BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Seven
stand trial; that is, the Athenians created a legal space for articulating political legitimacy.
This space was a trial for dōrodokia, and it was at just such a trial that competing
definitions of dōrodokia, hence competing understandings of what constituted legitimate,
democratic action, might be contested.
Adriaan Lanni has recently argued that the courts at Athens were used to enforce
informal norms generally rather than to uphold formal, legal statutes specifically. 17
Indeed, there are good historical reasons for adopting her view. Without a police force or
public prosecutors, prosecution—like the enforcement of a penalty—was left largely to
private initiative, whether by the victim in a private suit or by ‘whoever was willing’ in a
public suit. 18 As a result, with no legal experts—no professional lawmakers, judges, or
lawyers—the Athenians never imagined that the language of ‘the law’ was in any way
autonomous from society. 19 The jury, composed of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of
citizens who may or may not have been familiar with a given law, learned the ‘relevant’
law only if one of the litigants chose to have it read aloud. Even then, the content of laws
was not granted any privileged authority within the courts, as statutes were treated just
like any other source of communal norms, including poetry, public decrees, or general
platitudes about good or bad behavior. 20 When jurors cast their votes, they did so
immediately after the litigants’ speeches, without consulting among themselves, and
without any instruction from a legal expert, often without any instruction about the law.
17
Lanni (2006, forthcoming). See also Cohen (1991, 1995), Johnstone (1999), Allen (2000: 176-83).
18
Hunter (1994), Lanni (forthcoming: 2).
19
Carey (1994), contra Johnstone (1999); Todd (2000b).
20
For the significance of this, see Mirhady (1990), Allen (2000: 174-6), Lanni (2006, forthcoming). Note
how Aristotle claims that a speaker’s ethos was more important than almost anything else in a speech
(Rhet. 1356a).
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