BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Three
the guard was inherently the type of person, the kind of character who was prone to take
gifts. Indeed, the question of character or character types is largely absent from Creon’s
discussion of bribery, and this marks a crucial difference between Plato’s and Sophocles’
presentation of the dōrodokos. 3
Plato’s distinct correlation of money and character types signals a broader shift in
how the dōrodokos was conceptualized at Athens in the first few decades of the fourth
century. Long before Plato, it had been thought that wealth or poverty could corrupt
one’s character: greed was certainly a well-defined concept before the fourth century. 4
What changed around Plato’s time, however, was that wealth and poverty came to be
heavily correlated with dōrodokia, as well. Dorodokia was conceived primarily as a kind
of financial crime, the dōrodokos a character who had violated economically defined
obligations. Again, to a modern audience this particular conceptualization of bribery may
seem self-evident, but it emerged at Athens for very particular reasons.
This chapter will uncover those reasons, examining what changed from the late
fifth to the early fourth centuries, and then detail the period’s resultant picture of the
dōrodokos. After sketching the political anti-type of the Thirty that pervaded Athenian
political ideology in the decades after their bloody regime, we will examine how the
dōrodokos was closely mapped onto this anti-type in two court cases dealing with
dōrodokia (Lysias 28 and 29). The final section, focusing on Aristophanes’ Wealth and a
3 The distance between Sophocles and Plato is emblematic of the fundamental shift in politics brought on
by Pericles and his successors. Recall that, through provision of jury pay and misthophoria for magistrates
Pericles was similarly thought to have ‘bribed’ the dēmos (e.g. sundeka/saj, Plut. Per. 23.5). Plato later
says that Pericles actively made the Athenians “money-loving” (filargu/rouj, Plat. Gorg. 515e), but
already in Aristophanes we find reflection of whether Pericles improved or corrupted the dēmos. It was
only in discussions of the shift to the New Politics, however, that issues of character corruption arose.
4 Balot (2001: 58-98) on greed (pleonexia) in the archaic period. On the relationship between wealth and
civic character, Solon’s poetry provides particularly relevant comparanda for this chapter: see Sol. fr. 4.5-
6, 6.3-4, 13.11-13W.
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