BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter Seven
entire community, not just those of its elite citizens; for decisions that affected the entire
polity, they were kurios. 50 By transferring to the Council of 500 and the jury courts the
Areopagus’ prerogative to initiate and conduct proceedings for public officials, Ephialtes
made it less likely that an elite official who had been publicly reputed to be corrupt would
go untried or, worse, unpunished like Cimon.
If we look between Cimon’s exceptional trial and Ephialtes’ subsequent reforms,
therefore, we can begin to uncover a vital public debate over how to hold public officials
accountable. I underscore that the Areopagites’ bribery trials likely played a crucial role
in this debate. The same courtroom arguments concerning what should or should not be
considered dōrodokia—that is, which modes of politics were and were not legitimate—
shaped and were shaped by public debates found in deliberative institutions like the
Assembly. The accusations of dōrodokia surrounding Cimon’s trial—the injustice done
to the Athenian people or the prosecutor Pericles’ suspicious involvement with Cimon’s
sister—certainly were ways of delegitimizing Cimon’s acquittal. Simultaneously, too,
they signaled the illegitimacy of accountability before the Areopagus. In claiming that
dōrodokia, or some kind of corruption, had occurred, these accusations implicitly called
for a more ‘democratic’ approach, one which had been partly employed in Cimon’s trial
and was soon instituted through Ephialtes’ reforms.
This case-study is emblematic of what I see as a likely trend in how the Athenian
democracy functioned, and so successfully at that. Our evidence for consistent
connections between bribery and politics like the one proposed here, however, is very
limited, and ultimately the value of this approach is perhaps more theoretical than
50 Cf. Taylor (2007).
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