BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Five
and courts for commercial suits (dikai emporikai), for example, the Athenians
demonstrated considerable sensitivity to how the details of legal process, including who
was authorized to judge a suit, needed to be calibrated to the offense in question. 34 One
part of this calibration was determining which judicial body would be kurios: so the
archon basileus dealt with offenses involving religious matters, while the authoritative
domain of the archon polemarchos was offenses relating to war; similarly, as Athens’
most hallowed body, the Areopagus consistently dealt with the gravest religious
offenses. 35 These domains of authority, as we might call them, were not mere
jurisdictions, but were fields of an expertise of a sort that rendered an official or judicial
body kurios over a particular group of legal offenses.
In creating new legislation, I suggest, the Athenians utilized this concept of
domains of authority, in effect matching an offense to its relevant domain. Of course,
this was never a static process: the Athenians did not simply divide up the kosmos into
various domains and assign new offenses accordingly. Rather, the boundaries of various
domains of authority could be contested with the result that over time domains could
expand or shrink, be combined with or substituted for other domains. Ultimately, the
logic of how these domains were utilized was contingent on the specific circumstances
under which a law was drafted; still, as the next chapter will show, these four operations
on domains recur in Athenian legislation on dōrodokia throughout the democracy.
For the definition of an offense, its penalty, and the legal process by which it was
prosecuted, we have seen how both exogenous and endogenous, social and legal factors
shaped how a law was crafted. One final consideration, then, is the intent of the
34 Thus, one defining feature of the homicide courts was that they were held in the open air supposedly in
order to minimize the risk of spreading the homicide’s pollution to the jurors: Ant. 5.11, cf. AP 57.4.
35 Hansen (1991: 165). Cf. AP 56-8. On the Areopagus’ domain of authority, see below, n. 80.
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