BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Five
a law designed to regulate dōra. 53 After all, de/xesqai is a marked verb which connotes
not a general kind of action (like ‘give’ or ‘take’ or ‘promise’), but a specific kind of
exchange (i.e. illicit). When it was combined with the noun dōra to form the offense
dōrodokia, it explicitly marked those dōra as illicit by indicating that their receipt
resulted in a bad outcome. It is important to note, moreover, that this meaning of
de/xesqai was never coupled with other nouns to form new compound words: for the
Athenians only dōra could be marked as received in an illicit way. 54 Insofar as the
original law against dōrodokia regulated exactly what we might expect was covered
under the graphē dōrōn, both the law and the graphē dōrōn process were probably
coupled from the law’s original drafting.
Thus far we have identified substantive changes in what the original law against
dōrodokia regulated, but linking the law to the graphē dōrōn in this way implicates still
further change with regard to the penalty and procedure mandated by the law. Here it
will be sufficient to identify that there was legal change; in the next chapter we will
examine the significance of these changes. The only penalty mentioned in the law is
atimia—‘outlawry’, later interpreted as disfranchisement—yet by the second half of the
fourth century, sources indicate that the penalty for dōrodokia under the graphē dōrōn
could be atimia or, as is more often cited, payment of a fine ten times the amount of the
bribe. 55 Some of these sources also mention that death, not atimia, was a possible
53 Although less straight-forward, this point holds for the later law, as well. The Demosthenic law defined
when dōra became illicit to take, give, or promise unasked; it was a law about gifts, not bribes per se.
54 dw=ra + de/xesqai as intended to change the mind of someone else: early examples in Hom. Il.24.434
with scholiast, Hom.Hym. Herm. 549, Sappho fr. 1.22 (Page), Ar. Av. 937; cf. Harvey (1985: 83). That
dōrodokia was the only noun formed from this meaning of the verb de/xesqai is illustrated by the peculiar
morphological classes of compounds ending in –dokia: see further Chapter One.
55 Only Aeschin. 3.232 explicitly confirms that atimia was a penalty in a graphē dōrōn. Note how in two
late-fifth-century sources, atimia qua disfranchisement is used with regard to those convicted of dōrodokia:
And. 1.74 (400, although the reference might refer to atimoi in 405, when the relevant decree was passed)
240