BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter One
reciprocal exchanges, more often than not his ‘gift’ was actually both a ‘counter-gift’
repaying a previous obligation and a ‘gift’ incurring a new obligation. In practice,
therefore, the distinction between gift/counter-gift was usually blurred. 66
So gifts and the reciprocity that governed them symbolized a long-term
relationship between two social actors. In this sense, dōra could be used not only to
reinforce existing social ties, but even to forge new ones: by accepting dōra, one was
obligated to repay them, thereby setting off a potentially long-term sequence of gifts and
counter-gifts. To an observer looking in, the acceptance of a single gift might signal a
long-term relationship of reciprocal exchanges. For the Athenians, where there were
dōra, there were friends; and where there were friends, there were dōra. In this respect,
dōra acted as a kind of social glue, a way to bind people together into long-term,
reciprocal relationships.
Certainly these kinds of long-term relationships were the fabric of Athenian
society, but the story of Themistocles highlights how such ‘friendships’ (philia) also
played an important role in the practice of Athenian politics, whether we call these
‘friendships’, ‘political friendships’, or ‘associations’. 67 Indeed, a range of evidence
supports the claim that much of Athenian politics was conducted through the leveraging
of personal relationships. 68 This makes sense at first glance, as the majority of Athenian
66 Duly noted by Domingo Gygax (forthcoming: 86-90) in a discussion of the epinikion as both gift and
reward. Cf. Mastrocinque (1996: 12-13) on the difficulty in distinguishing between ‘gift’ and ‘tribute’ in
archaic Greece. We can see this idea in practice in the way that public honors were represented sometimes
as payment for past deeds, sometimes as encouraging (obligating) future benefactions, on which see most
recently Liddel (2007: 160-82).
67 The semantic field of philia and its cognates, especially philos/philoi, was broad. Philoi could range
from family members to friends to fellow citizens, while philia was more restrictively applied only to kin
or lovers: Konstan (1996); cf. Goldhill (1986: 88-106), Blundell (1991: 26-59).
68 Connor (1971), Dow (1976), Whitehead (1986: 301-5), Strauss (1987), Sinclair (1988a), Littman (1990),
Mitchell and Rhodes (1996), Mitchell (1997), Ober (2008). Cf. Calhoun (1913), Hunter (1994), Rubinstein
(2000) for the leveraging of social relations in the courts.
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