BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Two
control the disobedient dōrodokoi. 73 First, in 424 BCE the stratēgoi Pythodorus and
Sophocles were sentenced to exile, while their colleague Eurymedon was fined, because
they had all purportedly been bribed to withdraw from Sicily according to the terms of a
pact with the Sicilian king Hermocrates (Thuc. 4.65.2-3; Philochorus FGrH 328 F127).
In his account of these events, Thucydides ascribes the trial to the arrogance of the
dēmos, which he claims expected to succeed militarily even in the most adverse
circumstances (Thuc. 4.65.4). And again, on the disastrous Sicilian expedition in 413
BCE the stratēgos Nicias counseled against withdrawing from Sicily, in part out of the
fear that upon his return to Athens the soldiers would accuse him of withdrawing because
he had taken dōra (Thuc. 7.48.4; cf. Thuc. 3.98.5). As Thucydides suggests, the dēmos
controlled its generals; for them to have acted without explicit approval from the dēmos
would have been an unjust arrogation of authority, a sure sign of disobedience. 74
To recap the argument so far, just as Athens assumed first economic control over
allied possessions and then political and economic control over the allies themselves, the
Athenian dēmos asserted its control over monies within the polis and then over people
within the polis. As a result, political monies that had operated simultaneously within the
economies of empire and patronage gradually took on the valence of political control and
subordination. This new meaning was particularly problematic within the space of
domestic politics because it signaled a subordination of the dēmos to an individual
73 Stratēgoi were responsible for everything, good and bad, that happened on their expedition: Din. 1.74;
Pritchett (1974: 74). Even an autokratōr general like Nicias, one who had been given complete authority
to do as he pleased, could suffer tremendous penalties if he did not do certain things: cf. IG i² 98/99=ML
78.
74 Explicit when the dēmos blames its stratēgoi for the terms reached at the surrender of Potidaea (Thuc.
2.70.4); cf. [Xen.] Ath. Pol. 2.17. Reading dōrodokia through the lens of obedience in Thucydides follows
straightforwardly from the historians’ trope of the inversion of leaders and led, a motif closely connected
to the insubordination of troops in the field: Rood (1998: 28-31, 142-5). Crucially, for Thucydides the
analogy between a stratēgos’ command of his troops and the dēmos’ control of stratēgoi was clear.
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