Serfdom not a caste-system 27 



regulations, however well adapted to keep the serfs under control. 

 Sparta always feared her Helots, and it was essential to keep an enemy 

 out of Laconia. Early in the history of Syracuse the unprivileged 

 masses were supported by the serfs in their rising against the squatter- 

 lords, the ryapopot, whose great estates represented the allotments of 

 the original settlers. In Crete and Thessaly matters were complicated 

 by lack of a central authority. There were a number of cities : sub- 

 ordination and cooperation were alike hard to secure, and the history 

 of both groups is a story of jealousy, collisions, and weakness. The 

 Thessalian Penestae often rebelled. The two classes of Cretan 1 serfs 

 (public and private) were kept quiet partly by rigid exclusion from all 

 training of a military kind, partly by their more favourable condition : 

 but the insular position of Crete was perhaps a factor of equal impor- 

 tance. The long control of indigenous barbarian serfs by the city of 

 Heraclea was probably the result of similar causes. 



But in all these cases it is conquest that produces the relation be- 

 tween the tiller of the soil and his overlord. Whether the serf is regarded 

 as a weaker Greek or as a Barbarian (non -Greek) is not at present the 

 main question from my point of view. The notion of castes, belonging 

 to the same society and influenced by the same racial and religious 

 traditions, but each performing a distinct function priestly military 

 agricultural etc. as in ancient India, is another thing altogether. Caste 

 separates functions, but the division is in essence collateral. Serfdom 

 is a delegation of functions, and is a compulsory subordination. 

 That the Greeks of the seventh and sixth centuries BC were already 

 becoming conscious of a vital difference between other races and them- 

 selves, is fairly certain. It was soon to express itself in the common 

 language. Contact with Persia was soon to crystallize this feeling into 

 a moral antipathy, a disgust and contempt that found voice in the 

 arrogant claim that while nature's law justifies the ruling of servile 

 Barbarians by free Greeks, a reversal of the relation is an unnatural 

 monstrosity. Yet I cannot discover that Greeks ever gave up enslaving 

 brother Greeks. Callicratidas in the field and Plato in his school might 

 protest against the practice ; it still remained the custom in war to sell 

 as slaves those, Greek or Barbarian, whom the sword had spared. 

 We shall also find cases in which the remnant of the conquered 

 were left in their homes but reduced to the condition of cultivating 

 serfs. 



Among the little that is known of the ancient Etruscans, whose 

 power was once widely extended in Italy, is the fact that they dwelt in 

 cities and ruled a serf population who lived chiefly in the country. The 



1 See the remarks of Dareste Haussoullier and Th Reinach in the Recueil des inscriptions 

 juridiques Grecques (Paris 1904) on the Gortyn Laws. 



