BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Five
dispute to law, therefore, invariably there are ways in which legal space constrains or
expands, distorts, refracts, or clarifies litigants’ narratives about an offense.
Legal historians of ancient Athens have helpfully outlined a number of ways that
the law in action transformed everyday experiences. 21 I focus here on three specific areas
in which such translation would have occurred when a law was first drafted: defining an
offense, assigning it a penalty, and choosing a process by which it could be prosecuted.
For each of these areas, I would like to underscore that there were two kinds of
considerations that shaped the final form of the legislation: the social meaning of an
offense, viz. the way it was understood in society irrespective of any legal meaning
attached to it; and the social meaning of law more generally, that is, how specific features
of the law were articulated in relationship to each other, irrespective of how the offenses
were commonly conceptualized in society.
For Athenian laws on dōrodokia, therefore, we would expect that how dōrodokia
was conceptualized in society would have at least some bearing on how it was
consequently defined, punished, and prosecuted in law; yet as dōrodokia was transformed
into a legal space, its precise shape may have been conditioned by other entities within
that space, like how similar crimes were punished or prosecuted. These considerations
amount to, respectively, exogenous and endogenous factors that affected the process of
translation: the first affecting the starting point, or how dōrodokia was understood within
society; the second, the end point, or how dōrodokia was incorporated into law. 22 If we
21
See especially Humphreys (1983, 1985), Todd (1993), Carey (1994, 2004), Johnstone (1999), Lanni
(2006).
22
Ultimately, we should not seek to isolate completely these exogenous and endogenous factors. As recent
sociolegal scholars have demonstrated, the way an offense is conceived affects how it is incorporated into
law, but how it is incorporated into the law shapes, too, how it is conceived in society. In this sense, law
both structures and is structured by cultural norms: Silbey (1992, 2005), Sarat and Simon (2001), Ewick
and Silbey (2005), Mezey (2003), Rosen (2006).
225