BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Introduction
Athens had little negotiating power, and he might have blamed his sickness for why he
would not room with Leon. In short, we must take seriously the possibility that
Timagoras never considered himself a traitor. To that extent, a rational actor model
simply fails to understand his motivation.
Timagoras was not alone in being wholly ignorant of the ways in which he was
unsuccessfully negotiating his relationship with the community. The first four chapters
reveal how Athens’ greatest politicians—Themistocles, Cimon, Pericles, Cleon,
Aeschines and Demosthenes—were all accused of dōrodokia, yet few seemed to think of
their actions as ‘bribery’. Indeed, if Timagoras and countless other officials like him
were somehow unaware that they had failed the Athenians, they must have understood
their own actions as benefiting the democracy in some way. They must have slotted their
own actions into some larger political narrative about how a ‘good’ democracy functions.
This claim will be taken up extensively in Chapters Two through Four, which
collectively show how dōrodokia operated very much in the shadows of democracy: the
monies taken by the dōrodokos were constantly weighed against the monies of
democracy as two sides of the same coin. In effect, Timagoras and other dōrodokoi may
have thought they were dealing in legitimate political monies, only to discover, too late,
that the Athenians considered them bribe monies. Considerable disagreement arose, in
large part, because within both dōrodokia and the democracy, monies were used as
metaphors for the relationships they negotiated. Bribes signified corrupt social relations
in politics, just as the legitimate monies of the democracy—e.g. state pay, public honors,
tribute—signaled the proper social relations constitutive of the democracy itself. Such
‘weighing’ of monies, then, underscored a more profound weighing of how politics
19