BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Seven
Areopagus’ judgments in bribery trials were no longer deemed authoritative and hence
legitimate by the people; shifting domains thus allowed those who ‘should’ be the
authoritative judge of what constituted dōrodokia—the people—to judge the trials.
Throughout much of the rest of the democracy, dōrodokia fell under the authoritative
domain of the courts.
By contrast, public speakers and military generals, the most important political
figures, were brought under the domain of the Assembly through an eisangelia process.
This makes sense when we consider how intimately connected these figures were to
public policy: whereas juries might be kurios to judge the conduct of either figure after
the fact, only the dēmos as a whole had the authority to assess if their actions constituted
an immediate danger and thereby warranted an eisangelia. Finally, towards the end of
the democracy in the 340’s, as certain decisions made in the Assembly or the courts were
viewed with suspicion, the Areopagus’ reputation as the ancient ‘guardian of the laws’
made it an ideal authority for passing preliminary verdicts (apophasis) in dōrodokia trials
before the Assembly. 30
What I am proposing, therefore, is that part of the motivation behind Athenian
anti-bribery legislation was to use various judicial bodies to legitimate competing visions
of what ‘dōrodokia’ was—and, by implication, what ‘good governance’ was. The law
itself provided at best a heuristic for thinking about dōrodokia, and notably this heuristic
was closely followed by litigants in dōrodokia suits. If anything, the law’s vague
wording would have encouraged more, not fewer, prosecutions, as litigants would look to
30 Ultimately, these notions were part of a larger political debate about what the ‘ancestral constitution’
(patrios politeia) was. A return to the ancestral constitution, including restoring to the Areopagus some of
the powers Ephialtes had stripped from it, was viewed as a way to make Athens more democratic: see
Ruschenbusch (1958), Witte (1995).
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