I should emphasise that the writing of this paper falls at an early stage of my comparative research. I shall not attempt to provide a definitive location of helotage within the wide range of unfree statuses in world history. My paper is, rather, a {248|249} starting-point for future research, a preliminary investigation of certain potential insights to be derived from comparative study, based upon an outline reading into certain major servile systems in the historical past. Its primary aim is to address the broad question: in what ways might the history and sociology of other systems of unfree labour help to illuminate the character of helotage and of relations between the helots and their masters? Given, in particular, the paucity of the ancient evidence for helot-Spartiate relations—the lack of historical detail highlighted by Sue Alcock in her introduction to this volume—to what extent can comparative study help us to map out some plausible broad contours for the operation of helotage, even if much of the detailed topography must necessarily remain obscure? For the purposes of this initial investigation I shall focus on Spartiate-helot relationships within the key area of the agrarian economy.

As has been emphasised in a number of studies, such as Mark Golden’s salutary article (1992) on the uses of cross-cultural comparison in ancient social history, the enterprise of comparative history, and especially the methodology of comparison between unfree labour in antiquity and in more recent periods, is by no means straightforward. Although extensive theoretical discussion would be inappropriate in this volume, whose primary subject is the substantive relationship between helots and their masters, some brief remarks are appropriate by way of introduction to the comparative approach taken in my own substantive discussion.

In contrast to the unhelpfulness of globalising approaches, a more promising comparative approach to an understanding of helotage is, I suggest, through the investigation of specific aspects or problems which can legitimately be viewed in broader historical perspective. A good example of such a “specific” comparative approach is Paul Cartledge’s article “Rebels and Sambos in classical Greece: a comparative view” (Cartledge 2001, first published 1985), in which he successfully employed comparative insights from Eugene Genovese’s study of slave revolts, From Rebellion to Revolution (Genovese 1979), to explain the capacity of the Messenian helots to revolt, in contrast to chattel slaves elsewhere in Greece. Similarly, my comparative essay takes as its subject another major aspect of helotage: the character of Spartiate-helot relationships within the agrarian economies of Lakonia and Messenia during their respective periods of domination by Sparta. Its specific focus is the social relations of production between Spartiates and helots, especially the degree of Spartiate direction of helot farming, and the implications for the helots’ experience of servitude.

In his article on the methodology of comparative approaches to the history of slavery, Jacques Annequin has posed the question: “une reflexion comparative doit-elle se fonder sur des ressemblances factuelles ou sur des convergences de problematiques?” (1985:641-642). Although not impervious to the value, in appropriate context, of factual resemblances between helotage and other systems of unfree agrarian labour, the primary concentration of my own “réflexion comparative” will be upon “des convergences de problématiques”, the issues and variables common to diverse systems of exploitation which permit pertinent comparative study across historical time and space.

Indeed, comparative evidence from various types of agricultural labour systems suggests that, even within a common framework of exploitation, we should expect considerable variation in the degree of Spartiate intervention. For example, M. G. Smith’s study of the system of slavery maintained by the Fulani aristocracy of Zaria province (northern Nigeria) around 1900 notes different levels of intervention, with some slaves farming their owner’s fields through communal work under a slave overseer, whilst in other cases the slaves enjoyed desultory supervision, as long as they performed the required labour or provided rent in kind (M. G. Smith 1955:103-104). Similar variations in the degrees of autonomy permitted to slave cultivators have been noted within slavery in Thailand (Turton 1980:278-279). James Scott’s classic study of peasant rebellions and subsistence in Southeast Asia also identified a spectrum of landlord-cultivator relationships, ranging from those in which there was a considerable degree of landlord involvement in agricultural decision-making, and in provision of seed and necessary equipment, to relationships in which the landlord provided nothing beyond the land and a demand for rent (1976:174-176). Such variations in the degree of intervention by master or landowner, observed in diverse systems of dependent labour exploitation, have been found to correlate with a number of key variables. Although none, on its own, is necessarily decisive, collectively they constitute a set of interacting contributory factors that are worth examining in an attempt to illuminate the social relations of production between Spartiates and helots. {254|255}

