Volume 104 of Harvard Studies in Classical Philology includes: Jeremy Rau, “Δ 384 Τυδῆ, Ο 339 Μηκιστῆ, and τ 136 Ὀδυσῆ”; Naomi Rood, “Craft Similes and the Construction of Heroes in the Iliad”; Yoav Rinon, “The Tragic Pattern of the Iliad”; Catherine Rubincam, “Herodotus and His Descendants: Numbers in Ancient and Modern Narratives of Xerxes’ Campaigns”; Chiara Thumiger, “Personal Pronouns as Identity Terms in Ancient Greek: The Surviving Tragedies and Euripides’ Bacchae”; Luis Andrés Bredlow Wenda, “Epicurus’ Letter to Herodotus: Some Textual Notes”; Ulrich Gotter, “Cultural Differences and Cross-Cultural Contact: Greek and Roman Concepts of Power”; Christopher Krebs, “Hebescere virtus (Sallust BC 12.1): Metaphorical Ambiguity”; Alexei A. Grishin, “Ludus in undis: An Acrostic in Eclogue 9”; Jackie Elliott, “Aeneas’ Generic Wandering and the Construction of the Latin Literary Past: Ennian Epic vs. Ennian Tragedy in the Language of the Aeneid”; Luis Rivero García, “Virgil Aeneid 6.445–446: A Critical Note”; Monika Asztalos, “The Poet’s Mirror: Horace’s Carmen 4.10”; Denis Rousset, “The City and Its Territory in the Province of Achaea and ‘Roman Greece’”; and Alexander Kirichenko, “Satire, Propaganda, and the Pleasure of Reading: Apuleius’ Stories of Curiosity in Context.”

The name “Helots” evokes one of the most famous peculiarities of ancient Sparta, the system of dependent labor that guaranteed the livelihood of the free citizens. The Helots fulfilled all the functions that slaves carried out elsewhere in the Greek world, allowing their masters the leisure to be full-time warriors. Yet, despite their crucial role, Helots remain essentially invisible in our ancient sources and peripheral and enigmatic in modern scholarship.

This book is devoted to a much-needed reassessment of Helotry and of its place in the history and sociology of unfree labor. The essays deal with the origins and historical development of Helotry, with its sociological, economic, and demographic aspects, with its ideological construction and negotiation.

The crisis of Spartan power in the first half of the fourth century has been connected to Spartan inability to manage the hegemony built on the ruins of the Athenian Empire, or interpreted as a result of the unexpected annihilation of the Spartan army by the Boeotians at Leuktra. The present book offers a new perspective, suggesting that the crisis that finally brought down Sparta was in important ways a result of centrifugal impulses within the Peloponnesian League, accompanied by a general awakening of ethnicity in various areas of the Peloponnese.

A series of regional case studies is combined with thematic contributions focusing on topics such as the relationship of religious cults and ethnicity and of democracy and ethnicity, the use of archaeological evidence for ethnic phenomena, and comparative approaches based on social anthropology.