BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Six
Athenians about what to do with the dōrodokos man. Should they make him atimos, in
effect casting him out of the community in self-imposed exile like Sophocles and
Pythodorus? Or should they fine him and allow him to be reintegrated into the
community, like Eurymedon or Phormio before him? The divergent penalties for the four
stratēgoi reveal a deep rift in how Athenians were conceptualizing and regulating
dōrodokia at the start of the Peloponnesian War. In effect, disobedient officials who
disregarded the political authority of the dēmos might still be cast out of the community,
their pollution cleansed through expulsion; but a new kind of corrupt official, one who
had committed what amounted to a financial crime, was allowed to stay if he could pay
his fine and thereby mend his damaged relationship with the community.
It is attractive to align this legal conception of the dōrodokos with the incipient
conceptualization of the dōrodokos as a thief, traced in Chapter Three above. After all,
the thieving dōrodokos was somebody who began inside the city’s moral community but
wished to move outside of it by stealing and thereby harming the community. If such a
thief could be punished, might his desire to leave the moral community be corrected?
Ultimately, we have no evidence either way on how, if at all, the social conceptions and
legal expressions of the dōrodokos were connected in this period. But if my suggestion is
correct, one reason why the dōrodokos might have been allowed to stay in the community
via a monetary penalty instead of atimia was that he was defined by a new emergent
conception of dōrodokia.
Certainly, these divergent approaches to accountability—expulsion versus
reintegration—had already characterized the eisangelia procedure for prosecuting
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