BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Two
If I am right about the social meaning of the monies used to negotiate foreign
politics at this time, then we are halfway towards understanding Cimon’s presentation of
the dōrodokos at his trial. Recall that Cimon contrasts himself with the dōrodokos
according to the path that the dōra took: while his own wealth is directed towards
enriching the city, the dōrodokos’ is not. Yet because for both Cimon and the dōrodokos
the source of that wealth derives from Athens’ foreign relations, we should expect that
the proper use of that wealth would reify its social meaning as a money signaling Athens’
power. This is precisely what Cimon’s enriching of the city ‘from her enemies’ (a)po\
tw=n polemi/wn) signifies, as it assigns to Athens possession over and ultimately benefit
from those monies. By contrast, rather than channeling his monies into services that
benefit the city, the dōrodokos keeps them for himself and thereby manifestly assigns
them a different meaning. For the dōrodokos, the monies used to negotiate politic
relationships end up asserting the authority of himself—or, worse, his foreign friends—to
distribute the rewards of empire.
What I would like to suggest, in short, is that by differentiating the path of the
dōra, Cimon also differentiates their meaning. The stratēgos points to one critical way
the Athenians signaled their control over the rewards of empire: public works at Athens,
or ‘enriching the polis’, as Cimon calls it. Indeed, we find a series of public buildings
with clear links to Athens’ hegemony and the wealth it brought in: the Temple of
Artemis Aristoboule, the Stoa Poikile, the Piraeus and Long Walls, and the Theseion all
date to the first few decades of the League. In the same vein, we might add the later
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