BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter One
As in English, in Greek the word for ‘bribery’ and its cognates conveyed both
compensation and norm violation: so dōrodokia (“bribery”), dōrodokeō (“be bribed”),
and dekazō (“bribe”), all of which are attested only from the classical period onward. 36
The literal translation of dōrodokia is commonly taken to be “the receipt of dōra,” taken
from dōra (“gifts”) + dekhomai (“receive”). 37 Note how this derivation implies neither
compensation per se nor normative violation. As we will see, however, this literal
translation is misleading because it misses crucial nuance in the verb dekhomai. In fact,
the morphology of ‘bribery’ words in Greek points toward a semantic meaning closer to
“the receipt of dōra in expectation of something bad.” Just as we might expect, therefore,
dōrodokia, dōrodokeō, and dekazō were a marked class of words that conveyed,
specifically, direct exchange (compensation) and a bad outcome (normative violation).
Let us take a closer look.
Both dekazō 38 and cognates of dōrodokia 39 (dōra + dekhomai) stem from an early
Greek verb *dekmai (“receive what is given”). 40 The literal translation of dōrodokia
36 Dekazō first appears sometime between 440 and 420 (sundeka/sai, rightly emended from the
manuscripts’ sundika/sai, [Xen.] Ath. Pol. 3.7), dōrodokeō around the same time (Hdt. 6.72, 6.82).
37 E.g. Harvey (1985: 83), Kulesza (1995: 11-12), Taylor (2001: 53), Hashiba (2006: 62). This
seemingly innocuous translation is highly misleading, however, as dōrodokia never has such an innocent
meaning in the classical period, and there is no evidence that it ‘originally’ meant “the receipt of dōra.”
38 As the factitive form of the thematic verb de/komai, deka/zw literally meant “to cause someone to receive
in exchange for something,” but it always has connotations of bribery in the classical period: cf.
Szemerényi (1964: 126-8), Chantraine s.v. deka/zw. Note how Hesychius defines de/kwn as “the one who
has been bribed” (o( dekazo/menoj). Some scholars have followed an ancient folk etymology in positing a
different derivation of deka/zw from the way that jurors supposedly lined up in groups of ten (deka/j) to
receive their bribes: Frist s.v. de/ka, MacDowell (1983: 63-8), Harvey (1985: 88-9). Certainly this
derivation n is preferable from a formal perspective, but semantically it is not at all clear that deka/zw is the
correct formation from de/ka. After all, it is the jurors, not the bribe-giver, who ‘make a decad’; we would
thus expect deka/zw to describe the jurors. Moreover, the force of the prefix sun- in sundeka/sai is
redundant if we assume that ‘tenning’ entailed bribing the entire jury. sun- is perfectly understandable,
however, if we derive deka/zw from de/komai. This is to say nothing of the dubious value of Eratosthenes
as our source—pace Harvey (1985: 88)—or the implausibility of an etymology which, as Szeremerenyi
(1964: 126) aptly notes, “explains nothing and clearly bears the stamp of desperate invention.” At best,
Eratosthenes’ testimony might be a good indication of how entire juries were bribed—although
MacDowell’s (1983: 63-8) reconstruction seems fanciful—but we should seek the origins of deka/zw in
de/komai, not de/ka. Cf. Lipsius (1905-15: 174), Calhoun (1913: 67-70), Boeghold (1967: 113-14).
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