BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Five
introduced a kind of control over an official’s judgments. 75 Because at this time
magistrates like the archons regularly received dōra—court fees of a sort—for their
service as adjudicators, the graphē dōrōn straightforwardly regulated the receipt of these
dōra. 76 If an official had been suspected of giving a crooked judgment because of the
dōra he had taken, any citizen could have lodged an indictment before the Areopagus
Council. If this reconstruction is correct, then the original law against dōrodokia and the
graphē dōrōn procedure were drafted by Solon primarily as recourse to the crooked
judgments of corrupt magistrates.
I would like to underscore two important details in this reconstruction. If we can
push back the Athenian conception of the dōrodokos as a disobedient citizen to the
archaic period, it is striking how readily this figure seems to have been translated into the
Solonian regulation. After all, Solon’s attempt to institute some kind of check on the
judicial process, whether through ephesis or the graphē dōrōn, was analogous to the ways
in which the dēmos would later try to control the disobedient dōrodokos. 77 The penalty
of atimia, in particular, might have implied a kind of disobedience. Frequently atimia
was used as a penalty for magistrates (and citizens) who had failed to perform their civic
duties satisfactorily. 78 One reason why, I suggest, is that precisely because disobedient
officials could not effectively be controlled, they needed to be cast outside the moral
community of the polis. Like the fifth-century dōrodokos, they were essentially insiders
who were forced to become moral outsiders vis-à-vis the rest of the community.
75 On this point, Humphreys (1988: 469-70) is particularly helpful.
76 Archaic Greek law: Hom. Il. 18.507-8 with Gagarin (1975: 105, 109-10); Hom. h. Herm. 324; so, the
judge Deioces claims that he received no profit from his judgments, implying that other judges did profit
(Hdt. 1.97). In Classical Athens, certain kinds of cases regularly required court fees: Dem. 47.64, AP 59.3,
Poll. 8.127; Harrison (1971: 92-4), Hansen (1991: 261).
77 See above Chapter Two and especially below Chapter Six.
78 Hansen (1976: 72-4) surveys the sources.
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