpose to murder unarmed helots and terrorize the enslaved population into submission. These members of the krypteia undoubtedly committed all manner of horrifying sex crimes against any helot women they happened to encounter.

In fact, Devereaux notes in his article that it was so common for Spartiate men to rape helot women that offspring born of such rapes formed a significant, legally defined social class. Xenophon records in his Hellenika 5.3.9 that there was a social class in Sparta whose members were known as νόθοι (nóthoi), which literally means “baseborn.” Their fathers were Spartiates, but their mothers were helots.

Devereaux clarifies that he considers any form of sexual contact between a Spartiate and a helot to be a form of rape, because Spartiate men wielded the absolute power of life and death over all helot women and their entire families. No helot woman had the power to refuse a Spartiate man when he demanded sexual favors from her. Even if a helot woman sought out relations with a Spartiate man, she could only do so within a violently coercive system of oppression.

Conclusion

The next time you hear someone proclaiming that ancient Sparta was some kind of paradise for women, just remind them that the vast majority of women in Sparta were helots, for whom life was an indescribable Hell of perpetual torture and misery that most modern people probably can’t even imagine. The living circumstances of helot women in Sparta were not just abysmal by modern standards; they were significantly worse off than most enslaved people in most other Greek poleis.

Helot women were massively overworked, having not only the normal workload for peasant families, but also the additional workload of having to do textile work, cooking, and possibly domestic chores for the Spartiates who thought it was dishonorable to do anything for themselves. They also had to live in constant fear of being whipped or murdered by the krypteia. They were constantly starving and malnourished. People they loved were constantly dying, either from starvation or from being murdered by the krypteia, and a significant number of them were being raped by Spartiate men on a routine basis.

Life for Athenian women was generally not all that great, but, if someone forced me to choose between being a woman in Sparta and being a woman in Athens where I didn’t get to choose my social class, I’d much rather be a woman in Athens, because, at least in Athens, the likelihood of me at least nominally being free is higher than the likelihood of me being enslaved. If you were a woman in Sparta, by contrast, the overwhelming odds are that you’d be a helot.