BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Two
sketching must remain mere suggestion, as the relationship between mass and elite
shifted in the second half of the fifth century, it is clear that the terrain on which they
battled for political authority focused on the proliferation of legitimate political monies—
like misthophoria, army and naval pay, or cleruchies—and on their purported corruption,
as represented by bribe monies. 98 To invoke the dōrodokos, as Pericles’ and Cleon’s
critics certainly did, was to contest the implicit meaning of the relationships structured by
those monies: it was to contest their claim to be patron of the dēmos.
Such contestation of the legitimacy of political payments—or, more properly, the
legitimacy of monies used to negotiate political relations—attended a major shift towards
a new style of politics, as practiced by Cleon and his successors. The old-style,
patronage-like model of politics practiced by Cimon, Themistocles or Aristides was
replaced by redistribution of the dēmos’ own money, and we have already examined in
this context how misthophoria was re-read as bribe monies. Yet the New Politicians
were considered dōrodokoi also for the way they purportedly took bribes to speak in
public. 99 As we will see, this last image of the dōrodokos, too, was used to contest the
legitimacy of the New Politics.
The New Politicians represented both a significant improvement for, and a new
potential danger to, the democracy. On the one hand, their use of rhetoric explicitly to
98 In addition to employing the dōrodokos discursively to delegitimize some monies, the dēmos may have
used the law to legitimate other monies. Probably between the 450’s and 430’s, the Athenians imposed
limits on escaping liturgical service and created the antidosis procedure, which helped prevent elites from
shirking their liturgical duties: Gabrielsen (1986), Christ (1990) on antidosis and, on liturgies more
generally, Davies (1981: 98-9), Sinclair (1988: 188-90), Christ (2006: 143-204), Domingo Gygax
(forthcoming: passim). These legal changes have rightly been connected to the rise of the people’s
power—so Christ (2006: 158-61)—but another motivation for their enactment could have been to signal
and enforce through law which kinds of elite contributions to the community were legitimate. Indeed,
codifying legitimate political monies in law could have simultaneously broadcast an authoritative list of
legitimate contributions to the polis and, importantly, signaled the dēmos’ control over determining that list
in the first place.
99 See, for example, Ar. Eq. 930-4, 1196-8; V. 100-2, 240-1, 906-8; Th. 936-7.
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