If it were beneath a Spartan to labour--to maintain himself--to cultivate land--to build a house--to exercise an art;--to do aught else than to fight an enemy--to choose an ephor--to pass from the chase or the palaestra to the public tables--to live a hero in war--an aristocrat in peace,--it was clearly a supreme necessity to his very existence as a citizen, and even as a human being, that there should be a subordinate class of persons employed in the occupations rejected by himself, and engaged in providing for the wants of this privileged citizen.

Without Helots the Spartan was the most helpless of human beings.

Slavery taken from the Spartan state, the state would fall at once! It is no wonder, therefore, that this institution should have been guarded with an extraordinary jealousy--nor that extraordinary jealousy should have produced extraordinary harshness.

It is exactly in proportion to the fear of losing power that men are generally tyrannical in the exercise of it.

Nor is it from cruelty of disposition, but from the anxious curse of living among men whom social circumstances make his enemies because his slaves, that a despot usually grows ferocious, and that the urgings of suspicion create the reign of terror.