BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Seven
Mass Education, Elite exempla, and the Legitimation of Political Norms in the Courts:
It was noted above that the elaborate sortition of jurors and magistrates would
have affected primarily the masses, while it was primarily elite citizens who would have
been prosecuted for dōrodokia of whatever type. In other words, it would have been
mainly the masses who were so ‘educated’ by the sortition procedures in the fourth
century, whereas elites would have been punished by the law. Did legal regulation of
elite behavior through Athenian laws on dōrodokia have any such educative function? In
this section, I will argue that it did, but not as a means of educating someone who had
already taken bribes; rather, much like the institutional changes outlined above, the law in
action was intended to educate the citizenry as a whole. As we have traced with
changing conceptions of the dōrodokos, elites were held up as negative exempla for how
citizens should behave. In this way, we should think of the law in action as a valuable
site of civic education at Athens; particularly when it came to dōrodokia, it opened up a
unique political space for legitimizing fundamental political norms.
One as yet unanswered question in our investigation of Athenian bribery is whose
definition of bribery prevailed, and by what process did that definition become
legitimate? This was a question of vital importance to the democracy. When a general
was on campaign, if he effected some unacceptable outcome, the dēmos needed to signal
the illegitimacy of that outcome, but how? There was precious little time in Assembly
meetings, and the circulation of gossip was an unreliable means of signaling the
legitimacy of public actions. 16 As this section will argue, the Athenians’ solution was to
create a legal space wherein an outcome—or politician, or political process—could itself
16 On gossip in Athens, see Hunter (1990).
303