BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

ABSTRACT
This dissertation proposes a fresh look at bribery and its regulation to examine
how bribery shaped the development of the ancient Athenian democracy (508/7-322
BCE). Political scientists and economists commonly treat bribery as a kind of
inefficiency that can be minimized through proper institutional incentives and legal
sanctions within a static polity. Yet Athens’ democracy was anything but static, and the
very ‘problem’ of dōrodokia changed considerably over time. Exploring this dynamic
change thus refocuses our understanding of the relationship between bribery and
democracy.
As Chapter One shows, the concept of dōrodokia was used to distinguish between
legitimate and illegitimate forms of political collaboration vital to the success of the
democracy. Rather than define dōrodokia by the context in which the gift, favor, or
payment was made, the Athenians looked to the outcome of the transaction. ‘Good’
results, processes, and players were aligned with dēmokratia, ‘bad’ with dōrodokia.
Chapters Two through Four show how changing conceptions of dōrodokia were
consistently tied to evolving ideas about what good democratic politics looked like. The
figure of the corrupt man, or dōrodokos, was consistently conjured up in public discourse
to explain bad political results. In this way, he played a central role in public discourse as
a conceptual bogeyman to changing ideals within democratic politics.
As Chapters Five through Seven investigate, the very hallmarks of the Athenian
democracy—public accountability, selection by lot, and a clearer demarcation between
public and private spheres—were developed in opposition to dōrodokia. In this sense,
the Athenians articulated the constantly changing shape of their democracy by heavily
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