BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Conclusion
the dōra. If an official did something good for the community, even if he had received
dōra in the process, he was praised; if something bad happened during his tenure, he was
blamed, and frequently it was assumed that he had been bribed, even if the assumption
was unwarranted. 4 It was the outcome of the purported exchange that mattered, and this
outcome was always evaluated with respect to the good or bad done to the community.
As a result, the Athenians focused far less on minimizing an official’s opportunity to take
bribes and far more on ensuring that that official’s relationship with the community
would continue to be reciprocal.
Such a consequentialist approach to bribery worked particularly well in the
Athenians’ case precisely because so much of their political process leveraged social
relationships. Within this context, as we saw, dōra entered politics unproblematically;
numerous sources attest to the perquisites received by a variety of magistrates.
Negotiation of these duties within the context of personal friendships was inevitable, but
it was also desirable to the extent that it fostered greater cooperation and an ethos of
community among the citizens. 5 In practice the leveraging of private relationships in
politics created a range of outcomes, from desirable to undesirable, helpful to harmful.
Hence the Athenians needed some way to differentiate between the good and the bad
leveraging of relationships to achieve political outcomes. Accusations of bribery
4 Recall, for instance, that in the dōrodokia trials of Cimon and the unnamed public official of Lysias 21,
both defendants insisted that whatever dōra they had received should be evaluated according to how much
they had given back to the community: Plut. Cim. 14.3, Lys. 21 passim. Conversely, during the disastrous
Sicilian expedition of the Peloponnesian War, the general Nicias fears returning to Athens, lest the people
(erroneously) condemn him for having taken bribes to lose in battle: Thuc. 7.48.4; cf. 4.65.2-4.
5 Note, too, how higher rates of political participation in Athens meant that political office could be
leveraged by ultimately more citizens in helping, or in being helped by, their friends. Without a discrete
class of repeat political players consistently benefiting from access to public office, the stigma against gifts
to public officials might have been necessarily small. By contrast, in precisely those areas where we do
find a narrower range of political participation—notably military generals and public speakers—anxieties
over the mixing of money and politics were relatively great.
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