One relevant factor is the character of the economic exploitation of the dependent farming population, the nature of the obligations demanded by the master or landowner. Historically, there have been two main methods of exploitation. One method has been to demand labour services, with the cultivators being compelled to spend much of their time working the owner’s landholdings. Often under this arrangement, the cultivators have been allocated some (varying) amount of land for their own use. The other method has been for the owner to require the payment of dues, with the farming population being compelled to render tribute in kind (or, increasingly in the modern world, in cash) from the produce of the owner’s estates. Comparative evidence indicates that obligations in the form of dues are typically associated with lower levels of intervention than when labour services are required (cf. Bush 1996c:213-215). Within modern Russian serfdom, for example, “labour obligations (barshchina) required much greater supervision than dues (obrok) paid two or three times a year” (Moon 1999:205; cf. Kolchin 1987:63-64). Similarly, as Paul Lovejoy has noted, the system of plantation slavery practised in the Savanna region of Africa in the nineteenth century “included a variety of work regimes and management strategies,” ranging from cases in which slaves provided labour services, working “in a regimented fashion on the fields of the master under an overseer” to less regimented arrangements in which “slaves lived in their own villages and were subject to fixed payments” (Lovejoy 2000:212; cf. Mason 1973:465-466). Although the associations are not hard-and-fast, and there can be other factors involved, the requirement for labour services tends to correlate with a higher, and the demand for dues with a lower, degree of production for the market (Cooper 1979:115; Kolchin 1987:65; Moon 1999:70-71).

Another relevant factor is the relationship of the farming population to the landholdings they worked, the extent to which they enjoyed practical fixity of tenure, whether de iure or simply de facto. This factor is clearly directly connected to the capacity of the master or landowner to intervene in the agricultural process by moving his labour force around to suit his interests. Here the practices of certain {256|257} landowners with regard to peasant sharecropping tenants are particularly instructive. In the region of Tuscany in post-unification Italy, for example, tenants’ rights were weak. The landlord’s control was ensured by terms of contract which specified that the labour capacity and subsistence needs of the tenant’s family should match the size and labour requirements of the holding. To achieve this balance landlords were able to disperse members of their tenants’ families elsewhere or order the adoption of living-in help, could give or withhold permission for marriage, and could vet the appointment of new household heads (Gill 1983:147). Such a high level of intervention in the (dis)placement of the agricultural labour force is also common in systems of slave labour. The potential of the master to separate slave families—man from woman, children from parents—has often been noted as the most poignant example of the potential powerlessness of slaves to ensure some element of continuity in their position (e.g. Bradley 1987:52-70). Within the plantation slavery of the antebellum U.S. South, for example, children could be taken away into domestic service, and slaves of all ages were frequently sold, hired or loaned to other owners, or moved to other plantations. It has been estimated that, due largely to the strength of the interregional slave trade, “in the upper South about one first marriage in three was broken by forced separation and close to half of all children were separated from at least one parent” (Kolchin 1993:125-126, drawing upon the work of Tadman 1989). The fact that a common occasion of sale was the death of the owner highlights the fundamental insecurity of the slave’s link to the land that s/he cultivated.

Sale, however, was not the only means by which Spartiate masters may potentially have intervened in the disposition of their helot labour force. By analogy with both American slavery and Russian serfdom, young helots may have been taken off the land into personal and domestic service. We have particular evidence for the important roles played by male helot servants as batmen on campaign and by helot female domestics as wet-nurses of Spartiate children and as sexual partners of Spartiate citizens; sons produced through such liaisons were accorded an honourable place in Spartan society and may have added to the prestige of the citizen household (Hodkinson 1997:46-55, 2000:336-337). However, we have no evidence about whether or to what extent the supply of personal and domestic servants was drawn from the helot agricultural population.

The socio-economic implications of these significant changes are, unfortunately, obscured by uncertainty over the status of the inhabitants of most of the survey area. Plausible cases can be made for viewing them either as helots working Spartiate farms or as perioikoi working the land on their own account or with slave labour. It seems certain, however, that most of the western sector of the survey area, closest to Sparta itself, was Spartiate-owned—especially the area embracing the low hills and spurs along the eastern edge of the Eurotas valley from the confluence of the Rivers Eurotas and Kelephina to the state sanctuary of the Menelaion. Within this particular area, there was an initial foundation of 16 sites in the sixth century, comprising 13 small farmsteads (0.01-0.14 ha) and three somewhat larger sites (0.15-0.30 ha). In the later- fifth-century decline, the total number of settlements was reduced to ten. Only six of the 13 original small farmsteads and one of the larger sites continued in occupation; three new small farmsteads were also founded. More detailed analysis of these specific changes lies beyond the scope of this paper, but the general implications are clear. The initial wave of colonisation must have entailed Spartiate masters moving their helots into new settlements to facilitate the new or more intensive cultivation of nearby land. Equally significantly, the subsequent decline and readjustments must have involved the removal of some helot households from the landholdings they had formerly worked and the resettlement of others in different locations. In some cases, of course, removal or resettlement may have occurred at times when a helot household was becoming unviable anyway due to agricultural failure; but it is unlikely that such major changes could have been effected with no element of arbitrary Spartiate intervention or untimely disruption of helot life.

