The kyrpteia were the secret police who where
- according to plutarch ''from time to time the young men were equipped with daggers in the countryside to maintain peace with the helots
- at night the krypteia murdered helots whom they caught which wrere loitering around ie at night
- frequently visited the fields and killed helots who stood out for their physique and strength
YOU CAN USE THE FOLLOWING AS A SOURCE SOURCE
Plutarch,
Life of Lycurgus of Sparta, 28:
"The so-called KRYPTEIA at [Sparta], if it really was one of Lycurgus' institutions, as Aristotle says it was, may have given Plato (Laws 630.d) also this opinion of the man and his constitution.
This is as follows: The magistrates from time to time sent out into the countryside at large the most discreet of the young men, equipped only with daggers and necessary supplies. During the day they scattered into obscure and out of the way places, where they hid themselves and lay quiet. But in the night, they came down to the roads and killed every Helot whom they caught. Often, too, they actually made their way across fields where the Helots were working and killed the sturdiest and best of them. So, too, Thucydides, in his History of the Peloponnesian War [IV.80], states that the Helots who had been judged by the Spartans to be superior in bravery, set wreathes upon their heads in token of their emancipation, and visited the temples of the gods in procession, but in a little while afterwards all disappeared, more than two thousand of them, in such a way that no man was able to say, either then or afterwards, how they came to their deaths. And Aristotle in particular says also that the Ephors, as soon as they came into office, made formal declaration of war upon the Helots, so that there might be no impiety in slaying them."
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