BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Three
War and, especially, a metaphor for understanding the oligarchs’ problematic relationship
to the polity. Thinking through the relationship between Athens’ elite and the rest of the
community, the Athenians thought with the dōrodokos. Moreover, as our reading of
Wealth and Lysias 21 has demonstrated, configuring the dōrodokos as a greedy thief
entailed a ‘financialization’ of the ways in which civic obligations were understood.
With a proliferation of arms-length ties in the practice of politics, and with the creation of
political institutions focused almost exclusively on gaining a quantifiable financial return,
the public sphere in Athens grew, becoming more like the bureaucratic world to which
modern readers are more accustomed.
Of course, Athens would not always remain in the shadow of the Thirty, and by
mid-century shortly after the Social War, she had made almost a full recovery,
economically as well as politically. But with that recovery came a new problem: the rise
of Philip of Macedon and the growing threat he posed to Athenian freedom. As the next
chapter explores, with these changes in Athens’ economic and political fortunes,
dōrodokia again shifted meaning, becoming an ever graver threat to the democracy.
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