BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Two
increasingly marked with the valence of political subordination, the Athenians sought to
control not merely the resources but especially the relations of empire; as a result, the
figure of the dōrodokos crystallized as a disobedient official. Our guide for this emergent
conception of the dōrodokos will be Sophocles’ Antigone, performed some two decades
after Cimon’s trial. In that play, the Theban king Creon paints a detailed picture of the
dōrodokos, one that illuminates our understanding of Periclean politics in important
ways. For Creon, the bribes taken by the dōrodokos were illegitimate precisely because
they signaled a refusal to obey the king’s political authority. Rather than exchange good
works for public honor, the dōrodokos disobeyed the king and pursued a wage of silver, a
bribe, instead. Crucially, therefore, Sophocles’ Antigone reveals how the monies
counterpoised with bribes signaled political obedience; indeed, the monies of dōrodokos
and obedient citizen alike were used to think through the nature of political authority.
Sophocles’ Antigone opens with an edict from Creon, the king of Thebes, who
condemns one nephew, Polynices, while honoring the other, Eteocles, for their respective
roles in the recent siege of Thebes (cf. Soph. An. 191-210). Fundamentally, this
proclamation is underpinned by what amounts to a contested definition of the kinds of
social relations that should be the source of legitimate authority within the polis. Whereas
Creon conceives of philoi in civic terms as those who benefit the city, his niece Antigone,
sister of both Polynices and Eteocles, privileges a definition of philia along familial lines.
The entire play thus hinges on this disagreement, as Antigone ultimately chooses to
privilege unwritten laws over Creon’s edict. 58
58 The conflict between Antigone and Creon has been central to interpretations of the Antigone since Hegel.
The terms of this conflict—individual liberty vs. the state, religious vs. secular order, private vs. public,
human vs. divine, man vs. woman—are by now well-worn in the scholarship and perhaps distort the ways
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