BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Three
first few decades after the Peloponnesian War. 28 What I would like to suggest is that
such a specific focus on negative reciprocity, on providing bads for goods, was born of
the Thirty’s horrific regime. 29 Indeed, the Thirty’s negative exemplum helps explain why
the injustices of politicians might readily be linked with theft or financial appropriations:
both stealing from and actively harming the city were ways of giving bads when goods
would normally be expected. The stereotypical crimes of a tyrant, according to Plato, are
all crimes of ‘taking’ precisely because tyrants are unable to honor the reciprocity
inherent in friendships; no faith can be placed in the tyrannical man. 30 Here, too,
financial ‘taking’ stands as metaphor and manifestation of the tyrant’s unjust relationship
to the polity.
The dōrodokos and the Thirty in Lysias 28 and 29:
Thus far we have seen how in contemporary sources the Thirty’s financial
motives and political injustices were inextricably linked, both on a conceptual level as
forms of negative reciprocity and on a practical level as the pursuit of money was both
cause and consequence of unjust rule. I have suggested, moreover, that this close
interrelationship between money and injustice was symptomatic of a generic type
exemplified by the Thirty and characteristic of a range of ‘bad’ politicians during the first
28 Extrapolating from our admittedly spotty evidence, perhaps more than in any other period politicians at
this time were accused of crimes involving the mismanagement and expropriation of money: Cf. Strauss
(1985: esp. 70-1), Dillon (1987: 165-6). Embezzlement: Lys. 27.19; Pamphilus (Xen. Hell. 5.1.2, 5; Ar.
Pl. 174 with schol.; Plato com. fr. 14K); Epicrates (Lys. 27); Epicrates and Onomasas (Lys. 27.3);
Nicomachus (Lys. 30.26); Alcibiades (Lys. 14.37-8); Archedemus (Lys. 14.25). Malicious prosecution
(sykophancy): Lys. 20.7, 20.15, 20.19, 25.26, 25.30.
29 Cf. Xen. Hell. 2.4.21 and Rosenbloom (2002: 336-7), who posits that the atrocities of the Thirty created
a new conception of violence that ‘private profit’ could cause to the polis. This chapter aims to outline the
effects of this paradigm shift on the different, yet ultimately related, concept of dōrodokia and to examine
in detail the conceptual development that occurred in the generation after the Thirty.
30 Pl. Rep. 9.576a4-8. Note, too, the destruction a tyrant wrecks upon his parents (Pl. Rep. 9.574a5-c4).
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