TY  - JOUR
A1  - Carlà-Uhink, Filippo
T1  - ‘He had thoughtlessly accepted certain gifts’
T2  - Cultural History
N2  - It has been highlighted many times how difficult it is to draw a boundary between gift and bribe, and how the same transfer can be interpreted in different ways according to the position of the observer and the narrative frame into which it is inserted. This also applied of course to Ancient Rome; in both the Republic and Principate lawgivers tried to define the limits of acceptable transfers and thus also to identify what we might call ‘corruption’. Yet, such definitions remained to a large extent blurred, and what was constructed was mostly a ‘code of conduct’, allowing Roman politicians to perform their own ‘honesty’ in public duty – while being aware at all times that their involvement in different kinds of transfer might be used by their opponents against them and presented as a case of ‘corrupt’ behaviour.
KW  - corruption
KW  - gift-giving
KW  - Ancient Rome
KW  - bribery
KW  - transfers
KW  - code of conduct
KW  - embezzlement
KW  - Cicero
Y1  - 2024
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/63121
UR  - https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/cult.2024.0296
SN  - 2045-290X
SN  - 2045-2918
VL  - 13
IS  - 1
SP  - 52
EP  - 70
PB  - Edinburgh University Press
CY  - Edinburgh
ER  -