BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter One
if that tie is as bare as an arms-length bureaucrat-citizen relationship. Second, and this is
precisely the phenomenon captured by defining bribery as a kind of “illicit payment” or
“abuse,” bribery implies a violation of some norm. The crucial distinction between the
standard view and my own is how these two components—social relations and norms—
are combined with each other to create the category ‘bribery’.
On the standard view, the norms are taken to define the social relations involved
in bribery. As noted earlier, once we define the categories of ‘abuse’, ‘public’, ‘power’,
etc., we purportedly can determine the class of actions that constitute bribery. The social
relations that pertain in these actions are thus wholly incidental, but they are also,
themselves, determined by how we define the prevailing norms concerning ‘abuse’,
‘public’, etc. For an illicit payment to constitute bribery, in the sense that we want, it
would necessarily entail some counterbalancing of ‘public’ and ‘private’. In other words,
bribery would be possible only among those social relations that involve a ‘public’
individual.
This may seem like an acceptable result, but note how quickly it can both under-
determine and over-determine what scholars are actually trying to measure. Where a
strong informal network holds considerable power in society, for example, even if it does
not control the formal organs of government, within the network there may be no ‘public’
individuals, proper. Hence, the use of bribe-like payments within the network should not
strictly be considered bribery under the standard definition. Conversely, it is not always
an ‘abuse’ of power for a public official to receive some kind of gain in exchange for a
favorable vote: again, vote-swapping, campaign financing, and lobbying by special
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