BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Six
deliberative process of collective institutions resulted in poor decisions, and within this
context of general institutional failure, dōrodokia was increasingly suspected.
In many respects, this was a new concern for the democracy. In the first half of
the century, the threat of corruption of individual officials was chiefly mitigated by the
large size of political bodies: boards of magistrates came in multiples of ten, juries
numbered in the hundreds, and assemblies in the thousands, so the potential damage done
by a single corrupt individual was limited. Yet, despite their apparently unassailable size,
the growing importance of the jury courts and Assembly as arenas for acquiring political
authority made them all the more vulnerable to corruption. Especially as the
Peloponnesian War progressed and political outcomes worsened, it was here, in these
larger political bodies, that critics like Aristophanes feared dōrodokia was taking root.
We might relegate these fears to only a specific group of Athenians who were
generally critical of what Athens’ polity had become, but it is striking how these new
anxieties over democracy were attended (and often preceded) by legal expressions of a
new concern about dōrodokia. In the second half of the century, the Athenians began to
shift their focus in law from how a public official might be corrupted to how a single
individual, like a Cleon, might corrupt an entire political body through persuasion and, it
was suspected, dōrodokia. 46 Shifting from bribe-takers to bribe-givers, the legal image of
the dōrodokos broadened to include essentially private individuals who came into contact
cf. Thuc. 3.19.1, Lys. 21.3, Diod. 13.47.7, 13.52.5, 13.64.4 and generally Christ (2006: 156-62, esp. 161-2)
on the increasing economic obligations of the elite during the fifth-century democracy.
46 Scholars commonly note the improbability that large groups of people, whether on juries or at an
Assembly, were bribed: e.g. Staveley (1972: 113), Taylor (2007: 325, 329-30). Even despite this
improbability, however, the Athenians readily assumed that large groups were, in fact, being bribed: cf.
[Xen.] Ath. Pol. 3.7; Thuc. 6. 13.1; Lys. 12.43-4, 29.12; Pl. Tht. 173d; Xen. Symp. 1.4; Isoc. 18.11; Dem.
18.149; AP 27.5. More importantly, by positing that bribery of large groups was infrequent in actuality,
these scholars obfuscate the role this assumption played in the workings of the democracy: however
unfounded, it shifted in part how the Athenians regulated dōrodokia.
276