BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter One
cash: how do you evaluate that scene normatively? Understanding the pair’s
relationship—husband/wife, father/daughter, citizen/politician, store-owner/customer, to
name but a few examples—is absolutely necessary. So, too, is understanding whether the
cash represents a gift, payment, loan, kickback and so forth. Just as the social meaning of
money hinges on the other two categories, the social meaning of a relationship or even of
the transaction context can hinge on how much money is given, of what kind, to whom or
from what source. 21
In the case of bribery, therefore, for different outcomes (i.e. when different
obligations have been violated), for different social actors or for different relationships
between them, the degree of illicitness varies. 22 This is a second crucial advantage to the
standard view’s focus on what does and does not constitute bribery, an advantage that
allows us to assess why there might be a normative distinction between, say, bribing an
opponent in court to drop a lawsuit and bribing a bureaucrat to obtain a public contract.
On the standard view, identical actions within two different normative contexts (e.g. two
different countries) are very difficult to compare. Often scholars must resort to the
blanket assumption that there are ‘different values’ involved, without clearly pinpointing
what exactly motivates the change in normative value. By contrast, as we will see in the
21 Zelizer (1994: esp. 208-16) focuses on the social meaning of money and analyzes how people ‘earmark’
currencies with specific meaning, making the currencies non-fungible so that the specific content of
discrete social ties can be maintained. Thus, an allowance is different from a gift, which is different still
from payment for chores—all of which transactions can signal different aspects of a parent-child
relationship. Note, though, how the amount of payment for chores, including whether or not such
‘payment’ is distinct from an allowance, can signal a distinctively parent-child relationship and not, say,
that between employer and employee, as in the case of hiring someone to do the same chores.
22 Rigi (2004: 105-8) makes a similar point in isolating the various social variables—like relational
distance, amount of trust, power dynamic between transactors—that influence how and when bribery
occurs.
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