We should not imagine, however, that the modalities through which helotage was set in place necessarily exercised a determining impact on Spartiate-helot relations throughout the entire period of Spartan domination. For example, the economic framework of plantation slavery in most regions of Africa was—as in the U.S.A.— a creation of the slaveowners themselves, using newly enslaved imported labour which was typically subjected to close supervision. However, in certain circumstances established second-generation slave villages could become subject to less intervention and gradually assume greater self-direction of their agricultural labour (Klein and Lovejoy 1979:184-187; Lovejoy 2000:213). In assessing the development of helotage, we need to give consideration to two further interrelated variables which comparative evidence suggests may have had an important influence. In this section I shall examine the question of geographical distance between owner and cultivator; in the following section, the pattern of residence of the unfree population.

How might these comparative insights illuminate Spartiate-helot relations? The Spartiates all resided in the cluster of villages that constituted Sparta itself. As regards their holdings in the Sparta valley and neighbouring areas, the distinction drawn above between genuine absenteeism and simple “living apart”, along with the example of the closely-regulated “suburban” West African slave villages, reinforces the impression we have already gained from both the literary and the archaeological evidence: namely, that, even if there was a residential separation between the Spartiate masters and their helots, the minimal distance between them would not have posed any great barrier to a high degree of intervention in helot farming. Such intervention would have been facilitated by the fact that one of these Spartiate villages, Amyklai, was located in the very centre of the valley, 5 km south of the main cluster. A further indication of Spartiate intervention is the finding of the Laconia Survey that the pottery assemblage of most of the settlements in its western sector close to Sparta lacked evidence of storage vessels, suggesting that their agricultural produce was taken for storage to Sparta itself (Catling 2002:195-196). In several respects, Spartiate management of their estates in the Sparta valley and its environs appears similar to the level of intervention ascribed to the Athenian landowner Ischomachos in Xenophon’s Oikonomikos (7.29-21.12). Ischomachos and his wife reside in a town house, where the agricultural produce is stored (cf. esp. 9.2-10); but whenever he has no pressing business in town he walks out to his slave-worked farm, where he superintends all the details of the work and implements improvements in method (11.14-18; cf. 21.10).

The extant version of Hesychios’ text is too brief to indicate any distinctions between the roles played by helot mnôionomoi in different geographical locations. In view of the comparative evidence considered above, however, we should expect that differences in levels of Spartiate supervision dictated by geographical distance {268|269} will have led to considerable variations in the degree of responsibility for agricultural management possessed by different mnôionomoi. Xenophon’s Ischomachos, whom we have compared to owners of estates in the Sparta valley, given his ability to walk to his farms, was able to exert a strict regime of supervision and correction over his slave bailiff (Oik. 12.2-14.10; cf. 20.16-20; 21.9). Such close supervision would not have been feasible further afield. It is possible (though by no means certain) that, in order to monitor the activities of mnôionomoi on their distant estates, some wealthy Spartiates may have appointed outside agents, most plausibly, perhaps, drawn from among the perioikoi: men with functions comparable to those of estate managers within Russian serfdom, appointed by landowners to exercise a general supervision over their dispersed holdings. However, the Russian experience (Moon 1999:202-203) suggests that, even had such a practice been employed, the outcome of such supervision would normally have been a shared responsibility which left plenty of initiative for the mnôionomos.

