BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Seven
this manner the prime vehicle for signaling disapproval of public policies or political
outcomes.
Simply by considering the results of frequent dōrodokia trials—some of which
were publicized, others of which doubtless circulated around through informal
channels—an Athenian could quickly gather a rough approximation of which emergent
political practices were gaining legitimacy, which were consistently considered
illegitimate. Considerations like these are often overlooked when bribery is treated as a
cancer—an undesirable practice that is inherently foreign to the aims of politics and one
that must be contained—yet readily appear as vital concerns if we think of bribery as a
subset of politics. Thus, the Athenians may not have been effective in containing the
‘cancer’ of bribery, but they were unusually effective at leveraging accusations (and the
practice) of dōrodokia for the greater good.
Indeed, the next section will take up one case-study to explore this claim in more
depth. As evinced by an examination of how the Athenians first instituted public
accountability, the idea of ‘contesting the norm’, raised above in consideration of how
dōrodokia was prosecuted in Athenian courts, spilled over into other Athenian
deliberative institutions. ‘Bribery’ functioned like a paradigmatic anti-type, a metaphor
used for thinking through which kinds of political processes were ‘democratic’, which
were ‘undemocratic’. By making an accusation of bribery at a bribery trial, an Athenian
implicitly offered a contrasting view of what constituted the legitimate practice of
democratic politics, and this view both reflected and shaped political discourse within
deliberative institutions. ‘Undemocratic’ political practices, by contrast, were labeled as
bribery and were thus delegitimized by court decisions and, subsequently, public action.
314