02 - Penalties for Officials in Athenian Inscribed Decrees

This paper discusses penalties for officials recorded in inscribed Athenian laws of the classical period. At a basic level, it assesses what those penalties can tell us about Athenian accountability procedures.

The literature on inscribed penalties for Athenian officials is substantial. In the past decade or so, a number of scholars have discussed this material. Scafuro 2014 provides a detailed study of the penalties and the procedures via which they were imposed and exacted. Beretta Liverani 2013 and, separately, Blok 2021 specifically discuss the habit of stipulating 10,000 drachmai fines for officials. An Athenian penchant for instituting collective penalties (i.e. for entire boards of officials) has also attracted attention. In their analyses of these penalties, multiple scholars (see e.g. Johnstone 2011; Rubinstein 2012; Lanni 2017) have applied the so-called law and economics approach associated with the Chicago school of economics (see Levinson 2003 for an example of that approach). For instance, Lanni 2017 argues that the Athenians turned to collective penalties to improve deterrence and detection, since they encouraged individual officials to come forward as whistle-blowers.

A systematic treatment of the penalties for Athenian officials recorded in inscribed laws is out of the question. Instead, this twenty-minute paper focuses on collective penalties and critiques scholars' use of the law and economics approach. Due to time constraints, I concentrate mainly on fifth-century examples. In essence, my argument is that the collective penalty was not simply a functional tool designed to improve deterrence and detection.

For example, some collective penalties for Athenian officials occur in inscribed laws that granted privileges and concessions to certain foreign individuals and subject communities. In this legislative context, the collective penalty seems to answer an external (i.e. non-Athenian) concern about the conduct of the officials. Insisting that each member of a board was to pay a monetary fine communicated an Athenian willingness and ability to enforce a given concession or privilege.

Elsewhere, a concentration of penalties for Athenian officials (which include examples of collective penalties) occurs in the inscribed decrees regulating the collection and processing of the tribute. Drawing on jokes from Aristophanic comedy and additional epigraphic evidence, I argue that the penalties in those decrees reflect pronounced anxieties about the conduct of councillors and that of other officials whose duties brought them into contact with foreign envoys. Since the relevant collective penalties rarely targeted perpetrators of victimless crimes, I suggest it is anachronistic to view them as functional tools designed to overcome so-called information deficits.

With respect to the examples discussed, I focus on a relatively small number of inscribed decrees and their penalties: e.g. IG I³ 61-2 (decrees for Methone and Aphytis); IG I³ 34, 68, and 71 (decrees regulating the collection and processing of tribute).

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Presenters

Edward Jones, University of Oxford

  SCS-74