BRIBERY IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Kellam ... - Historia Antigua

Conover Bribery in Classical Athens Introduction
be of just as much use as any contemporary study in shedding light on current models
used to examine bribery.
On the whole, the goal of the following seven chapters is to paint a picture of how
dōrodokia shaped the development of the Athenian democracy: representing an alternate
trajectory that the democracy might take, instances of purported bribery were significant
political and cultural moments at Athens. The Athenians consequently enacted a range of
legal and institutional measures to weigh these moments and leverage them for the
collective good. Each time dōrodokia was thought to have arisen, the Athenians decided
as a collective body whether a particular outcome associated with dōrodokia was
legitimate—and hence consonant with the democracy—or illegitimate—and hence
bribery. And in looking back at the development of the democracy, they repeatedly
looked to the dōrodokos as the conceptual bogeyman of their polity: the anti-citizen who
violated his ‘friendship’ with the community. As we will consider in the Conclusion,
even though dōrodokia appears to have been quite frequent, it need not have been
detrimental to the polity. In fact, this dissertation suggests that we should take seriously
the idea that more frequent bribery, playing the specific role it did in Classical Athens,
actually may have helped, not harmed the emergence and persistence of democracy.
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