BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Conclusion
The view from Athens suggests that these questions are perhaps the wrong ones to
ask. For the Athenians, bribery was not a discrete problem that could simply be solved
(or reduced to a minimal equilibrium); rather, it was a mode of politics that, along with
the democracy, changed, reinvented itself, took on new meaning, and thus had to be
constantly re-incorporated into the workings of the democracy. Athenian bribery, like the
democracy itself, was not a static phenomenon—some isolated inefficiency in the
workings of polity—but was ever dynamic. In other words, precisely because the
democracy was always changing, there was never any set equilibrium for which the
Athenians were striving: certainly Plato and Aristotle understood that polities were
always in motion, always evolving or devolving over time. As a result, there was never
any static ideal of ‘good government’ against which bribery could be measured. To
speak of ‘more’ or ‘less’ bribery at Athens would be to miss the point that the Athenians
seemed okay with even a considerable amount of bribery, provided it could be leveraged
in some way for the good of the democracy.
It is important, in this regard, to underscore the very different way in which the
Athenians approached the concept of bribery. For them the normative value of dōra did
not depend on the context in which they were given or received (e.g. public office), or
even the intent with which they were given. It hinged, instead, on the perceived result of
costs in time, money, and effort: e.g. Klitgaard (1988: 24). What conventional political economic wisdom
suggests is that the ideal amount of bribery lies at the equilibrium where trying to regulate it further would
accrue more costs than simply letting the bribery exist. It could be argued that, given severe informational
asymmetries in the world of Athenian politics—that is, given the enormous costs of trying to monitor
public officials’ financial accounts—this equilibrium was astonishingly high at Athens; on this view, given
Athens’ inefficient technologies for monitoring public officials, we could only expect that they would have
a high amount of bribery.
This view is unattractive, however, given the extreme monitoring the Athenians actually achieved:
they employed treasurers whose sole job was to look after the accounts of generals, they examined the
financial accounts of magistrates ten times a year, and the Athenians did not seem shy about bringing a
bribery suit against an official. Indeed, if political economists have correctly modeled the cost-benefit
analysis of bribery and its regulation, then Athens’ success as democracy and economy is doubly
impressive, for she invested seemingly excessive resources in combating corruption.
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