BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Two
Hellespont; clearing the area of pirates and establishing an Athenian colony there
manifestly fell in line with Athens’ desire to reap and control the rewards of empire. 36
On the other hand, the expedition is also presented as a ‘personal’ one undertaken by
Cimon to recover the bones of Theseus (esp. Plut. Cim. 8.5-6). When he returned to
Athens, he housed the bones in a Theseion which he (re-)built and which had on its walls
paintings depicting Theseus’ exploits: battles against the Amazons and Centaurs, and a
visit to his father Poseidon under the sea, no doubt a potent metaphor for Athens’
thalassocracy (Paus. 1.17.2-3). 37 Such a gift to the city, funded by Cimon’s conquest,
both signaled Athens’ naval archē generally and glorified Cimon’s excellence in
particular. 38 It thus simultaneously negotiated Athens’ relations to her allies and Cimon’s
relationship to the polis.
The monies of patronage and empire were functionally identical: both circulated
within a kind of economic distribution—whether tribute or handouts, food or military
protection—saturated with the valence of vertical political relations: enslavement to
Athenian hegemony in the case of the tribute, political authority over the dēmos in the
case of elite services to the city. But if these monies functioned as metaphors for a
distinct set of vertical relations, bribe monies short-circuited those relations. Elsewhere
in Plutarch’s Life of Cimon, in fact, Cimon is again praised for being “incorruptible and
untouched by dōrodokia in politics” (a)de/kaston kai\ a1qikton e)n th| = politei/a|
dwrodoki/aj) while nearly all of the other public officials of his day took their fill of
36 Podlecki (1971: 142). Pirates: Plut. Cim. 8.3-5. Colony: Thuc. 1.98.2, DS 11.60.2.
37 On the wall paintings and their political symbolism, see Walker (1995: esp. 58), Mills (1997: 36-8).
38 Pace Walker (1995: 56-61), Podlecki (1971) makes a compelling case for how Cimon’s private
expenditure brought him consider public honor in this case; cf. Domingo Gygax (forthcoming: 202). For
other public monuments that glorified individual citizens and were funded through military campaigns, see
also Themistocles’ erection of the Temple of Artemis Aristoboule (Plut. Them. 22.1-2) and Cimon’s
probable role in the construction of the Stoa Poikile, which featured, among other paintings, depictions of
both himself and his father Miltiades (Paus. 1.15.1-3).
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