Chapter 4 How (Not) to Be a Citizen: Subordination and Participation of the Perioikoi in Hellenistic Sparta (and Elsewhere)
In: Politeia and KoinōniaSearch for other papers by Christel Müller in
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Abstract
This study investigates members of civic communities who did not have ‘full’ citizen rights of a city, but who formed part of a coherent whole with the politai and who justified their status through economic or military activities. This form of status was typical of Classical Sparta, which included, between the Homoioi and the helots, the perioikoi, far greater in number than the Spartans themselves, together with whom they constituted the Lacedaemonians. Beyond the debate about institutional identity within their settlements, called poleis by the sources, the perioikoi formed a category subject to the Spartans in various ways, serving primarily as a pool of labor for military activities. The perioikoi also maintained complex relationships with the kings, who owned areas in the Perioikis. In the Hellenistic period, two questions arise: what role did the perioikoi continue to play, especially during the revolutions of the second half of the third century and the early second century? How did they disappear as the territory of Lacedaemon progressively broke apart, to take their independence, as evidenced in the late Hellenistic era through the existence of a koinon of the Lacedaemonians? This disappearance, one of the clearest signs of the “normalization” of Spartan institutions, took place while another category appeared and expanded in the third century BCE: that of paroikoi in Greece (Attica in particular) and Asia Minor (such as Pergamum and Ephesus), which allows a good overview of the diversity of dependent categories among which they form a fundamental subdivision.