helot

plural helots

1. historicalAncient GreeceA member of the ancient Spartan class of serfs.

   1 more example

   […] when one of their kings dies, not only the Spartans, but a certain number of the country people from every part of Laconia are forced, whether they will or no, to attend the funeral. So these persons and the helots, and likewise the Spartans themselves, flock together to the number of several thousands, men and women intermingled; and all of them smite their foreheads violently, and weep and wall without stint, saying always that their last king was the best.

   1942, “Erato”, in George Rawlinson, transl., The Persian Wars, translation of original by Herodotus

2. A serf; a slave.

   A man who conceives and writes a great book, my friend, has done more work than all the helots that laboured on these pyramidal futilities.

   1910 January 12, Ameen Rihani, “Probing the Trivial”, in The Book of Khalid, New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, published October 1911, →OCLC, book the first (In the Exchange), pages 10–11

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   All wore a costume suggestive of a more tranquil and prosperous age than this — Dame Clara Butt singing, in a voice not quite so deep as Arumugam's, 'Land of Hope and Glory', the gold squeezed from tropical helots enhancing the upper-class comforts of a cold climate.

   1959, Anthony Burgess, Beds in the East (The Malayan Trilogy), published 1972, page 611

   “In part, the blame falls on the corporate elite,” Barbara Ehrenreich wrote back in 1989, “which demands ever more bankers and lawyers, on the one hand, and low-paid helots on the other.” These low-paid helots are now unpaid interns and networked amateurs.

   2014, Astra Taylor, quoting Barbara Ehrenreich, chapter 2, in The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, Henry Holt and Company, →ISBN