By offering an analysis of different conceptions of corruption connected to the political regime and contingency in which they developed, the article retrieves a systemic meaning of political corruption. Through the works of Plato, Aristotle, Polybius and Machiavelli, it reconstructs a dimension of political corruption particular to popular governments and also engages with recent neo-republican and institutionalist attempts at redefining political corruption. The article concludes that we still lack a proper conception of systemic corruption comparable to the one of the (...) Ancients because we are yet unable to account for the role procedures and institutions play in fostering corruption through their normal functioning and what this means for liberal democratic regimes. (shrink)

By offering an analysis of different conceptions of corruption connected to the political regime and contingency in which they developed, the article retrieves a systemic meaning of political corruption. Through the works of Plato, Aristotle, Polybius and Machiavelli, it reconstructs a dimension of political corruption particular to popular governments and also engages with recent neo-republican and institutionalist attempts at redefining political corruption. The article concludes that we still lack a proper conception of systemic corruption comparable to the one of the (...) Ancients because we are yet unable to account for the role procedures and institutions play in fostering corruption through their normal functioning and what this means for liberal democratic regimes. (shrink)

A board of ¿law-guardians¿, or nomophulakes, has long been associated with the Athenian regime of Demetrius of Phalerum (317-307 bc). The duties of Demetrius¿ officials have been surmised from an entry on nomophulakes in the Atthis of Philochorus (FGrHist 328 F64), which lists their central functions as the supervision of ma-gistrates and the prevention of illegal resolutions by the assembly and council. This understanding of the fourth-century nomophulakes stands in contradiction to the explicit testimony of Pollux (8.102), who asserts that (...) Demetrius changed the name of the hendeka, the eleven Athenian gaolers, to nomophulakes. A case is made here for the acceptance of Pollux, a case based on textual grounds and on comparison with other reforms associated with Demetrius. It is further argued that Philochorus¿ description applies ¿ as the sole excerpter of the Atthis to give a temporal context, the Lexicon Cantabrigiense, indeed states ¿ to nomophulakes created in the aftermath of Areopagite reform in the mid-fifth century, and that Demetrius¿ officials were linked to these early nomophulakes through their inheritance of different aspects of nomophulakia associated with the early Areopagus. (shrink)