No Helot, perhaps, was murdered from mere wantonness; but who does not see how many would necessarily have been butchered at the slightest suspicion of disaffection, or for the faintest utility of example?
These miserable men were the objects of compassion to all Greece.

"It was the common opinion," says Aelian, "that the earthquake in Sparta was a judgment from the gods upon the Spartan inhumanity to the Helots." And perhaps in all history (not even excepting that awful calmness with which the Italian historians narrate the cruelties of a Paduan tyrant or a Venetian oligarchy) there is no record of crime more thrilling than that dark and terrible passage in Thucydides which relates how two thousand Helots, the best and bravest of their tribe, were selected as for reward and freedom, how they were led to the temples in thanksgiving to the gods--and how they disappeared, their fate notorious--the manner of it a mystery! XIII.

Besides the Helots, the Spartans exercised an authority over the intermediate class called the Perioeci.

These were indubitably the old Achaean race, who had been reduced, not to slavery, but to dependance.

They retained possession of their own towns, estimated in number, after the entire conquest of Messenia, at one hundred.