BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter One
favors one or the other. 88 In that case, it can appear that some inherent obligation has
been broken and, crucially, that this normative violation has resulted from how someone
has tried to negotiate the other relationship. Because such relational work is often
performed through monies—gifts, counter-gifts, cash, favors, entitlements, etc.—the
normative violation is often blamed on the transaction, the very site and means of
relational negotiation. 89
Examining Athens from a relational perspective allows us to push our relational
model yet further. As the case of Themistocles suggests, dōra in political collaboration
can negotiate two relationships simultaneously; when one of those relationships is
thought to outweigh the other unjustly, outsiders readily frame the actions as bribery. 90
We can generalize this claim as follows: wherever there was political collaboration, there
was the possibility that someone might look at the scene and call it bribery. After all,
Athenian politics did not merely leverage these configurations of social relations, but was
in fact constituted by them. Hence, politics at Athens, like politics anywhere, should be
viewed as a specific subset of all the social relations that attain in society. Each political
88 Hence ‘private gain’ at ‘public loss’ shows an undesirable favoring of private over public regard. The
imbalance between a bribe-taker’s profit while the rest of the polis suffered was central to the topos of
“profiting at your [sc. the people’s expense,” treated in Chapters Three and Four below.
89 This is precisely what occurs in Zelizer’s (1994; 2005b) ‘Hostile Worlds’ scenarios, on which see above.
90 Cf. von Reden (1995a: 94). It should be noted that such dual framing always arises in political
situations, but can be found in other social contexts, as well. To return to Timocreon’s abuse of
Themistocles, the Athenian is called a “liar, con, traitor...won over by roguish silver” (yeu&stan a1dikon
prodo&tan…a)rguri/oisi kobalikoi=si peisqei\j, 727 PMG 4-5) for having taken money from Timocreon’s
enemies to keep Timocreon in exile, rather than to restore him as he had pledged to do. Timocreon was
Themistocles’ guest-friend (cf. cei=non, 727 PMG 4), and the entire poem details how, in repeatedly
committing bribery, Themistocles harmed not only Timocreon, but a number of other friends, as well.
There, not restoring Timocreon from exile is a service that negotiates two distinct sets of
relationships—Themistocles and Timocreon, Themistocles and Timocreon’s enemies. Although
Timocreon blames this service on “roguish silver” and thereby assumes Themistocles had been bribed, in
theory Themistocles may have been given this silver as a ‘gift’ with no strings attached and may simply
have been showing more favor to one set of friends (Timocreon’s enemies) than to another (Timocreon).
The poem has been much discussed: see especially AE 415, Fornara (1966: 260), Stehle (1994: 510-11)
on historical issues and Podlecki (1975), Scodel (1983), and Stehle (1994) on the thorny issue of the
poem’s genre.
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