Bribery in classical Athens.

This dissertation proposes a fresh look at bribery and its regulation to examine how bribery shaped the development of the ancient Athenian democracy (508/7--322 BCE). Political scientists and economists commonly treat bribery as a kind of inefficiency that can be minimized through proper institutional incentives and legal sanctions within a static polity. Yet Athens' democracy was anything but static, and the very 'problem' of d orodokia changed considerably over time. Exploring this dynamic change thus refocuses our understanding of the relationship between bribery and democracy. As Chapter One shows, the concept of dorodokia was used to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate forms of political collaboration vital to the success of the democracy. Rather than define dorodokia by the context in which the gift, favor, or payment was made, the Athenians looked to the outcome of the transaction. 'Good' results, processes, and players were aligned with demokratia, 'bad' with dorodokia. Chapters Two through Four show how changing conceptions of d orodokia were consistently tied to evolving ideas about what good democratic politics looked like. The figure of the corrupt man, or dorodokos, was consistently conjured up in public discourse to explain bad political results. In this way, he played a central role in public discourse as a conceptual bogeyman to changing ideals within democratic politics. As Chapters Five through Seven investigate, the very hallmarks of the Athenian democracy---public accountability, selection by lot, and a clearer demarcation between public and private spheres---were developed in opposition to dorodokia. In this sense, the Athenians articulated the constantly changing shape of their democracy by heavily legislating dorodokia. Rather than focus on minimizing profit from public office, the Athenians designed their institutions so that frequent dorodokia would be leveraged for the common good. In both public discourse and political practice, d orodokia emerges as an integral mode of democratic politics. Not only did the Athenians think through their democracy by thinking with the figure of the dorodokos , but they designed democratic institutions expressly as anti- dorodokia measures. The central question about Athens thus becomes how she succeeded not in spite of, but because of such prevalent bribery.