BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Five
‘expertise’ that went into its creation. Accordingly, this chapter outlines how the social
meaning of such legislation was generated through a dialectic process involving social
and legal representations of the dōrodokos. Two main points will be sketched here and
argued for in greater detail in the chapters to come. First, creating new legislation on
dōrodokia entailed ‘translating’ the social figure of the dōrodokos into a legal entity. The
final form of that legislation was thus shaped both by the social meaning of dōrodokia—
changing conceptions of the dōrodokos—and by the social meaning of law and legal
process more generally. This process of translation occurred in three different ways: in
the legal definition of dōrodokia, the penalty assigned to it, and the process by which it
could be prosecuted. One crucial aim of this section, then, will be to abstract general
principles for each area of translation. Of course, translating the dōrodokos into a legal
entity implies knowing the intended effect of a law or new legal process, so our final
point will concern the various functions that dōrodokia legislation played in the
democracy.
Our first concern is straightforward: how do we move from an action in society
to its legal regulation? Some kind of abstraction of this action must occur in order to
create a general legal rule applicable to a range of specific cases. In other words, an
offense must be defined in the law in some way, yet doing so fixes a particular, albeit
general, idea of what the offense is: both what constitutes the offense and what its
broader significance is. This process of abstraction inevitably entails a kind of
translation, for a fixed legal definition can never fully match up with how an offense
might be described by its participants (or even by its observers). When litigants bring a
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