BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter One
Now we can begin to see what was considered so bad about dōrodokia and why
adopting the frame of bribery (or not) was an inherently political act. By taking what his
opponent called ‘bribes’, the dōrodokos effectively represented a change to the logic of
an existing relationship. At best he was re-negotiating, at worst rejecting, the norms
governing the relationship between public official and the people, citizen and community.
Potentially each side viewed the other as trying to establish a new ideal, a new standard
by which political friendships with the community were to be negotiated. For this reason,
dōrodokoi are often portrayed as weighing the currency of one relationship against
another, esteeming the bribes as more valuable than any rewards inherent in benefiting
the community. 109 This process of weighing was both literal and symbolic: the
dōrodokos had to determine not only which social frame would be given greater weight
in his simultaneous negotiation of two relationships, but especially which normative
context, which set of ideal types, was more important to him.
Such weighing of currencies often resulted in the alignment of bribe monies with
cash, that is, the currency of the marketplace. No doubt some of the time the form of the
bribe was in actual Athenian drachmas; to this extent, calling the bribe monies ‘cash’
could form a purely descriptive role. But often, too, referring to the bribe monies as
‘money’ played a crucial discursive role: it was a way to signal that the relations,
practices, or outcomes associated with the bribe were illegitimate. In this light, bribe
monies functioned as an ‘anti-currency’ to the legitimate monies of democracy; the
former derived their full social meaning as conceptual opposites to the latter. In both
cases, then, the monies used to negotiate political relationships, whether legitimate or
109 E.g. Lysias 21 (philotimia weighed against bribery), Dem. 19.142 with Dem. 19.223, Din. 1.21.
Subsequent chapters will illustrate this point in more depth.
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