The name "Helots" evokes one of the most famous peculiarities of ancient Sparta, the system of dependent labor that guaranteed the livelihood of the free citizens. The Helots fulfilled all the functions that slaves carried out elsewhere in the Greek world, allowing their masters the leisure to be full-time warriors. Yet, despite their crucial role, Helots remain essentially invisible in our ancient sources and peripheral and enigmatic in modern scholarship.

This book is devoted to a much-needed reassessment of Helotry and of its place in the history and sociology of unfree labor. The essays deal with the origins and historical development of Helotry, with its sociological, economic, and demographic aspects, with its ideological construction and negotiation.

This volume is a unique, multi-authored social history of war from the third millennium B.C.E. to the tenth century C.E. in the Mediterranean, the Near East, and Europe (Egypt, Achaemenid Persia, Greece, the Hellenistic World, the Roman Republic and Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the early Islamic World, and early Medieval Europe), with parallel studies of Mesoamerica (the Maya and Aztecs) and East Asia (ancient China, medieval Japan). The product of a colloquium at Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies, this volume offers a broadly based, comparative examination of war and military organization in their complex interactions with social, economic, and political structures as well as cultural practices.