interaction between military and society in greece

• Spartiates

  Full Spartan citizens, sometimes called "homoioi" meaning "those who are equal", smallest group, dedicated their lives to being soldiers
• Perioikoi

  Not Spartan, lived in Laconia, craftsmen, did jobs like fishing and hunting
• Helots

  Enslaved serf class, largest group, agricultural labour
• Inferiors

  • Neodamodes
  • Tresantes
• Neodamodes

  Helots who had been given freedom as a reward for good behaviour or bravery in war, not full Spartan citizens but similar status to Perioikoi
• Tresantes

  Spartiates who had lost their citizenship because they had showed cowardice, socially isolated, had to wear special clothes, lost right to participate in politics, lost their kleros and helots
• If a spartiate showed cowardice he could be demoted to the status on inferior
• The Helots did manual labour for the Spartan citizens, meaning that they did not have to spend time on this work, nor did they have to spend time amassing wealth to pay for their own slaves. This saved time could be spent on military preparation.
• The state declared war on the Helots at the beginning of each year.
• The most promising students of the agoge graduated to the kyrpteia which got them very used to killing other people.
• The Helots were sometimes forced to get drunk, sing and dance at Spartan dinners. This kind of humiliation taught the Spartans about the dangers of excess.
• The chance to escape the bonds of slavery could have motivated helots to work hard for Sparta, despite their brutal treatment.
• Helots who had been judged by the Spartans to be superior in bravery, set wreathes upon their heads in token of their freedom from slavery, and visited the temples of the gods in procession. But a little while afterwards all disappeared, more than two thousand of them, in such a way that no man was able to say how they came to their deaths.
• The Spartan System arose after the Second Messenian War, an uprising of the Helots against the Spartiates, which lasted 17 years and almost wiped-out Sparta. Their whole system arose as a way to prevent this happening again.
• Before Athens established democracy in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE, the city had been ruled by tyrants.
• Tyrant

  A man who wields absolute power (like a king), usually takes power for himself by amassing followers and staging a coup
• Under the tyrants, the common people had no political power and there was massive economic inequality, with some of the poorest citizens trapped in crippling debt to wealthy landowners.
• The rule of the tyrants was in part supported by the nature of the Athenian military at the time, which was dominated by a very small class of aristocratic cavalry - nobles on horseback.
• The hoplite phalanx became the main tactic of the Athenian army around the time of the First Greco-Persian War (490 BCE)

  This proved that Athenian society needed its average citizens more than it needed its aristocracy, giving the Athenian people confidence to pursue their new system of democracy
• The Athenian fleet was built to be the largest in the Greek world - around 200 ships! Each ship needed many rowers, mostly drawn from the poorer classes of society.
• Athens relied on their navy more than their army, so Athens' poorer citizens were now the most important in protecting the city and in helping it to flourish.
• Wealthy landowners and middle class hoplites could no longer claim to be the ones protecting Athens, and so had no real claim to political power over the ordinary people.