The Helots, then, to whom this business exclusively belonged, a race of slaves, distinguishable however from the slaves or serfs who tilled the land, handing on their mastery in those matters in a kind of guild, father to son, through old-established families of flute- [216] players, wine-mixers, bakers, and the like, thus left their hereditary lords, Les Gens Fleur-de-lisés (to borrow an expression from French feudalism) in unbroken leisure, to perfect themselves for the proper functions of gentlemen--scholê,+ leisure, in the two senses of the word, which in truth involve one another--their whole time free, to be told out in austere schools. Long easeful nights, with more than enough to eat and drink, the "illiberal" pleasures of appetite, as Aristotle and Plato agree in thinking them, are of course the appropriate reward or remedy of those who work painfully with their hands, and seem to have been freely conceded to those Helots, who by concession of the State, from first to last their legal owner, were in domestic service, and sometimes much petted in the house, though by no means freely conceded to the "golden youth" of Lacedaemon--youth of gold, or gilded steel. The traditional Helot, drunk perforce to disgust his young master with the coarseness of vice, is probably a fable; and there are other stories full of a touching spirit of natural service, of submissiveness, of an instinctively loyal admiration for the brilliant qualities of one trained perhaps to despise him, by which the servitor must have become, in his measure, actually a sharer in them. Just here, for once, we see that slavish êthos,+ the servile range of sentiment, which ought to accompany the condition of slavery, if it be indeed, as Aristotle supposes, one of the [217] natural relationships between man and man, idealised, or aesthetically right, pleasant and proper; the aretê,+ or "best possible condition," of the young servitor as such, including a sort of bodily worship, and a willingness to share the keen discipline which had developed the so attractive gallantry of his youthful lords.