BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Three
In the Shadow of the Thirty:
Dōrodokia in the Generation after the Peloponnesian War
403-378 BCE
When Plato’s Socrates sets up his ideal city in the Republic, he explicitly bans its
citizens from becoming bribe-takers and money-lovers (dwrodo/kouj…filoxrhma/touj
Pl. Rep. 390d6); the dōrodokos was not allowed in Callipolis. As a result, Socrates
argues, the city should ban all poetry that praises or describes dōrodokia, including lines
from Hesiod, parts of the Iliad in which Achilles accepts bribes, and even certain stories
about the gods, like the hero Asclepius who according to tradition took bribes to bring a
man back to life (Rep. 3.390d-e, 3.408b-c). Socrates fears that the moral education of the
citizens of Callipolis might suffer if such poor exempla were held before them. Indeed,
the philosopher goes so far as to say that they should deny that Achilles was ever so
greedy (filoxrh/maton) as to take bribes from Agamemnon or Priam (Pl. Rep. 3.390e6-
8). As Socrates later explains about Asclepius, if someone is the son of a god, they
should insist that he is not venal or greedy (ai)sxrokerdh/j), and if he is greedy, they
should insist that he is not the son of a god (Pl. Rep. 3.408c1-3). The two are simply
incompatible social types.
For Plato, not only was the dōrodokos a distinct social type in its own right, but
that type was, specifically, money-loving just like an Achilles or an Asclepius, a corrupt
character born of economic excess. Elsewhere in the Republic Plato identifies the causes
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