Tonight her lecture is on a timely theme, oligarchs and their discontents, as part of her series this year on political crises in Athens and Rome. So thank you very much, Professor Lane.

Thank you so much. Thank you, Provost. Most charitable care have the patricians of you. So spoke the Roman senator Meninius Agrippa in Shakespeare's Coriolanus, a play about ancient Rome in about 491 BCE. Meninius was one of those patricians himself, so that meant he belonged to one of the aristocratic clans that enjoyed special privileges, such as the right to wear a certain kind of shoe. You can see the laced boot there on the bottom right, and also exclusive access to certain offices. So the you to whom he's speaking at this moment in the play is a group of plebeians. And these were the relatively poor Roman citizens who had become self-conscious political actors just a few years before, in a momentous event in 494, when a large number of the poor, as the historian TJ Cornell writes, who were oppressed by debt and arbitrary treatment, withdrew from the city en masse. And this was known as the first ever secession of the plebs. The plebs seceded, they withdrew and withheld their labor until the patricians were forced to accept concessions. So they had to accept a plebeian assembly and the creation of tribunes, officials who were elected by the plebeians to protect them physically and legally from endangerment. So we can see this as a settlement between the oligarchs and the rest. So here's my title term. It comes from ancient Greek, meaning the rule, RK, of the few. And in practice, that means the relatively few and relatively wealthy who use their economic and social power as a basis to claim political authority. Now, in practice, then Shakespeare's play explores the dynamics of oligarchic power in Rome. So Meninius, for example, who was attempting to reassure the plebeians, as I began by quoting, elicited only scorn from an anonymous second citizen in the play, who retorts, care for us, they never cared for us yet. They suffer us to famish and their storehouses crammed with grain. And he complained that they were trying, the patricians, the oligarchs, were trying to repeal the acts that had been established against the rich just those few years before the new assembly, the new tribunes, those are the wholesome acts. And instead, they were providing more piercing statutes daily to chain up and restrain the poor. Now, Second Citizens' mistrust was warranted. Many of the patricians of the time did hold views, these views of the kind that he feared, and that Livy would describe as saying that the patricians openly preferred license for themselves rather than liberty for everyone. Yet Shakespeare's play showcases a divide among the patricians, the oligarchs, that will be central to this lecture. So, on the one hand, we have what I call the accommodationist model. And this is exemplified by Meninius in that speech. So Meninius was willing to tolerate popular power up to a point. He was willing to accept the new assembly and the tribunes. But he tried to persuade the masses of the special role that the patricians should continue to enjoy in the body politic. And he did that in a famous speech, literally, about the body politic. So he compares the pubeians to mutinous limbs. Their arms and legs are in mutiny against the belly. The belly enjoys all the good food and is, in the eyes of the limbs, idle and inactive. But the belly replies that it is the storehouse and the shop of the whole body. So Meninius is trying to justify the special privileges of the patrician Senate that have a belly full of wealth, but he claims are using it to benefit the common people. It should be said that he somewhat undermined the force of the metaphor by comparing Second Citizen to the body's big toe. Second Citizen is not impressed with that comparison. But Shakespeare's play also dramatizes a different stance that I'll call the irredentist model of reactionary resistance by oligarchs who try to turn the clock back on popular power. So this model is exemplified by the figure of Coriolanus himself, who refuses to flatter and pacify the plebeians. Indeed, once he's elected consul, he threatens them with a grain shortage, threatening them with famine, just as second citizen had feared, if they don't agree to abolish the tribunes. The threat fails, the tribunes remain, and Coriolanus vows eternal hatred to Rome, turning traitorously to join its enemies in attacking the city. So we can see both irredentist and accommodationist moments in Roman history going forward. For example, a few decades later, after Coriolanus' treason, this group, known as the Second Decamerate, who were originally appointed as law reformers, would aggrandize their powers to the point of doing away with elections and so with the means of securing equal liberty. And that oligarchic venture was only overturned by a second secession of the plebs. Though still in the aftermath, a tribune would warn them to be wary, saying, Don't you realize in what an atmosphere of contempt you live? The patricians would deprive you of part of the daylight if they could. So what we see in Roman history is a kind of alternation between accommodation and irredentism. So on the right, you see the two episodes I already mentioned, these reactionary overturning efforts. And on the left, you see what we already saw, the accommodation with the tribunes in 494, and another moment when the tribunes forced the consulship to be open to plebeian candidates. But the point I want to emphasize is that in Rome, accommodationism only ever went so far. The upper classes always kept the upper hand. And that was because of what you see on the bottom left, the elitist structure of the Roman Constitution. So throughout the life of the Roman Republic, the Senate always enjoyed special political rights and privileges. And the richest classes, for example, were allowed to vote first