BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Conclusion
Anti-bribery reform advocates consequently focus on diffusing political power and
reducing discretion while increasing accountability. In making government more
efficient and fair, such reforms implicitly make government more responsive to the
people’s interests. It is perhaps no coincidence, then, that the bulk of suggested reforms
entail implementation of what are essentially the hallmarks of modern liberal
democracies—public accountability, transparency, clear separation of public and private
spheres, and the rule of law. 1
By these standards, the Athenians enacted paradigmatic reforms for combating
bribery. The vast majority of public officials at Athens were selected by lottery for one-
year terms and worked collaboratively on executive boards, not individually; similarly,
the most significant court cases were decided by juries consisting of hundreds of
Athenians, selected at random from a pool of 6,000 potential jurors each year. The
potential monopolization of resources, whether political, economic, or judicial, was thus
slim. Likewise, executive boards were tasked with explicit charges by the dēmos;
although they might have a certain amount of discretion in how they fulfilled their
charge, the members of a board nevertheless tended to have effectively little discretionary
power of their own. Finally, as we saw in the previous two chapters, the Athenians
heavily legislated bribery, creating no fewer than seven legal processes for prosecuting
the gift or receipt of bribes, whether generally or involving specific officials in specific
contexts. By modern standards, the penalties attached to these laws—a tenfold fine,
1 See recently Klitgaard (1988), della Porta and Vannuci (1999), Rose-Ackerman (1999), World Bank
(1997), Doig (2000), della Porta and Rose-Ackerman (2002), Johnston (2005). Robinson (1998) has
rightly called for more research as to the efficacy of these specific reforms; his approach prudently
privileges analytical empirical research over definitions and models. His uncertainty stems in part from the
recognized need to adapt anti-corruption reforms to a local context; in this light, ethnographic studies of
corruption have been particularly illuminating: see Haller and Shore (2005) generally and, for specific
examples, Ledeneva (1998) and Lane Scheppele (1999) on Russia in transition, Rosenthal (1964) on the
Muslim world, and Gupta (1995) on India.
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