[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
Accusations of corruption are charges often hurled at vilified magistrates or ascribed to whole administrations by opposing political parties; however, the term and its scope are only rarely defined. This is because, while the etymology of the word is straightforward (from the Latin ‘corrumpere’), its value as a comparative historical category is much more difficult to gauge, due in large part to its shifting definition. Its meaning can change from person to person, culture to culture, era to era, milieu to milieu. Because the term is often deployed in rhetorical, subjective, or specifically legal ways, each usage requires historians or literary theorists to apply careful and consistent methods with which to analyze, categorize, and cross-compare them. For a special issue of the journal Cultural History, editors Filippo Carlà-Uhink and Marta García Morcillo turn to the subject of corruption in ancient Rome, a topic familiar to anyone acquainted with Edward Gibbon, the work of Ramsay MacMullen, or the dozens of pedestrian op-eds comparing America to late-antique Rome. The special issue sprang from research conducted within the international project, “Twisted Transfers: Discursive Constructions of Corruption in Ancient Greece and Rome (2020-4).” The authors present a selective introduction to the modern theorization of corruption followed by four articles that use case studies to explore corruptive practices within Roman antiquity from the late republic to the mid-second century CE.
In the introduction, the volume editors state that corruption today has generally been viewed as intellectual historian Bruce Buchan and political scientist Lisa Hill defined it, namely, as having both a moral and legal dimension as a misuse of power for personal advantage (1). Carlà-Uhink and García Morcillo do rightfully recognize, as most other historians of corruption today have, that there cannot be a singular, global definition of “corruption” to rule them all. Its study is instead a practice in measuring deviation in degrees from socially accepted norms (3).[1] They do, however, reject recent attempts to define corruption through solely legal approaches, policymaking, or the appraisal of anticorruption tactics. Instead, they privilege the ethical roots, narrativization, and discourse of individual acts of corruption. The authors stress that corruption theorists must now shift focus to “how material and immaterial transfers are presented, discussed, criticized and justified by both actors and observers.” This is exactly what anthropologists like Marcel Mauss had long been arguing for with respect to theories of gift exchange. The editors argue that applying this method would allow readers today to focus on motivations over actions.
In the first article, “Corruption and the Public Sphere in Late Republican Rome,” Niklas Engel asks whether contemporary concepts of corruption can be applied to Rome in the late republic. The discussion opens on the outrageous acquittal of Clodius after the Bona Dea trial in 61 BCE. To assess modern versus ancient ideas of corruption, Engel wades into the continued debate over ‘privatus’ and ‘publicus’ within Roman mindsets, which were not directly analogous to modern ideas of the “public” versus “private” spheres. He looks particularly at Cicero’s about-face over a law backed by Cato the Younger that would have taken away immunity from equestrian jurors. If the law had been passed, it would have held equites accountable for taking gifts as bribes. Engel excuses Cicero’s defense of the equestrians on the grounds that he was putting his relationship with the ordo above his clear understanding that bribery was wrong. He argues that although Cicero may just seem like an opportunist to outside observers, he really privileged “rank and honor” as a statesman. To me, this is not about inhabiting modern versus ancient viewpoints, but rather a matter of whether we wish to be apologists for Cicero’s hypocrisy in enforcing corruption legislation when it serves him (e.g., in prosecuting Verres) and turning against it when it does not (e.g., when he wishes to preserve his relationship with the equestrians). To Engel, it is about seeing Cicero’s deference of the equestrian ordo in a broader social perspective.
The second article is Sema Karataş’s “Competition and Corruption: Sodalicia in Late Republican Rome.” We again return to the year 61 BCE, this time with a focus on Pompey’s return to Rome and his triumph. Karataş sets the political scene by looking at the letters of Cicero to examine two senatus consulta regarding ambitus (electoral misconduct) and attempts by the tribune Marcus Aufidius Lurco to curb the endemic practice, suggesting that “competition in running for offices and its negative effects again hit their peak in 61 BCE” (30). Because of the fierceness of competition for a small number of magistracies, there was a lot of overstep and misconduct, but her main question concerns the passage of a law on political associations, the lex Licinia de sodaliciis, in 55 BCE. Karataş deftly unpacks the context of emerging political associations in the late republican city called sodalicia, the attempts by the Senate to control them, and the innovative nature of the law in combining old and new procedural practices. Her thorough analysis of the ambitus trials of the republican period is a successful and traditional approach. Her look at the specific makeup and political nature of the sodalicia should be engaged with by scholars of voluntary associations and corruption alike.
Filippo Carlà-Uhink’s chapter looks at corruption and normative behaviors among Roman magistrates in the late republic and early principate. To begin, we are brought back to the Roman republic yet again, this time to Cicero prosecuting Verres in 70 BCE. The focus is on perceived Roman differences between the gift and the bribe, teasing out nuances in how each can be perceived differently depending on the culture, the observer, and the frame. He examines the reception of anti-corruption laws such as the lex Cincia de donis et muneribus (204 BCE) and analyzes how debates over gifts versus bribes continued into the empire (under Claudius, for instance). He concludes that “one cannot distinguish the ethics of gift giving from its etics” (64). Carlà-Uhink argues that most Romans would not have viewed many of the gifts given to magistrates or taken by them as corrupt, and points to the need today to understand how engaging systems of trust, commitment, and consistency may have mitigated or mediated impressions of corruption. .[2]
Finally, Marta García Morcillo looks at the economic thinking in Seneca the Younger’s writings from the mid-first century CE. In a close reading of De Beneficiis and the Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, she concludes that Seneca sees a “dangerous mentality of profit” (71) throughout. Although the analysis here is engaging and philosophically deep, it never fully ties back to the important historical and specific legal contexts of corruption and commercial intrigue under Nero’s reign or its logistics. Making use of Tacitus’ Annals and paralleling Seneca’s rhetoric in his works to, for instance, Tacitus’ allegations of corrupt advisors like Tigellinus surrounding Nero (14.57), the insinuation of cronyism and unwarranted imperial gifts surrounding Seneca himself (14.52-53), or addressing Nero’s alleged used of Locusta to poison his political rivals (13.15) would have helped provide context. Situating these works into the political, economic, and historical milieus within which they were written could have allowed readers to engage with Seneca’s motives and to understand the longstanding issues that Roman landed elites and philosophers had with quaestus (profit) fully.
