BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Six
Athenians reaffirmed which political domains should make those judgments in the first
place: this specific norm was to be authorized by a jury court, not by the dōrodokos. As
we will investigate in greater detail in the next chapter, one reason for including more
precise definitions of dōrodokia at this time may have been to allow a jury—and, in an
eisangelia, the dēmos—to reauthorize the precise communal norms which had been
thought misjudged or evaded by the dōrodokos.
Subsequent formal measures similarly reasserted the proper authority of a
political body whose domain contained some political norm in the community. If a
dōrodokos had misestimated what constituted harm to the dēmos, or if he had tried to use
dōrodokia to escape judgment by the community, these later measures ensured that the
community had another chance to pass judgment or to be the proper arbiters of what was
and was not harmful to the dēmos. Here, though, it is crucial that so many of these
measures were predicated on the threat posed by veritable networks of corruption, just
like the ones we examined in Chapter Four.
So, in one trial a certain Euxennipus claimed that he had been left off the citizen
registry—and others had been illegally voted onto it—because of corruption involving a
local official and his friends. 72 Whereas the graphē dōrōn originally had focused on the
corruption of individual agents and only much later came to cover the individuals who
corrupted entire political bodies, the networks of corruption envisioned by Euxenippus
and others in the final decades of the democracy posed a new challenge. Both insiders
and outsiders were potentially already corrupt and working in concert. In response, the
Athenians continued to affirm a proper institutional structure, as they had done by giving
72 The speech for Euxitheus’ case was written by Demosthenes (Dem. 57) and is discussed most fully by
Haussoullier (1979: 41-51), Whitehead (1986: esp. 293-301). For purported corruption involving the
dēmarch Eubulides, see Dem. 57.26, 58-61. Eubulides’ father and corruption: Dem. 57.26, 60-1.
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