The line separating slavery and freedom in the Archaic period was not always clear. For instance, in Greece, there were groups in society that were not regarded as slaves officially, but were de facto slaves who were not accepted into the community of the polis. Thus, Sparta had its subjugated population of helots: they had to till the plots of land assigned to individual Spartans and surrender a large part of the produce to them; they had no freedom of movement, being bound to their masters and to the fields they had to work. Yet, individual Spartans could not freely dispose of “their” helots as if they were slaves, for example, by selling them or setting them free, for it was only the state that could give them their freedom. Thus, the helots were slaves of the Spartan polis, of which they could not be citizens. Somewhat comparable situations existed in Crete, where the Dorians had established many small states that were usually, as in Sparta, based on a clear demarcation between citizen-warriors on the one hand and an indigenous subject population on the other. The latter worked the fields of the citizens but had presumably a slightly better position in society than the helots in Sparta. In Thessaly, in the beginning of the 1st millennium BC, an aristocracy emerged that had more or less divided the peasant population among themselves; we hear of large numbers of serfs belonging to individual noblemen. Their exact status is hard to delineate, but it seems that the serfs here were more closely bound to their overlords, whereas in Crete and especially in Sparta they were primarily subject to the collectivity of the polis. Traces of comparable institutions have been found in various other Greek states, but the details are mostly unknown to us. In all these cases, however, the affected people had been living in a certain area for some time before being subjugated by the citizens or the elites of poleis founded in their midst, and although they were not formally treated as slaves, they were reduced to a position of serfdom and were never adopted into the communities of the poleis. In Italy, we may think of the city-states of the Etruscans, where, as far as we know, the indigenous Italic populations lived in a state of serfdom. Greek colonies in Sicily, such as Syracuse, and presumably many Greek cities on the coasts of the Black Sea, had also reduced the indigenous populations in the vicinity to a form of serfdom, if not downright slavery.
World History