In the absence of the Spartiate owner, how far then might the responsibilities of helot mnôionomoi extend? Was their management limited to strictly agricultural matters, such as ensuring the availability of the appropriate equipment, seed and animals, supervising the input of labour, determining the mix of crops to be grown, deciding the timing of sowing and harvest, and ensuring delivery of the owner’s share of the produce? Or did it extend to more “structural” responsibilities, such as ensuring that the level of available labour matched the size of the holding and the owner’s requirements for produce: responsibilities which might have involved (re)distributing cultivation rights between households or exerting influence over key life-decisions affecting the growth or diminution of helot families? The possibility of such an extended role raises questions regarding the capacity in which the mnôionomos performed his role. Clearly, he was in one sense an overseer accepted, if not appointed, by the Spartiate owner; but did his position also reflect, as Ducat (1990:63) has suggested, the structure of the local helot community? Ducat terms the mnôionomoi “des chefs coutumiers”; I would think particularly of the heads of larger and more important helot households.

The proposition that the persons chosen as mnôionomoi may have emerged from the structure of local helot society also raises the question whether their roles were confined to individual Spartiate estates or may have had a wider communal aspect. Despite Ducat’s understandable linkage of the mnôia to a group of helots working a Spartiate estate, the term itself is unspecific in reference and could equally refer to a broader grouping of helots. In approaching this question, it is relevant to examine {269|270} the issue of helot residence patterns. The comparative material considered above suggests that a relatively high degree of local, communal self-direction of agricultural production may be particularly associated with a nucleated settlement pattern, as in the case of the village communities of Russian serfs and certain groups of African slaves.

This association does appear to apply, both positively and negatively, in the case of helotage. We have already seen that the Laconia Survey area adjacent to Sparta itself was one of dispersed, small-scale settlements. Although both archaeological and literary evidence is limited, current indications are that the Sparta plain too contained no sizeable settlements beyond the Spartiate villages and that the helot cultivators were dispersed in a mixture of isolated farmsteads and hamlets (Catling 2002:232-233). In short, those helot farmers under the closest degree of supervision by their Spartiate masters were settled in a pattern of residence less conducive to collective co-ordination of agricultural production by the helots themselves.

The concentration of the Messenian helot population into nucleated rather than dispersed settlements was probably an important factor in ensuring the capacity of helot mnôionomoi to act effectively as local co-ordinators of agricultural production. It also makes more plausible the possibility that the mnôionomoi may have operated at a broader communal level, perhaps even at the level of a large village like “I04 Romanou Romanou,” where they might in effect have been village leaders comprising the more important household heads. Unfortunately, we have no direct evidence for the nature of helot household structures. I have suggested elsewhere that, as part of a strategy to even out some of the above fluctuations and divergences, helot households may have taken the form of co-residential multiple family households (Hodkinson 2000:125, 386-387). Under such arrangements, the heads of large households would have been notable figures, men of some authority in the wider community. This suggestion, however, must necessarily remain hypothetical.

Whatever the structure of helot households, in considering the kinds of roles that village leaders could potentially have played, we can turn for potential illumination to the best attested case for comparison, namely, the officials of Russian serf communes, who played an important mediating role between absentee landowners and the local serf community. David Moon (1999:199) has noted that, “communes were the basic institutions of local government in Russian villages…guided by state decrees and landowners’ instructions, as well as the peasants’ unwritten customary law…Communal officials were responsible for a wide range of village affairs, including day-to-day administration, sharing out and collecting the obligations communities owed to their landowners and the state, and distributing the village’s arable land between households. Communes directed the village economy, especially the three-field system of crop rotation.” Of course, in the absence of hard information, we cannot simply transfer the capacities of Russian commune officials onto Messenian helot mnôionomoi. We saw earlier that, whereas in Russia serfdom was superimposed on a pre-existing peasant society, there is room for debate about the relative contributions made by the incoming Spartiates and the local farming population to the formation of the Messenian agrarian economy under Spartan rule. Nevertheless, as already noted, the examples of many second-generation African slave villages indicate how even initially disparate groups of slaves transplanted into new territory can, within a context of village residence and landowner absenteeism, come to assume greater self-direction of the agrarian economy. In particular, the aforementioned case of Nupe slave villages, which comprised ethnically homogeneous groups of captives taken from other parts of Nupe territory, shows how the development of semi-autonomous agricultural production can be powerfully facilitated when the servile population shares a {272|273} common ethnic identity—as was increasingly the case in fifth-century Messenia, whether founded in a longstanding collective identity or spurred by the development of a secondary ethnic consciousness under the common conditions of servitude imposed by Spartan rule (Luraghi 2002a:238-240). The example of the Russian serf commune, consequently, constitutes an appropriate comparison to think with.

