"Sparta" is commonly understood to mean the city of Sparta as a political entity and "Spartans" its free inhabitants. Only in the blog you quote is the term "Sparta" used to refer to the wider city-state of Sparta that encompassed subjugated settlements outside of Sparta. Historical sources, ancient as well as modern, do not consider the helots to be "Spartan" (or even "Spartiate", a term made up by the author of the blog as distinct from "Spartan", a distinction grammatically impossible in the Greek language).
Σπᾰρτῐᾱ́της is a perfectly fine greek noun and was used in antiquity to denote the ”homoioi” of spartan society, it is not a made up word by Bret Devereaux. Historical sources <em>do</em> consider helots to be spartans, just not citizens or ”homoioi”.
I would suggest reading the posted blog-post. The author <em>do</em> know what he is talking about and–in my opinion—quiet an engaging writer.
In turn, I would suggest not assuming that I haven't read the blog post.
"Σπαρτιάτης" is used in Greek (modern and ancient) to mean a (male) inhabitant
of a place called "Sparta". What the blog author claims is that there are _two_
words, one of which means free citizens of Sparta and the other, helots. He says
that one of those words is "Spartiate" and that the other is "Spartan".
This is a distinction that is impossible to make with a single word in Greek.
The words he uses, "Spartan" and "Spartiate" are two Latin transliterations of
the single Greek word "Σπαρτιάτης", that has one single meaning, as I explain it
above.
Furthermore, the distinction between free and enslaved inhabitans of Sparta is,
in all historical sources, made clear by using two words with different roots:
"Spartan" for the free citizens of the city, "helot" for the enslaved people of
the surrounding territories of the city-state. Nobody else than the author calls
one "Spartan" and the other "Spartiate". That's entirely the blog author's
made-up terminology.
So what I'm saying the blog author has made up is the distinct meaning of
"Spartan" and "Spartiate". I do not claim that he has made up the word
"Spartiate", as you seem to assume in your comment. Please correct me if I
misunderstood your comment, and not you mine.
Apologies for seemingly misunderstanding your post and in turn not making my point very clear! But, surely “spartiate” (or rather Σπαρτιάτης) isn't a made up word? Also, as I understand your reply the classical sources exclusively use that word for the “homoioi”? If so I understand your original point and have learned something new today.
And a small edit: It was your last parenthesis that confused me, I would have written it as:
“or even "Spartiate", a term distinguished by the author of the blog as distinct from "Spartan"…”
Apology accepted. I'm not a native English speaker as you are not a native Greek speaker. Which btw should give you pause before trying to teach me a lesson about my language. I've deleted a comment that made that point more forcefully and I'll now leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out how I know you're not a native Greek speaker.
"Homoioi" (όμοιοι) means "equals" or "peers". That's what Spartans considered each other and they'd use that word in context, but used the demonym "Spartan" to refer to their fellow free citizens of Sparta as did everybody else. The helots were called either helots or ..."the Spartans' slaves".
