BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Four
were thus honored as much for discharging their duties ‘uncorruptly’ as for valuing the
community’s interests and the very honors bestowed by the community.
Ultimately, Demosthenes was not vindicated as having acted adōrodokētōs, but
was instead convicted and fined 50 talents. A man who only seven years earlier had been
crowned as one of Athens’ greatest patriots and counselors was imprisoned, though
allowed to escape into exile (Plut. Dem. 26.2-5). Much of the political atmosphere at
Athens had of course changed in the interim. Still, as Dinarchus’ prosecution speech
suggests by connecting Demosthenes to other corrupt traitors through outright
comparisons or more subtly through various tropes from contemporary narratives of
dōrodokia, much of the political atmosphere was the same, as it had been since Philip’s
emergence. Although Demosthenes was no Aeschines—part of a corrupt network of
traitors hired out to a foreign king—he was deemed a traitor all the same, just one of a
group of leading citizens who debased the city and endangered her laws through their
systematic domestic corruption.
That the dōrodokos became a traitor—and, specifically, a traitor working with
other traitors within the city—pointed to deep rifts in the democracy during the last half
of the fourth century. The fear of elite defection, which would have entailed civil war
and probably constitutional change as well, was persistent; if the rest of Greece was any
indication, this fear was a veritable threat at Athens. The bonds of trust between citizens
were increasingly diluted as Athens tried to effect a financial recovery. So the Athenians
looked to their laws and their own system of public honors as stick and carrot to induce
elite members of the community to participate in the democracy. And so, Demosthenes,
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