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Spartan Co7istitution. 55 Helots, the servile class : who differed from the Athenian slaves in not being saleable out of the country ^^. They were partly, like the serfs or villeins of the middle ages, adscripti glehce^ and tilled the estates of the individual Spar- tan landlords, to whom, like metayers^ they paid a rent of a fixed portion of the gross produce of the soil ^^ ; and partly they attended their masters as domestic servants; waiting on them at the public tables, taking care of their children, accompanying them as esquires in the field, &c. Of these three classes, the Helots appear to have had no rights whatever, except the right of not being sold out of the country, and perhaps not without the landed estate to which they belonged. The Perioeci were certainly freemen and not slaves ; but their rights seem to have been confined to the possession of land, and the administration of some petty municipal afi'airs^^ They were excluded from the great were placed in a middle state between the latter and the natives ; and their language — in their own country the most despised — ^held in the isle of Erin an intermediate rank between that of the new government, and the Celtic idiom of the vanquished people — degraded by the conquest, like the population which spoke it." ^9 Ephorus in Strabo viii. p. 365. says that the helots surrendered on two condi- tions, 1. that they should not be sold out of the country, and 2. that their masters should not be able to liberate them. This is one of the many cases where existing institutions have been referred to an imaginary contract : for it would be absurd to suppose that prisoners would stipulate that they should not be liberated by their masters. The veoSajULajSeis of Sparta did not correspond to the libertini of Rome : for the former were manumitted by the state on grounds of public policy, the latter by their masters on grounds of private kindness. The account of Archemachus (Athen. VI. p. 264 A. Phot, in ireveaTaL p. 409. 18.) that some of the Boeotians of Arne became the slaves of the Thessalians on condition that their masters should not sell them out of the country or have the right of life and death over them, is liable to no objection of this kind. 20 At one time as much as a half, rJniLcrv nrav ba-a-ov Kapirov apovpa (pepeiy Tyrtaeus ap. Paus. IV. 14. 5. The rent now usually paid by the French metayers is half the price of the entire produce of the soil. To this class of helots, Livy's description of the measure of Nabis refers : " Ilotarum deinde quidam (hi sunt jam inde antiquitus castellani, agreste genus) per omnes vicos sub verberibus acti necantur," XXXIV. 27. On the meaning of castellanus see Ruperti on Livy v. 5. 2» This is conjectured by Miiller from the circumstance of the Perioeci living in 7roX€t9, which were in late times detached from Sparta by T. Quinctius, and by Augustus constituted into a separate community (the EXevdepoXaKOive^^ i. e. independent^ not free Laconians), b. iii. c. ii. § 1, 3. There were also at one time Kokol Kdyadol among the Perioeci, Xen. Hell. v. 3. 9. and Miiller has remarked that Paus. III. 22. 5. mentions an inhabitant of Acriae in Laconia who was an Olympic victor : Gottling on Aristot. Pol. p. 465. has suggested that this person might have been an Eleutherolaconian : and although Miiller Proleg. p, 428. has observed that