PERI'CI (Gr. Perkikol,•iterally, "dwellers round about," i.e., round about some particular locality or city) was the name given, in ancient Greece, to the original Achaia:i inhabitants of Laconia by their Dorian conquerors. The Periceci were not slaves, like the Helots (q.v.); they were merely a vassal population, personally free, cultivating their own ground, and carrying ou most of the home and foreign trade of Laconia, but pos sessing no political rights, incapable of intermarrying with the Dorians of Sparta, or of holding important state-offices, and subjected to a land-tax iu token of their dependent condition. They have been—as regards their political position—compared to the Saxons of England after the Norman conquest, and seldom has a historical parallel been so sound. The Periceci must have been very numerous, for they occupied at one time upwards of 100 cities, several of whin were on the boast, whence the whole seaboard of Laconia bore the name of the Perioikois, and they produced capital sailors, which doubt less accounts for the anomalous fact of Perked being occasionally invested with the command of the Spartan fleet. They also formed a part of the Spartan army. At the
battle of Platten, (479 n.c.), there were 10,000 Periceci present. These dependent Achill ans were not, however, all on a dead level of vassalage; they lived in regularly organized communities, where the social distinctions of rank. refinement, and wealth, were as marked as elsewhere. Xenophon speaks of " accomplished and well-born gentlemen" (kaloi agathoi) among the Perimci serving as volunteers in the Spartan army; and such artists and men of culture as Laced‘emon produced in all probability belonged to this class. Periceci also existed in the other Dorian communities of the PeloponneSus.