BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Four
any ‘wage’ provided. 60 While wealthy citizens on trial frequently cited their public
works in the hopes of receiving favorable treatment from a jury, an informal reward of
this kind was at best irregularly awarded and hence could not be counted on. By contrast,
civic honors voted by the dēmos and by deme assemblies had become symbolic
cornerstones of the community. 61 To reject the pursuit of civic honor was thus to reject
the symbolic foundations of citizenship and the city itself; it was to deny the very ethos of
a democratic citizen.
We can now begin to see why the aforementioned rhetorical shift from presenting
dōrodokia in terms of logos to casting it in terms of ethos and pathos appeared, crucially,
at this point in the democracy. To examine this trend further, let us take a look at the
most famous case of dōrodokia in Athenian history, the Harpalus Affair. In 324,
Alexander was only just returning from India and finally disciplining various corrupt
officials who had been overseeing affairs for him in Greece and Persia. Harpalus was
one such official infamous for rampant corruption and extortion while treasurer at
Babylon. Upon Alexander’s return, Harpalus fled with 5,000 talents of silver to Athens,
where he had been granted citizenship and where he hoped to find sympathy among the
60 Hence the reciprocal exchange of philotimia and communal charis became standardized and formalized
at this time: see especially Hakkarainen (1997: 14-19).
61 On this point, Demosthenes is particularly vehement in his prosecution of Leptines for proposing a law in
355 to abolish the awarding of ateleia, or exemption from taxes in return for services to the city (Dem. 20).
As the orator warns, to eliminate such an honor would effectively discourage anyone from wanting to
benefit the city (Dem. 20.5). His argument is predicated on the notion that citizens assumed that one good
turn would merit another from the people (cf. Dem. 20.151), and that civic honors for services rendered
were a mark of pistis, or good faith, in the reciprocal relations between private individual and public
community. To revoke previously granted honors would thus render all civic honors a)pi/stouj or
“untrustworthy” (Dem. 20.124). This would have been catastrophic for the dēmos, Demosthenes intones,
because it would have removed the one factor that made civic honors in a democracy more valuable than
those in an oligarchy or tyranny: public authorization of the honors (Dem. 20.15-17). Without such
publicly authorized honors, Athens might very well become another Pydna, a city supposedly betrayed by
traitorous citizens who had been bribed by Philip with none other than dwreiai/, that is, the very ‘honors’
which a democratic polis usually bestowed on its citizens. Cf. von Reden (1995a: 98-9) on public
dwreiai/.
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