BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Six
though they had done so since the original Solonian law against dōrodokia. Yet the
debate on what to do with the dōrodokos seems to have cut both ways, for the opposite
concern, to ensure that other corrupt officials were really expelled forever, seems to have
led to the creation of the death penalty for dōrodokia at a euthyna. 41 We can date this
change to after 403, and it is tempting to place it during the revision of the laws
completed in 399. 42 By this time atimia had developed into a different kind of penalty—
one that less directly expelled a threat from the community (he was disfranchised, not
necessarily exiled). Capital punishment, by contrast, would have secured the expulsion of
the dōrodokos from the community, whether through outright death or voluntary lifelong
exile. 43
In sum, the emergence of a new kind of dōrodokia involving tribute collection
resulted in a new penalty—a monetary fine—which gradually became a standard,
alternate penalty for any case of dōrodokia. The penalty of expulsion, whether outlawry
or later death, continued to be used as a penalty for public officials. As practice clearly
indicated, however, there were considerable implications for these divergent penalties.
The Athenians were no longer judging whether the reciprocal relationship between an
official and the community had been severed; they were judging whether it had been
41 So, Din. 1.60 explicitly differentiates between the rationales behind the two penalties. On his view, the
death penalty was intended to make an example out of an offender. I would underscore that the example
being made was that the dōrodokos should be cast out of the community, in effect, that his actions
constituted those that belonged ‘outside’ the community.
42 The defendant of Lysias 21, dated to 403, in a dōrodokia trial at a euthyna, asks simply that he not be
disfranchised or pay a fine, without any mention of death (e.g. Lys. 21.25). In the fourth century, a series
of dōrodokia trials resulted in capital punishment, but these were all at eisangeliai, so they are
inconclusive, though perhaps suggestive, of the penalty at a euthyna: see further below, n. 70. Note how
Plato groups together dōrodokia with a standard list of other crimes for which the Thirty had been wellknown
(Rep. 9.575b), and which in the fourth century took the death penalty (so Xen. Mem. 1.2.62; cf. Plat.
Gorg. 508e).
43 In this respect, the development of capital punishment for dōrodokia, which often resulted in voluntary
lifelong exile, could have been loosely intended to replicate what atimia qua outlawry had accomplished.
The ‘harshness’ of the penalty need not have been at issue, pace MacDowell (1983a: 75-6; 1990: 337)
though see Xen. Mem. 1.2.62.
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