BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Five
Although this point must remain mere conjecture, we can see how thinking about the law
as a translation of the dōrodokos from social type to legal entity actually reveals critical
nuance in the law’s broader social meaning.
In terms of legal process, Solon’s choice of matching the law against dōrodokia
with the graphē dōrōn process may seem counterintuitive at first glance, but it makes
good sense if we think in terms of domains of authority. If the lawgiver so loathed
corruption among a small group of elite citizens, why, in order to address this corruption,
would he institute an indictment of elite archons before a standing body of elite former
archons (the Areopagus) who may have been opposed to the interests of the people? This
question is easier to answer when we note that, as Danielle Allen has perceptively
illuminated, a punishment like atimia was akin to religious purification. 79 Those who had
taken dōra illicitly were thought to have violated the sanctity of their office and aligned
themselves against the community’s interests. By acting against the community’s
interests, the dōrodokos failed to provide a proper return, in essence contaminating his
civic friendship with the community. Solon’s response was to purify the community by
casting the offender outside its boundaries—precisely the kind of transformation of
insider into outsider as was noted above.
Crucially, the body that was to judge this offense was the most hallowed political
body in the archaic polis: the Areopagus Council. Throughout the archaic and classical
periods the Areopagus heard cases incurring the greatest religious pollution—murder,
intentional wounding, cutting down Athens’ sacred olive trees, and serious political
crimes in the first part of the democracy—meaning the pollution caused by bribery fell
79 Allen (2000: 209-11). On the similarities between religious purification and punishment in the Greek
polis, see also Gernet (1981: 240-251, 265-7), Cantarella (1988).
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