BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Conclusion
were prescriptive ideas about how a political actor should act. Specifically, as we have
seen, bribery trials functioned as a vital political opportunity for an authoritative body to
think through and weigh in on a particular outcome or policy. Through bribery trials, that
authoritative body could signal its disapproval of certain political results: a ‘failed’
military campaign, for instance, or a ‘harmful’ public proposal. At these legal venues,
the people could begin formal deliberation on what a better solution to ‘corrupt’
institutions might be. All bribery trials offered, whether explicitly or implicitly, a
different view of what a ‘democratic’ polity should look like, and these views could play
a foundational role in shifting—and legitimating—the terms of public debate.
Approached this way, an accusation of dōrodokia was an insinuation that the
democracy was headed in the wrong direction, albeit for a single point in time when an
official had purportedly taken a bribe and thereby effected a bad outcome. It was a
reminder, too, that the democracy could always be better than it was, and it was
consequently an invitation to think about a new trajectory for the democracy. The
significance so attached to bribery may seem excessive to modern readers, but the
Athenians appear to have consciously crafted their institutions to foster exactly this kind
of deliberation on dōrodokia. With vague legal definitions, high rates of prosecution, and
speeches at trials that attempted to place the conduct of the accused either inside or
outside the sphere of permissible, legitimate, ‘democratic’ actions, Athenian laws on
dōrodokia created a political space within the courts wherein the norms on bribery could
be contested and ultimately legitimated.
In this way, by construing a different relationship between law and legitimacy, the
Athenians could perform crucial political work that would have been too time-consuming
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