There was no end to humiliation suffered by helots from Spartans. They made helots wear hats from dog’s skin, so they would not mix with Spartans. Dogs were considered servile and cowardly animals, thus the canine symbolism was clear to the Greeks.  Each year, the helots were ritually flogged, apparently for no other reason than to affirm their servitude.  Any Spartan could to kill helots without any repercussion or punishment. In fact, mass murders of helots were quite usual in Spartan society.  For example, in 425 B.C. over two thousand helots were massacred in a carefully staged event.

It would seem to make good sense to keep the slaves well nourished, but Spartans were too weird.  Any helots who became overweight were put to death, with their Spartan masters fined for “letting them get fat”.  What is more, the Spartans used to rape helot women as a means of meeting the state’s needs in terms of human resources. Born from this rape girls were left to die, while boys were taken to serve as soldiers for a Spartan war machine.

Have you ever wondered why Spartans were able to spend so much time of the lives on military exercises?  I guess, everyone watched the movie about 300 brave Spartans and their king Leonidas who did not let Persian king to invade ancient Greece. Everyday life of Spartans was shown in great details omitting one “dirty” secret.  The helots.

Spartans were one a very few ancient Greek nations who had their own slaves of the same Dorian origin. In other words, these slaves were their Greek fellows by birth, mostly from Messenia. This was quite unusual for the rest of Greece, where slaves were mostly foreigners, who were captures during wars.

The helots outnumbered Spartans many times by its population. They either worked on Spartans lands or were carrying all domestic work. Yet Spartans hated them as much as anybody could hate his worst enemy.  This unusual hatred of the Spartans towards the helots originates in fear. Given the relatively small number of Spartans in comparison with huge slave population, they feared that helots would attempt to destroy them.

This  fear contributed to mistreatment of helots.  Because of it,  Spartan men always carried their spears, undid the straps of their bucklers only at home.  That may also explain why there were so inclined to succeed in military training.

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I would like to tell you about one of the strangest barbaric rituals of ancient Rome that started after 390 B.C. and took place for centuries. Once a year dozens of Roman guard dogs were crucified on the Capitoline hill. At the same time Capitoline geese were present at the ceremony. They were watching the ceremony of poor dogs crucification, from the most prestigious place, sitting on gilded purple cushions.

This way Roman citizens were commemorating a tragic event that occurred in 390 B.C. which is known to historians as sack of Rome by Gauls. It was a collective initial shock for people of Rome that was hard to forget. The memory of the catastrophic defeat stayed with Rome for generations. The dogs were crucified because they did not alert Romans when the Gallic troops attacked. And the geese were rewarded because honking provided the only warning of approaching Gauls.