BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

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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. 231
Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Five legislation. We have already seen that different penalties very well might imply different roles of the law in action, so it is worth outlining what these roles might be. There are two different roles that will be of importance in our investigation in Chapter Seven: an educative and a legitimating function of the law. Law and legal institutions are commonly understood as shaping communal expectations, defining or signaling norms, and enacting social rituals that tap into the collective consciousness of a polity: broadly speaking, this is law’s impact on culture and public discourse. 36 What we will be interested in here is a conscious motivation to use legislation to impact public discourse. One idea that will emerge in Chapter Seven is that the Athenians consciously matched vague legal definitions and high penalties with the proper domain of authority in order to signal publicly what constituted an unacceptable political outcome (i.e. dōrodokia). By watching dōrodokia trials, or even by simply focusing on the outcomes of the trials, Athenians could gauge better what kinds of actions were considered democratic, which were considered undemocratic or characteristic of the dōrodokos. Such an educative role for the law is itself predicated on a different, legitimating function of the law. As we will see, to the extent that the Athenians used dōrodokia trials to define which political outcomes were acceptable, they were using legal process as a legitimizing force in society. In essence, litigants unhappy with a given political result frequently called foul and brought someone to trial for dōrodokia in order to contest the legitimacy of the original result. Legal process thus opened up a political space in which the two litigants could debate not only whether a given outcome constituted dōrodokia, 36 On which, see Todd (2000a), Lanni (2006, forthcoming), Papakonstantinou (2008) for the Athenian context; Silbey (1992, 2005), Sarat and Austin (2001), Mezey (2003) for contemporary law. 232
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BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam
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© Copyright by Kellam McChesney Co
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legislating dōrodokia. Rather than
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encouragement that made me crazily
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and long-lasting patience were crit
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CHAPTER SEVEN: Athenian dōrodokia
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BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

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