Bribery and Reciprocity in the Classical Antiquity

众所周知，古典希腊人有他们自己的关于礼物的传统价值观，根据这一价值观，互惠应该在形成他们的社会关系中发挥重要作用，因为所谓的荷马社会。从私人角度来看，送礼是一种重要的做法，有时被认为是一种美德。但另一方面，在城邦的公共领域，礼物很容易被转化为贿赂，这将严重损害共同利益。因此，希腊人对礼物和贿赂的态度非常矛盾。这个项目的主要关注点是雅典人如何在雅典民主的发展过程中接受或挣扎于贿赂或礼物的问题。首席调查员表示，他们以某种方式成功地将互惠原则融入到Leitourgia等民主制度中，同时制定了严格的反贿赂法律法规和程序。希腊人对礼物和贿赂态度的转变可能有几个转折点：最重要的转折点之一是波斯战争(公元前490-79年)，当时希腊人注意到波斯人带来的礼物的危险影响，诱使他们中的一些人背叛。总而言之，雅典公民在6世纪末之前一直对贿赂持宽大态度，到了5世纪末，他们意识到至少有一些礼物可能会给他们的社区带来灾难性的结果，因此出台了一系列法律法规，以法律和法令的形式惩罚他们。

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.