BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Seven
between how litigants and the law defined an offense. 27 The redrafting of the original
law against dōrodokia thus had the crucial effect of focusing litigants’ attention on what,
precisely, constituted ‘harm against the people’; the norm itself was under trial.
Why would dōrodokia legislation be an exception? It is certainly possible that
this was an unintended, even unforeseeable, effect of the new anti-bribery legislation
towards the end of the fifth century—we have no contemporary evidence either way
about the discussions that went into anti-bribery legislation, so certainty is impossible.
Recall, though, that especially for the Athenians accusations of bribery were always
already claims about polity. It would make sense for a litigant to rely on the wording of a
law precisely because what constituted dōrodokia was a matter that could be defined only
by the community as a whole. In this light, because of the peculiarly political nature of
dōrodokia, the law—i.e. the dēmos’ benchmark for how to define dōrodokia—played an
unusually authoritative role in forensic debates.
Moreover, the legislative motivation I am positing here accords well with another
curious feature of Athenian anti-bribery legislation: the wide range of institutional
settings in which trials could be held, what we termed domains of authority in the last
chapter. For any given offense in Athenian law there were often multiple legal
procedures, each with its own distinct incentives and legal penalties (for both prosecutor
and defendant)—presumably to give prosecutors the greatest flexibility in choosing
whether or not to prosecute. Most of these options, however, did not change the venue of
the trial. Whereas most offenses had at most two different venues for prosecution, at one
point or another dōrodokia trials were heard by at least four different institutional bodies:
27 Contra Todd (2000a), who maintains that there was never any such marked legal language at Athens; cf.
Johnstone (1999).
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