BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Introduction
signals a different approach to bribery and its regulation will thus motivate a synopsis of
the larger argument to come.
In defining what bribery was, the Athenians focused on outcome, not intent. The
Athenian word for bribery was dōrodokia, which literally meant “the receipt of gifts in
anticipation of some bad outcome.” 20 There was no word for ‘bribes’, and without a bad
outcome associated with the gifts, there was no bribery to speak of. Thus, the main law
against dōrodokia explicitly defined the offense of bribery as whenever someone gives or
receives “to the harm of the people” (e)pi\ bla/bh| tou= dh/mou, Dem. 21.113). The
Athenians conceptualized dōrodokia by focusing on the outcome: what mattered was the
result of the gifts, not the context in or intent with which they were given. Gifts with bad
outcomes were bribes; and bad outcomes were presumed to be caused by bribery. 21 In
this sense, the appropriate question we should ask about Timagoras was not whether or
not he intended to abuse his power, but whether or not the outcome of his actions was
acceptable.
Surely disagreements over what constituted an acceptable outcome arose in the
democracy: witness Timagoras’ misestimation of Athenian attitudes towards his gift-
taking and especially towards the outcome of the treaty he negotiated with the King.
These evaluative discrepancies underpin Chapter One, in which I respond to the problem
of definition by outlining a relational model of bribery. This model treats bribery not as a
class of political actions, but as a political claim about actions. Bribery, on my view, is a
kind of social frame: a normative assessment of a sequence of events positing a
20 This is a controversial translation, defended at length in Chapter One. Usually scholars translate
dōrodokia as “receipt of gifts”: Harvey (1985: 83), Kulesza (1995: 11-12), Taylor (2001: 53), Hashiba
(2006: 62), but this is inherently problematic: Chapter One below.
21 I thank Arudra Burra for clarifying for me the distinction between these constitutive and denominative
definitions of bribery.
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