Male slaves and servants often accompanied Classical armies, although they may have been less ubiquitous than has usually been supposed (van Wees 2001: 60). These attendants carried arms and armor, gathered firewood, cooked and cleaned, and evacuated and tended the wounded. Wealthier citizen hoplites at Athens possessed a single slave attendant, while each Spartan soldier could count on the services of one or more helot. Poorer mercenaries generally did not have attendants. In exceptional circumstances, slaves could be armed for pitched battle, while in urban fighting they might help defend their masters’ homes. Some slaves also served as rowers in the Athenian and other navies. Helots too could be armed, and as the Classical period wore on, the Spartans increasingly used freed helot hoplites to supplement their dwindling citizen troops.
Non-Greek fighting women, the Amazons, constitute a prominent motif of Classical art, often as mythical stand-ins for the Persians. The participation of real Greek women in warfare, however, receives only rare mention in ancient sources. In Classical Greece, many of the military functions performed by female auxiliaries in other societies were the responsibility of slave or helot attendants. Still, women did on occasion accompany Classical armies. The Athenians besieging Samos in 440/39, for instance, allegedly brought courtesans (hetairai) along with them (Athenaios 572F), while Thucydides records that 110 women bakers served alongside the 480 defenders of Plataiai (Thuc. 2.78). In mercenary armies, women could become valued and vocal members of the soldiers’ community, as Xenophon demonstrates in the Anabasis, his memoir of life with the Cyreans. Women also participated in urban combat, hurling tiles and stones from rooftops against invading troops.
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