BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Four
efforts at financial recovery effectively destabilized the status boundaries between citizen
and non-citizen—granting to non-citizens what had been citizen privileges in exchange
for the financial boon they provided the city—the civic honor inherent in being a citizen
was reinscribed in the monies that citizens provided the community. This amplified the
symbolic value of those monies so that they became metaphors for a citizen’s loyalty to
the polis; indeed, they were emblematic of a citizen’s trustworthiness, as well.
As wealthy citizens contributed (financially or otherwise) to the community,
increasingly during this period they were publicly honored for doing so. Just as in
general during the mid-fourth century we see a roughly two-thirds increase in the number
of extant public inscriptions, around the 350’s and 340’s we find an explosion in
epigraphic sources recording public honors awarded an official for doing his job well. 52
As Lambert (2004: 86) reminds, “it is clear that decrees honoring Athenians were not a
wholly new phenomenon in the 340’s; it was the regular inscribing of the decrees by the
city that was new.”
Indeed, that civic honors were a privileged currency in the polis is an idea familiar
from Chapter 2, where we saw how in the fifth century the dēmos’ authority to distribute
public honors intimately shaped attitudes towards dōrodokia. Yet in the fifth century,
these public honors were awarded infrequently in comparison to the regular provision of
wage or misthos—itself also a symbolic reward—for a range of public officials. 53 By
contrast, in the fourth century, our evidence for a similar misthos is scarce; it appears,
instead, that magistrates were not provided a ‘wage’ which also doubled as a symbolic
52 Hedrick (1999: 392 with discussion at 391-3). Of the more than 250 inscriptions honoring Athenian
citizens during the democracy, none pre-date the 350’s: for fuller discussion, see Lambert (2004: 85-6).
53 Detailed extensively in Domingo Gygax (forthcoming); see also Gauthier (1985).
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