In raising this particular question, of course, we are led logically on to the broader, political question that lies at the heart of modern debates about helot-Spartiate relationships: how, in the face of occasional widespread revolt, the minority elite group of Spartiates, largely confined to Sparta itself, maintained effective control for several centuries over the much larger servile helot population spread around their large and often distant territory. The particular insight to emerge from this article is, I suggest, that the issue of Spartiate collective political management stands parallel to, and may have been interlocked with, the issue of individual Spartiate management of agricultural estates. If the relations of privileged collaboration established in the agrarian sphere between Spartiate masters and {277|278} the mnôionomoi reinforced the authority of wealthy helot households, the influence exercised by those prominent helots within their own communities may in turn have contributed towards the maintenance of order and the stifling, for the most part, of protest against Spartan rule.

The substantive part of this paper began by asking how helot farming actually worked on the ground, in particular to what extent it was directed by intervention from Spartiate owners, and what the implications were for the fundamental conditions of helot life, including the nature of local helot communities. In addressing these questions, I have attempted to examine certain key variables and general insights suggested by comparative evidence from other systems of unfree agrarian labour, as a means of providing context to and extracting maximum value from the limited ancient literary and archaeological evidence. The first variable to be examined, the nature of helot obligations, was one which took a common form throughout the helotised regions of Spartiate territory: the payment of dues in kind through a sharecropping arrangement. Comparative evidence indicated that the payment of dues was typically correlated with a lesser degree of direct intervention by the owner, although the use of sharecropping may have provided a somewhat greater incentive for such intervention than if the dues had been fixed. The next issue examined was whether helots enjoyed practical fixity of tenure on the land. The ancient evidence regarding the sale of helots proved to be somewhat ambiguous; but the changing agrarian settlement patterns close to Sparta revealed by the Laconia Survey suggested that in this region Spartiate owners actively settled their helots onto new agricultural land and subsequently re-settled them when conditions deteriorated. This insight prompted investigation of the underlying issue of responsibility for the formation of the agrarian economy, which comparative study suggested was an important initial influence upon the dominant group’s capacity to intervene in agricultural production. It was concluded that, in contrast to the Laconia Survey area, Sparta’s acquisition of control over eastern Messenia involved the incorporation of a pre-existing farming population within its own territory, although there was probably some scope for the incoming Spartiates to mould local agrarian structures. From here, the observation, derived again from comparative evidence, that subsequent developments in agrarian structures could sometimes override initial patterns of exploitation led to examination of two interrelated variables which have frequently been noted as exercising a significant influence upon social relations of production: geographical distance and patterns of residence among the unfree population. The first of these was, by definition, a {278|279} factor differentiating different regions of Spartiate territory. Comparative material indicated that the high degree of Spartiate intervention in areas of Lakonia close to Sparta would not have been feasible in regions further afield where, as absentee landowners, Spartiates would have had to manage their estates through helot overseers, such as the mnôionomoi, the “leaders of the helots.” This distinction according to geographical distance was seen to correlate with a marked difference between the dispersed settlement pattern of areas close to Sparta and the prevailing pattern of nucleated residence in Messenia. This latter pattern would have created greater potential scope for the development of communal identity and institutions in the context of village residence. Prompted by comparative evidence, however, it was noted that inequalities among the helots may have led to the domination of communal activities by wealthier households who, through their collaboration with Spartiate landowners, could gain private advantage which gave them a vested interest in the maintenance of Spartan rule.

Through use of the comparative method we have been able to reach a deeper understanding, not only of the relationships between Spartiate landowners and their unfree labour force in the operation of the agrarian economy, but also of the implications for certain aspects of helot society, such as their experience of leadership and community. Indeed, the insights of this paper regarding the social relations of production between Spartiates and helots could be profitably extended into a more in-depth examination of relations of patronage and of the potential use of helots as a source of socio-political influence. A number of other aspects of helotage, some of them briefly touched on in this essay—aspects such as the use of helots (or ex-helots) in warfare, their employment in domestic service, helot property ownership, and religious practice—could also be fruitfully explored in the context of other systems of unfree labour, drawing upon a wider range of societies, and in greater depth, than in this initial study. For the present, however, this article has indicated how the practice of comparative history can illuminate the relationship between the helots and their masters to a greater degree than is possible through exclusive reliance on the exiguous data available from the ancient world. {279|}