BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter One
bribery seems an odd approach to take particularly for historical societies like ancient
Athens.
This chapter presents a different approach to how we should define and measure
bribery, one that treats bribery not as a class of political actions, but as a political claim
about actions. The first section will present an overview of this approach, examining
how bribery, as a social frame, creates distinct normative patterns in every polity. The
following section will apply this approach to the case of democratic Athens by focusing,
in particular, on the language of bribery and the practice of politics. There it will be
shown that the medium of bribery, the bribe, is emblematic of a host of different ways in
which the Athenians leveraged social relationships in the practice of politics. In the
third and last section, we will consider how the normative value of the bribe often shifts
depending on whether one adopts the frame of an insider—someone part of the bribe
relationship—or an outsider. In turn, public discourse on what did and did not constitute
bribery was, itself, composed of numerous, competing accusations of bribery.
Understanding how this public discourse was constructed will enable us, in the chapters
to come, to measure how and why Athenian conceptions of bribery changed over the
course of the democracy, and how bribery played an integral role in how the Athenians
thought through their democracy.
A Relational Approach to Bribery
The relational approach adopted here begins with the simple claim that bribery
entails both social relations and norms. First, bribery is never conducted in a social
vacuum: there are always at least two participants linked by some kind of social tie, even
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