BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Three
on justice—his itemization of expenses and quantification of revenue suggest that the
‘good’ of each act was nevertheless measured in financial, both numerical and monetized,
terms.
The speaker of Lysias 21 suggests that his civic obligations should be evaluated
according to a narrowly financial lens—that is, they should be assessed according to the
exact amount of financial revenue they provided—precisely because the polis was so
poor, sources of revenue were few and far between, and the city’s leaders were
plundering the treasury (o(ra=te ga/r…ta\ prosio/nta th| = po/lei w(j o)li/ga e)sti/ kai\
tau=ta w(j u(po\ tw=n e)festhko/twn a(rpa/zetai, Lys. 21.13). In other words, according
to the defendant, the city needed to focus on exact financial revenue in order to recover
financially after the Thirty.
The defendant’s line of thinking fits in well with a range of different fiscal
measures taken at Athens in the generation after the Thirty. These measures focused on
the exact financial return an investment would provide the community. In 378/7, for
example, the symmory system was created, whereby wealthy elties were assigned to a
‘share group’ (symmoria) that would cover the specific cost of the eisphora war tax. 66
This reform seems to have been designed to ensure that the city could collect the full
amount of the tax, that the earlier method of collection—on an individual basis by local
demarchs—simply was not effective enough. 67 When the eisphora was collected, the 300
wealthiest citizens, three per symmory, were liable to pay the entire tax up-front, while
collecting reimbursement from the other members of their symmory. By making
66 Philochorus FGrH 328 F46; de Ste. Croix (1953), Ruschenbusch (1978), Rhodes (1984), Gabrielsen
(1985: 36; 1987: 47-51), MacDowell (1986) on the symmory system.
67 Cf. Hakkarainen (1997: 10-11), van Wees (2006: 369-70). On the previous system of eisphora
collection, see AP 21.5 with 8.3, Davies (1981: 143-50), Whitehead (1986: 132-3).
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