BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Five
punishment. 56 Despite such contemporary accounts, these additional penalties have no
clear place in the wording of the Demosthenic law. While it is certainly possible that the
scholiast lopped off these additional penalties when incorporating the law into
Demosthenes’ speech, we would still need to identify when they were added to the law.
After all, it does not seem likely that all three penalties were simultaneously included in
the initial drafting of the law.
Unlike most early Athenian laws, which tend to outline both an offense and a
legal process for prosecuting offenders, the Demosthenic law is silent on procedure. 57
We know from other sources, however, that the graphē dōrōn entailed bringing a graphē
before the thesmothetai, who comprised six of the nine archons, the most important non-
military magistrates in Athens (AP 54.2). In terms of procedure, therefore, we are left
with two questions: why is legal process omitted from the Demosthenic text, and was a
graphē before the thesmothetai the original procedure employed when the law was first
drafted?
It is possible that, when the Athenian law code was revised in 409-399, because
laws seemed to have been grouped together by procedure according to the magistrate
who presided over the trial, some laws may have been redrafted and displayed without
explicit mention of procedure in the law itself. 58 So, for instance, another speech of
and Lys. 21.11, 25 (403/2). This is good evidence that the atimia stipulated in the original law was
interpreted as disfranchisement by the end of the fifth century.
56 Din. 1.60, Hyp. 5.24 (conjectured).
57 On the procedural, as opposed to substantive, emphasis of (especially archaic) Athenian law, see Gagarin
(1986: 51-97), Todd (1993: 64-7). The locus classicus for this idea is the law governing the graphē
hubreōs, cited at Dem. 21.47: “If a man commits hubris (u(bri/zh|)…” and proceeds to lay out the procedure
for bringing him to justice without defining what actually constituted hubris.
58 Quoting the decree of Teisamenus, which ordered the revision of the laws, Andocides says that the laws
were to be drafted on tablets initially and handed over to the magistrates (Andoc. 1.83); Ostwald (1986:
515) plausibly takes this to mean that each magistrate received the laws that fell within his domain of
authority. In that case, although the decree omits this detail, it is likely that the final publication of the laws
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