BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Four
like others before him, was convicted perhaps in a desperate effort to salvage the city’s
honor and deter the rest of his purportedly corrupt band from further ruining the city. 85
With the hindsight of history, the city’s efforts to curb elite defection from the
democracy could not save the democracy itself. By the end of 323, Athens’ leaders,
newly invigorated by the death of Alexander, had led the city into what would be her last
war as a sovereign entity: a war on behalf of all of Greece against Alexander’s viceroy
Antipater. But the Lamian War proved yet another failure, as Athens and the rest of
Greece came to be completely controlled by Antipater (Diod. 18.17.3-5). 86 Meanwhile,
Demosthenes, at long last recalled to the city during the lead-up to the Lamian War, fled
Athens after Antipater’s victory and, pursued by the Macedonian’s men, sought refuge in
a temple to Poseidon. When asked to give himself up, he stalled for time, feigning to
write a letter to his relatives while really withdrawing in private to drink some poison
concealed in the tip of his writing reed (Plut. Dem. 29). Though Demosthenes died a free
man, his city remained under Macedonian control for centuries until the advent of the
Romans.
Given the warnings of the oracle at Dodona, of Dinarchus, of Hyperides and even
of Demosthenes himself, it is perhaps ironic that ultimately the democracy was done in
not by a crop of traitors but by a group of patriots hoping to reclaim the city’s freedom—
in other words, by democrats, not dōrodokoi. In this light, the Harpalus Affair, and the
indomitable specter of a political set-up which the trial brings to mind, raises important
questions about the role of dōrodokia trials and accusations in the larger workings of the
85 Sealey (1993: 214) notes that within just six months the Assembly had pardoned or at least partly
exonerated most of the men suspected of involvement in the Harpalus Affair; by the summer, only
Demosthenes for sure was still in exile.
86 Lamian War: e.g. Ashton (1982) and, for the aftermath of the war in Athens, Habicht (1997: 36-66).
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