BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Three
‘financialized’, just as we saw in Aristophanes’ Wealth. The defendant signals this
financialization in two ways: he enumerates the costs of every one of his liturgies, and he
asks the jury to think of how much revenue in money his services brought the city. First,
every single public service is given a numerical price: 2,000 drachmas here, 5,000
drachmas there, 6 talents over one period of time, 30 mnae and 40,000 drachmas over
another. Had the jurors been keeping a running tab in their minds, they would have
discovered that the defendant had spent 63,600 drachmas—the colossal sum of 10.5
talents—in doing ‘good’ for the city. Elsewhere, too, he refers to his money (xrh/mata,
Lys. 21.13, 21) and the specifically financial value it holds for the polis (esp. Lys. 21.12-
13).
Such enumeration of expenses and value is perhaps understandable in the context
of financial outlays, but the defendant also alludes to the quantifiable revenue his services
brought back for the community. When describing his performance of the trierarchy, he
asks how much ‘bad’ his deeds wrought for the city’s enemies, how much ‘good’ it did
the polis itself; but he prefaces both of these questions by asking, above all, how much
money (xrh/mata) a ship decked out like his brought in as revenue. 65 Although the
defendant never signals that a certain total amount of public revenue and private
expenditure would justly merit an acquittal—in this sense, there was ultimately no ‘price’
65
Kai/toi ou3tw pareskeuasme/nhn trih/rh po/sa po/sa oi1esqe a)nhlwke/nai a)nhlwke/nai xrh/mata xrh/mata; xrh/mata h2 po/sa tou\j
polemi/ouj ei)rga/sqai kaka/ kaka/; kaka/
h2 po/sa th\n po/lin eu eu} eu pepoihke/nai; Lys. 21.8. This language returns later in
the speech with the antithesis of eu} peponqo/taj…eu} pepoihko/twn, Lys. 21.22. Both passages pick up
on contemporary public decrees honoring those who “do the polis well” (eu} poi/ein): e.g. IG i 3 80.9 (421/0
BCE); IG i 3 174.6 (c.420 BCE); IG i 3 102.9 (410/9 BCE); see discussion at Veligianni-Terzi (1997: 198-
200). What is remarkable about this echo is that, in the fifth century at least, this formula appears only in
decrees honoring foreigners with either citizenship or the proxeny. The earliest secure attestation of such
praise in a decree honoring a citizen dates to the mid-fourth century: IG ii 2 1188.15-16 (mid-C4); cf. IG ii 2
196.13-14 (353/2 BCE). It is possible, then, that the defendant in Lysias 21 was consciously picking up on
his perceived outsider status and, with reference to his good deeds, seeking re-integration into the moral
community of the dēmos.
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