The End of Spartan Helotage
The Athenians were among the Greek city states whom the hard-pressed Spartans asked for help to suppress the Helots. A conservative faction led by Cimon controlled Athens at the time, and so 4000 Athenian soldiers were duly sent to Sparta’s aid. However, once they arrived, the Athenians’ radical democracy ideas alarmed the Spartan authorities. They feared that such notions would spread to their Helots and further fuel the uprising, or that the Athenians might even switch sides. So the Spartans sent the Athenians back home.
Insulted, the Athenians threw out their conservative leaders and repudiated their alliance with Sparta. Left to their own devices, the Spartans eventually managed to crush the Helot revolt after a bitter struggle that lasted for two years, and finally ended in 462 BC. They then subjected their slaves to yet another round of cruel reprisals. The Helots finally gained their freedom a century later, when Sparta was crushed by Epaminondas of Thebes. As seen below, he realized that the Spartan state’s economy depended upon mass slavery. So he kicked the props out from under the Spartans and liberated the Helots. That set Sparta, once the Greek world’s most dominant and feared state, into a downward spiral from which it never recovered.