Battle of Leuktra 371 BC

[PMBardunias]

Athens - rightly - gets a good going over for its imperial hubris (so eloquently summed up in Thucydides' narration of the Sicilian expedition and the Melian Dialogue for example). Yet in all these centuries the slavery that dare not be mentioned - that of the Lakonian towns and Messenia - is looked away from or explained away. Not as much nowadays I'd admit.

Here is where we fall out again. The Messenian helots were not enslaved, this is pure anti-spartan propaganda, they were serfs and the difference is far more than semantic. Every state in Greece was rife with true chattel slaves, many of them fellow Greeks, so there was no pseudo-abolishonist movement. What there was, was a realization that by creating a state that never existed historically as a united political unit, giving them a real big capitol, and calling them Messenia would fetter Sparta.

As for the Laconians, I'm guessing you mean the Laconian helots and not the Perioic towns, for surely there can be no question of these being enslaved. The political organization in Laconia is far too complex to charaterize it as simply domination from Sparta. The continuous support of Perioic towns and Laconian helots during threatened or actual invasion of Laconia show this to be the case. I don't buy the notion of a mass case of Stockholm syndrome.