BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Three
and could not be a member of the 3,000. By contrast, with the Amnesty the Athenians
chose to forget completely the entire period of the Thirty, in effect refusing to punish
specific individuals for their specific crimes. That the Thirty and other officials from the
oligarchy had to undergo a scrutiny before being admitted back into the polity only
underscored that they should be brought to trial as offending public officials, not private
citizens. 79 The Athenians thereby laid a foundation of impersonal justice, and in fact later
that year they passed a law making it illegal to create ad hominem legislation (And.
1.87). 80 In short, the Amnesty epitomized the Athenians’ commitment to shaping law
and justice around the abstract, impartial concept of a citizen, rather than the highly
subjective image of an individual. 81
Lysias 21 was delivered probably within only a couple years of the Amnesty, yet
its nod towards impartial political justice points to a trend in political reforms that would
continue for decades. One significant way that the Athenians tried to create a more
depersonalized space for justice was by further separating the ‘private’ and ‘public’
79 Note how it was only after the Thirty that it became routine for all public officials to submit their
accounts at the end of office: see Chapter Six below. Accordingly, that only formal officials under the
oligarchy would be brought to justice could have signaled the Athenians’ commitment to a new system of
mandatory accountability for all officials.
80 As the defendant of Lysias 21 suggests, justice was to be a fair exchanged based on mutual good
character (Lys. 21. 12, 14), a notion which would later underpin the increasingly greater use of contracts in
conducting maritime trade: Cohen (1971), and recently Lanni (2006: 149-74). Even the role of judicial
witnesses like a speaker’s family members, epitomes of a highly discretionary mode of justice, was
severely curtailed. Sometime in the early fourth century it became compulsory for witness testimony to be
presented in written, not oral, form at a public trial: Ruschenbusch (1989: 34-5) suggests an early fourthcentury
date, while Rhodes (1995: 310-11) cautiously posits sometime in the 370’s. Although this law was
probably introduced to diminish the incidence of witness perjury—so Dem. 45.44, [Dem.] 46.6,
Humphreys (1985: 321-2)—it nevertheless could have prevented witnesses from arguing impassionately
(and subjectively) on behalf of a particular litigant: Rubinstein (2000: 72-5).
81 Of course, this process was never complete, and throughout the fourth century, too, we find speakers
appealing to the jurors qua individuals: Allen (2000), Lanni (2006). Still, the shift to a more abstract
concept of law—argued for especially in Ostwald (1986), Sealey (1987), and Harris (2006)—is much more
pronounced around the turn of the century, as epitomized by Socrates’ discussion of the laws in Plato’s
Crito. While I would not refer to the Athenian legal system even in the fourth century as ‘the rule of
law’—see especially Chapter Five below—one central claim I make here is that after the Thirty the
Athenians made the space of law and justice even more ‘depersonalized’ than it had been in the fifth
century.
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