BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter One
for example, by obtaining even just a rough approximation of what the Athenians
considered an ‘abuse’, ‘public’, ‘power’, ‘private’ and ‘gain’, we might begin to
understand which actions did and did not constitute bribery at Athens. From there we
could more accurately differentiate between those actions that were really bribery at
Athens and those that only seem (to us) like bribery but were perfectly licit for the
Athenians, and so forth.
Or so the theory goes. There are immediate, salient problems with taking a
definition like “abuse of public power for private gain”—already laden in specific
normative terms, it seems—and trying to translate it from one normative context to
another. Even within a given set of cultural norms, it is unclear on what grounds
‘abuse’ should be defined. Is it a violation of formal (legal) rules regarding the conduct
of public officials, an action that goes contrary to the public interest, or one that goes
against the public’s conception of what is acceptable? 2 Again, we could simply limit
ourselves to one way of defining ‘abuse’ (or ‘power’ or ‘gain’, for that matter). But
doing so obscures the crucial political work done by, say, limiting our scope to formal
regulations of official conduct while disregarding both public opinion about what the law
should say and the extent to which the law is seen to foster the public interest. This is not
just an issue of asking, when a particular law is thought unjust, whether it should be
2 These three options correspond to a modified version of Arnold Heidenheimer’s (1989) threefold
typology of definitions of corruption. Heidenheimer differentiates between defining ‘abuse’ according to
the norms of public office (i.e. legal norms) or the public interest; alternatively, under a market-based
approach, public officials qua rational (utility maximizing) agents always tend to use public office to
maximize private gain or influence. As Philp (1997: 445) has convincingly shown, however, market-based
approaches always already incorporate legalistic definitions insofar as they presume that proper official
conduct is determined by the law. In place of the market-oriented approach, therefore, I have included
Gibbons’ (1989) definition based on public opinion even though this approach has not gained much
traction; see also Peters and Welch (1978). Legalistic approaches can be found in Leys (1965), Nye
(1967), Scott (1972). Public interest approach: Gronbeck (1978). Market-based model: Banfield (1975),
Rose-Ackerman (1978, 1999), Klitgaard (1988), Goudie and Stasavage (1998), della Porta and Vannuci
(1999), Lambsdorff (2002).
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