in some of the assemblies, so they could, in principle, win a majority before the poorest ever even got to cast their votes. So we can say that the Roman accommodationist model was top-down. The elites periodically had to accommodate popular demands, but only up to a certain point. They always remained dominant in the republic. Now, by contrast, then, in Athens, we see an accommodationist model that was bottom up. Once democratic power had been firmly established, the aristocratic and wealthy found themselves under the popular thumb. And this was recognized by some of the elites even at the time. So someone who's left a text that we refer to as written by an old oligarch, I've talked about this once before, two years ago in my lecture on democracy, left us a text where he says, the people, meaning the common people, know that it is more beneficial for them not to hold the highest offices, but to let the most capable men hold them. Now you might be thinking, wait a minute, that doesn't sound very bottom-up. If the most capable men, the elites, are elected to the high offices, isn't that top down? Well, the problem was that being elected to high office in Athens brought great risks. As one historian has written, any Athenian general, for example, who demonstrated incompetence or suffered a major defeat was likely to be brought to trial. They could try to use their powers of eloquence, but they might well hesitate to return to the city. And indeed, he continues to explain that many of the generals who were indicted went into voluntary exile to avoid a jury trial because they risked being held responsible for anything that didn't live up to the expectations of the people. And so the jury trial gave popular juries composed of citizens selected originally by lot who chose to turn up to the jury courts on a given day the power to hold the elite leaders to accountability, even including exile, fines, and even, in some cases, the sentence of death. So this bottom-up Athenian accommodation required the oligarchs to bite their tongues and swallow their pride more dramatically than did the top-down Roman model. And so Athenian irredentism would lead to even more radical moves by the oligarchs than we saw in Rome. So let's compare the Athenian and Roman models. So Coriolanus, for all his bitterness, was trying only to reverse some plebeian gains. He wasn't trying to overturn the whole political constitution. And as we saw, Meninius and his like, in contrast, were willing to accept some plebeian gains, but still remain in many ways on top. But in Athens, just as bottom-up accommodation went to the opposite extreme, where the popular juries were able to keep the elites under their thumb, so that drove some of the oligarchs in Athens to the more irredentist extreme. So they weren't just seeking to quell certain popular gains, they would seek to overturn the democracy itself, to monopolize political power, even to the point of stripping their opponents of citizenship. And this is what I want to focus on for the remainder of the lecture. The historian Matthew Simonton has argued that oligarchy as a movement in classical Greece really took shape as a reaction to democracy. So as he describes it, it was a bundle of defensive and reactionary techniques. And so Athenian irredentism is reactionary revolution. These oligarchs are not willing to accept any kind of popular game. They want to reverse the democratic constitution to overturn democratic citizenship. And in fact, in the late fifth century, they tried to do that twice. And so I now want to look at how subversive elites can attempt to overthrow the democracy, regroup, and try again, becoming even more brutal the second time, a phenomenon that we sometimes also see today. And in the conclusion, I'll discuss how the democracy ultimately restored itself and managed to live with the oligarchs going forward. So the moral of the story is that democracies have always had oligarchs within them and have always had to figure out how to handle them. So now two oligarchic revolts and then the restoration of democracy. So we see in the fifth century a struggle between the oligarchs and democracies across the ancient Greek world, and this intensified during the Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens, when the Spartans supported oligarchs and the Athenians supported Democrats. And these oligarchic revolts, trying to turn the clock back, could have an immense human cost. So for example, Thucydides describes the civil war in this period in the Greek polis of Corkyra, its modern Corfu, you might recognize it there on the map, when oligarchs were accused of seeking to dissolve the democracy. And Thucydides said that as a result, in the ensuing civil war, one saw every imaginable kind of death. Fathers killed their sons, people were dragged from the temples and slaughtered in front of them. Now in Athens, push came to oligarchic shove, to this reactionary oligarchic shove of irredentist revolts, in the aftermath of military defeats. So, first of all, in 415, a major military expedition by the Athenians is destroyed. And in the aftermath, we have a first oligarchic takeover in 411. And then Athens definitively loses the war in 404, and the oligarchs try again in its wake. So let's look at both of those efforts. So 411 BCE, when the oligarchic party becomes known as the 400. And to give you a sense of who these men were, so one of them was Antiphon. He was famous for his rhetorical skills as a kind of lawyer on call writing speeches for others. Another was a man named Theramenes who went generally with the prevailing winds. Antiphon would ultimately be tried and executed for his role in the 400. And we'll see later what happens to Theramenes. So, 404, these two men and their comrades start by getting control of the council and assembly and monopolizing the speeches there to the point that if anyone did speak out against them, he