Wowzo, this is better than I'd hoped, the transcript of the BBC "The Spartans" program, narrated and hosted by Bettany Hughes:
Cinadon's conspiracy
from "The Spartans"
One of the conspiracy's leaders, Cinadon, was neither a helot nor a perioikoi but what was known as a 'lower-grade Spartan'. There were a number of ways you could be reduced to this limbo-like state. Cowardice in battle made you a 'trembler'. Low or mixed birth made you a mothakes, like Lysander. You could even be stripped of citizenship for failure to pay your subs to the common mess.
The alarming thing about Cinadon's conspiracy was its reach. It appeared to involve everyone from helot through perioikoi to the 'lower-grade Spartans' – all of those who had been excluded from the full benefits of the Spartan utopia and who, according to Cinadon, wanted 'to eat the Spartans, raw'.
Once they had made their confessions, Cinadon and his fellow conspirators were driven through the city at spear-point, through a gauntlet of whips, to face their final punishment. They probably ended up at a crevasse a few miles outside Sparta called Keadhas, a place of execution.
Ever since, legends about this place have always been sinister, but it seems that, for once, the locals weren't exaggerating. An archaeological study has revealed that the floor of the crevasse is thick with human remains – it's literally a subterranean bone yard.
A small sample of bones removed for analysis were quickly identified as the remains of 17 human beings. They dated from the 6th-5th century BC, and were mostly from adult males; however, they also included the remains from two women and a child aged about 10. Several other adult skeletons were observed in positions suggesting that they had died while trying to climb out of the crevasse, suggesting that at least some of the victims had been alive when they were thrown into it.
The Cinadon conspiracy had highlighted the major flaw in the Spartan system: its almost pathological elitism.
Just made me think of it, that's all.
graphic files and documentary of the Atapuerca excavations