BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Introduction
bribe-taker like Timagoras appears on average once in every twelve pages of Greek for
the democracy, amounting to well over 450 accusations and descriptions of bribery in
extant sources ranging from tragedy and comedy to historiography, inscriptions, forensic
oratory and philosophy. 5 When we encounter yet another instance of Athenian bribery,
the sheer familiarity of the phenomenon, its omnipresence, renders it invisible. 6
As the shocking events surrounding Timagoras’ execution call to witness, though,
bribery was never so invisible in the democracy. Just as Timagoras’ own politicking
serves as a narrative foil to Pelopidas’ virtuous course in Plutarch’s biography—a bad
alternative, a reminder of how Pelopidas could have erred—at every incremental step in
the development of the democracy bribery seems to have been there, lurking, reminding
the Athenians of how their polity might still err. Far from being invisible, instances of
bribery always brought to light an important decision for the Athenians to make. Should
they follow the course of a Timagoras or of a Leon? Should they punish the purported
bribe-taker or legitimate his actions? To chart the course of the democracy, therefore, is
to uncover from its shadows a continuous series of historical foils, points at which the
Athenians briefly considered which direction their polity should take.
5 Particularly given our dearth of contemporary sources for nearly half of the democracy, this number
seems remarkably high. It amounts to, on average, one accusation per oration of Lysias, one account of
bribery per year in Thucydides’ Histories (excluding the Archaeology in Book I), and three accusations per
Aristophanic comedy. My count is derived from the index of sources in Harvey (1985) as compared to
pages of non-fragmentary Greek in the Oxford Classical Text series of classical authors.
6 Within the past 80 years, there have been only a handful of articles devoted expressly to Athenian bribery,
despite the fact that each author notes the omnipresence of bribery in our sources: see recently Perlman
(1976), Wankel (1982), Cargill (1985), Harvey (1985), Strauss (1985), Kulesza (1995), Taylor (2001); cf.
Lipsius (1905-15: esp. 2.401-6), MacDowell (1983a), Herman (1987: 73-81), Mitchell (1987: 181-6),
Noetlichs (1987), von Reden (1995: 93-99, 117-20), Mastrocinque (1996), Hashiba (2006). Athenian
bribery features in only two footnotes in Noonan’s (1984) otherwise magisterial study of bribery and was
absent from Heidenheimer’s handbook on political corruption until the second edition.
When Athenian bribery has been analyzed, scholars have been content merely to answer basic
questions: what was bribery? who committed it? how prevalent was it, and why was it so prevalent? and
how was it kept under control? To my mind these kinds of questions, while undoubtedly helpful, only
perpetuate the invisibility of Athenian bribery as a phenomenon, for they do not engage with the more
profound ways in which bribery, as practice or idea, fundamentally shaped the democracy.
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