BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter One
Athenians to define when leveraging a social relation was okay, when it was not. As the
Athenian democracy developed, there was also a need to be able to redefine these broad
political norms over time. As we will examine here, bribery qua a social frame was the
political narrative par excellence for conceptualizing what had gone wrong in a particular
case and why this was ‘wrong’ in the first place. To frame something as bribery was a
way to contest its legitimacy; in this way, competing claims over which social frame
should become social fact were competing claims over how best to understand the
democracy.
Bribery was a popular explanation for political injustice at Athens. When a public
official’s obligation to the community was breached, bribery was usually assumed to be
the cause. These assumptions pervade Athenian political history as public officials’
failure to do what was expected of them—their violation of the obligations inherent in
their relationship with the community—were blamed on bribery. 92 Yet in order to
assume that a specific outcome was caused by bribery, an Athenian had to have had the
idea that most bad outcomes were caused by bribery. How a particular outcome was
framed was therefore shaped by prevailing norms and expectations about politics. In
short, each time an Athenian assumed that bribery had occurred, the very choice of social
frames hinged on broader political narratives.
There are two parts to this idea that the social frame of bribery at the individual
level was interlocked with common narratives of polity. First, bribes were associated
with ‘bad friends’; to claim that someone had taken bribes was to identify him with a
specific social type, what I will call the dōrodokos or corrupt man. In this way, the
92 Strauss (1985: 71-2), Todd (1993: 306), Kulesza (1995: 42-4), Taylor (2001: 161). Pritchett (1974:
2.24) on generals’ responsibility for everything, as well as prosecution of generals for major defeats (1974:
2.20); cf. Roberts (1982), Elster (1999).
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