In his Corruption and the Decline of Rome, MacMullen rightfully noted how historians should apprehend corruption: “We do not understand the past best when we sit in judgement on it. However, where we detect disagreement among the actors in it, we may fairly follow out the consequences of the different preferences expressed, and compare them, and perhaps conclude at the end that one or the other was destructive or dysfunctional” (123).[3] This was the basic methodology he deployed in a sweeping and impressive analysis of the late Roman Empire that also contextualized the embedded rhetorics, ideas, attitudes, and views of Romans from Cicero to Stilicho. Although the authors state in the introduction that they wish to use different time periods from ancient Rome’s history to highlight how their “discursive approach” to corruption might be fruitful, this is not born out in the admittedly short issue. It focuses predominantly on the late republic in the time of Cicero and the early imperial period, with no exploration of late antiquity or early Christianity. This was a missed opportunity that could have improved the range and applicability of the issue.
The history of corruption is an important subject that deserves increased attention. But the volume has its own biases to contextualize. While the title alerts readers to the explicit focus on ancient Rome, the introduction only obliquely signals to readers that the authors will provide a western perspective in determining the antecedents of ideas of corruption today. The authors immediately justify the volume’s necessity by contending that “Our modern idea of corruption” has its roots predominantly in Greco-Roman antiquity (1)—without evidence for this thesis thereafter. By casting Greco-Roman antiquity as the fountainhead for “our” modern idea of corruption in the present, the extensive scholarship focused on corruption in the ancient Near East and Egypt, India, and China (and its influence on the modern global marketplace today) is erased.[4] Each culture developed important, individualized ancient legal and religious texts for addressing corruptive practices like bribery and misuse of funds; many of which remain embedded even today within religions like Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. It is entirely within the rights of a work to focus on a certain time and place; however, championing Greco-Roman antecedents without consideration of the many other ways that corruption today was once and still is understood within the Mediterranean and beyond only perpetuates the centering of the classical world above others. The topic of this short special issue and the contributions within, however, are a worthy endeavor and do open new lines of enquiry. In early 2025, a more robust and chronologically expansive volume focused on Greco-Roman corruption, edited by Filippo Carlà-Uhink and Eike Faber with many of the same contributors to this special issue, was published.[5] Such broader cultural and chronological frameworks can provide more evidence for the issue’s guiding thesis that the “discursive construction” of corruption as a preferred historical method can help us better understand ancient Rome—and maybe even the current moment we are living in—in context.
Authors and titles
Filippo Carlà-Uhink and Marta García Morcillo, “Discursive Constructions of Corruption in Ancient Rome: Introduction”
Niklas Engel, “Corruption and the Public Sphere in Late Republican Rome.”
Sema Karataş, “Competition and Corruption: Sodalicia in Late Republican Rome”
Filippo Carlà-Uhink, “‘He had thoughtlessly accepted certain gifts’: Corruption and Normative Behaviour for Roman Magistrates”
Marta García Morcillo, “Financial Wealth, Value and Moral Corruption in Seneca’s Economic Thinking”
Notes
[1] See also the edited volume by Ronald Kroeze, André Vitória, and Guy Geltner (eds), Anti-corruption in History: From Antiquity to the Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). The reviewer notes that she has a chapter in this volume that addresses corruption in late antiquity.
[2] Neil Coffee already underscored in his analysis of gift giving practices in Cicero that perceptions of “corruption” versus “gift giving” are often culturally contextual ideas, a notion accentuated by his comparative study of guanxi in China with business gifts in ancient Rome (Gift and Gain: How Money Transformed Ancient Rome [Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2017], 99-108).
[3] Ramsay MacMullen, Corruption and the Decline of Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
[4] This is surmised from the fact that the articles stem originally from a panel called “Discursive Constructions of Corruption in Ancient Rome” held at the 2021 European Social Studies History Conference. For religious and historical studies on the influence of corruptive practices from the Near East, Levant, and India, see Richard King, Confronting Corruption: Letting the Bible Speak (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2018); Mark W. Hamilton, “Bribery at the Boundaries of Gift Giving in the Hebrew Bible,” BN.NF 187 (2020): 39-58; Roger S. Nam, “Bribery and the Informal Economy in Proverbs,” Biblical Interpretation 29 (1): 49-66; Fethi B. Jomaa Ahmed, “Corruption According to the Main Sources of Islam,” Intellectual Discourse 26 (2018): 91–110; Upendra Thakur, Corruption in Ancient India (Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1979). This is all just to note that “our” should not stand as a synonym for “European” or “western” simply because it is a book in English written about ancient Rome, if we hope to open up Classics to a global antiquity and future cultural comparison.
[5] Filippo Carlà-Uhink and Eike Faber, Corruption in the Graeco-Roman World: Re-Reading the Sources (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2025).