As stated in Document C, “at night they descended upon the highways and slaughtered any helots they caught.” Not only would they have the helots work for no pay but if they seemed too intelligent they would be murdered. The helots were not considered citizens, and didn’t live with the city limits. They had no rights and were treated very poorly. The Spartans didn’t need a currency because they had the helots; they would do all of the farming and would get nothing in return. They were forced to give their masters, the Spartiates, half of what they harvested.
In cessation, many could argue that Sparta gave women equal rights and let them run the country, which is more than most early civilizations did, but this strength doesn’t outweigh the many, many weaknesses of Sparta. Some of these weaknesses include having no means of education, being abusive and murderous towards children, and enslaving natives of the land. All of these weaknesses provide a profuse amount of evidence supporting that the weaknesses outweighed the