Watching Me, Watching You, Watching Me: Greek Helots and Their Masters

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Ancient classical sources tell us that in the late eighth/seventh centuries BCE the armies of Sparta marched on their neighbors to the west, the Messenians, and conquered their wide and fertile lands. Many Messenians fled, but others remained to become the famed “helots” of the Greek world—a population subject to Sparta in a status deemed “between free men and slaves.” Unsuccessful revolts periodically disrupted the regime, but for some three centuries Spartan citizens controlled, but feared, their helots; Messenian helots feared, but labored for, their masters. This paper considers the strategies of surveillance—from both sides—that governed this fraught relationship. Sparta maintained control of its subject population through a variety of punitive measures, including the Krypteia: a curious Spartan institution sometimes referred to as a roving “secret police.” Helot reconnaissance is considerably more difficult to investigate, but recent archaeological evidence points to active internal Messenian communication networks. The agencies and methods behind such mutual “watching” require additional scrutiny, using both archaeological and textual evidence, an analysis that will be contextualized and informed by studies of surveillance of enslaved or resistant populations in other periods and places, especially populations in wider regional settings.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39991.0