BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter One
relational approach to bribery, the logic of the gift accorded with the logic of the
relationship in which it was given.
Take the case of Themistocles and the thirty talents. Recall how, under the
standard view, the payments in Herodotus’ depiction of the Greek fleet’s deliberations at
Artemisium seemed baffling; on a relational view, by contrast, these dōra are perfectly
‘rational’. As Herodotus writes, Themistocles successfully persuades Eurybiades, but
only by giving money as if “in fact” it were coming from himself (w(j par) e(wutou=
dh=qen dh=qen didou/j, Hdt. 8.5). In other words, Themistocles lies about the source of the money
in order to leverage his own friendship with Eurybiades. After all, we can imagine how
Eurybiades might readily accept money from Themistocles—who personally yielded his
command to the Spartan (Plut. Them. 7.3)—but might balk at the idea of taking money
from (or simply being persuaded by the entreaties of) the Euboeans, whose shores
Eurybiades in particular wanted to abandon (Plut. Them. 7.4). 62
Similarly, Themistocles and Adimantus were not on the best of terms—note their
bickering before the Battle of Salamis (Hdt. 8.59-62)—and the dōra given and received
reflect this enmity. Themistocles couches his offer of dōra within a thinly veiled threat:
he flat-out commands Adimantus that the Corinthians not abandon the Greek fleet; and
he ominously refers to bribery by the Persian King, in effect suggesting that, unless
Adimantus were to comply, he would be accused of taking bribes from Xerxes. In an
alternate version, in fact, Themistocles makes precisely this threat to one of his own men
(cf. Plut. Them. 7.4.6). The dōra were calibrated to the dynamics of a specific
relationship in each case.
62 Even if we assume that Eurybiades simply wanted to move the Greek fleet elsewhere to give the Spartans
at Thermoplyae a better chance—so Frost (1980: 106 ad 7.6)—it is crucial that he could not have been
paid by just anyone to do so. Themistocles still had to leverage his own relationship with the Spartan.
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