BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Chapter One
illegitimate, acted as a conceptual frame for thinking about politics. Encoded within each
was a lens for understanding how politics should or should not be conducted.
Herein lay the importance of bribery as a political narrative. In claiming that an
insider had committed bribery, or in defending oneself against an outsider’s accusation of
bribery, an Athenian implicitly (or explicitly) tried to legitimate one set of political
norms—one way of understanding the dōrodokos or the ideal public official—while
delegitimizing another. As was suggested in the first section of this chapter, he was
aligning himself with a particular narrative about how politics should be conducted. This
narrative both framed what the norms governing the moral community of the people
should be and cast an opponent—whether the dōrodokos himself or his accuser—outside
that moral community. Within the practice of politics, accusations of dōrodokia could
thus be used to (de-)legitimate new ways of conducting politics. As new social
relationships were leveraged in new ways in the democracy, whether they had been
leveraged in a good or a bad way was framed through the idea of bribery. As will be
crucial in the story we will trace, acceptable outcomes were defined as ‘democracy’,
unacceptable as ‘bribery’. Crucially, these attempts at legitimization or delegitimization
focused on the currency of political relationships: the monies of one were counterpoised
against the monies of the other. Tracing these monies will tell us much not only about
dōrodokia, but especially about dēmokratia.
Looking Ahead:
The above framework for understanding bribery will form the basis of the next
three chapters, which will take a diachronic look at the figure of the dōrodokos in the
Athenian democracy. As we will see, the dōrodokos was the bogeyman of the
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