Bribery and Reciprocity in the Classical Antiquity

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As is generally recognized, the classical Greeks had their own traditional values about gift, according to which reciprocity should play an essential role in forming their social relationships, since the so-called Homeric society. From the private point of view, gift-giving was an important practice, which was sometimes deemed as virtue. But on the other hand, in the public sphere of a polis a gift could easily be converted into bribery, which would awfully injure the common interests. The Greeks therefore had very ambivalent attitudes towards gift and bribery. The main concern of this project is how the Athenians came to terms with, or struggled with, the problem of bribery or gift in the course of the development of the Athenian democracy.The head investigator suggests that in some way or another they succeeded in integrating the reciprocity principle into the democratic systems such as leitourgia, while preparing strict legal regulations and procedures against bribery on the other hand. There could have been several turning points in the change of their attitudes towards gift and bribery : one of the most important epochs of that sort was the Persian Wars(490-79BC), when the Greeks noticed the dangerous effect of gift brought by the Persians to induce some of them into betrayal. In sum, the Athenian citizens, who had originally had lenient attitudes towards bribery until the end of the sixth century, came to realize by the late fifth that at least some kinds of gift could bring a catastrophic result to their community, and therefore introduced a series of legal regulations to punish them in the form of law and decrees.