quickly and conveniently turned up dead. These were crimes for which no suspects were brought to justice. With dissent made impossible, people imagined that the number of conspirators was far greater than it really was. And this paved the way for an irregular assembly meeting that was held outside Athens when 10 of the conspirators had been set up as law reformers. And the first proposal they make outside Athens at this other assembly is that they abolish prosecution for proposing changes that would be illegal under the prior laws. So if you think about that, if no one can be prosecuted for proposing illegal changes to the laws, that nullifies the democratic rule of law that had previously obtained. So they nullify the democratic laws and they nullify the democratic offices. They announce that no one would hold office or receive pay under the old constitution. And that amounts to ousting the existing state officials, abolishing the wages for office, and they also restrict male citizenship to just 5,000 men by instituting a wealth threshold. Why 5,000? Well, the idea is that these are those who are best able to serve with their persons and their wealth, and they want to give them full power to make treaties with whoever they wished. So what does this mean, serve with their persons and their wealth? This is turning the principle of democratic public service upside down. The Democrats claimed power based especially on rowing in the fleet, which they could do without any private means. But the wealthier purchased their own sword and spear to serve in the hoplite land army. And the 5,000 is just about equivalent to those who could afford to make that purchase. So that's what it means that they can serve the state by their persons and their wealth. Now, all of that said, despite naming the 5,000, the 400 really want to concentrate power in their own hands. And they do that by establishing a new official body, a council of 400. So this is why we call them the council. And the important point for me here is that this is an official body. So the 400 exercise their power through holding office in this council, and it monopolizes a lot of the powers that the democracy had widely distributed. So this new council has the sole authority to legislate, to appoint magistrates, to formulate oaths, and to hold other office holders to account. Now, with those powers, then they began to act with what the Cities calls an iron hand. They're using violence to maintain their power. Now there is a wrinkle here because I've been calling them oligarchs, and one of our other ancient sources calls this an oligarchy straight out. But they're also trying to claim the mantle of the preceding democracy. So as I spoke about in my lecture in October, Cleisthenes was remembered as the founder of the Athenian democracy, but the 400 want to lay claim to the traditional laws that he had enacted when he set up the democracy. So they're rewriting history trying to claim that Cleisthenes really had intended a kind of oligarchy all along. So how did this regime eventually fall? Well, the Democrats had naval forces on the island of Samos who took an oath. To practice democratic government themselves and to regard the 400 as their enemies. And in this remarkable observation, Thucydides says that they told themselves that they must not become demoralized thinking that their city had abandoned them, since it was the few who had revolted from them, the many. In other words, the Democrats were the real body of the city all along. And while these democratic forces regrouped abroad, the oligarchs at home had their own Achilles' heel. They fell into the fierce internal rivalry that tends to be the downfall of such oligarchies. And so the city held a new assembly to depose the 400. They turned the government really over to the 5,000, and that was a stepping stone to the restoration of the full democracy. The fate of the 400, as we saw, Antiphon was among those executed. Some others went on trial and escaped, we think, into voluntary exile. And some of the rest betrayed one another, trying to claim that they had been the good oligarchs and that some of their fellows were the ones who should really be punished. Our friend Theramenes is among them. He lived to fight another day. So that brings us then to the next moment, which is after in 404, the fall of Athens to Sparta, the military defeat, and now the second oligarchic takeover, which is known by the name of the 30. We have two narratives. The more famous is the one given by the historian Xenophon, who actually lived through these events as a young man. So what I'm going to emphasize is how the 30 was even more radical, even more irredentist than the 400. And then we'll see how democracy was ultimately restored. So in 404, the Spartans have conquered Athens. They're physically in Athens. That's the Spartan general Lysander. And in that context, the oligarchs try again, many of them the very same who had tried seven years before, if they'd managed to escape punishment for that. So once again, they propose a new body of men to act as law reformers, and the Athenians appoint 30 men to draw up the ancestral laws. But the 30 don't really do that job. Xenophon says they were charged with writing up the laws, but they continually postponed writing the laws down and publishing them for all to see. So instead, what the 30 did was to consolidate power in their own hands. And what I want to emphasize is that they consolidate power, not office. So remember I stressed that the 400 had held office, they had set up this new council on which they served. The 30, as far as we know, actually held themselves above the constraints of political office. The only official position that we know that they held, and it wasn't really an official position, was that of the law reformers. But law reformers had no fixed term of office, and they were not subject to any kind of accountability measures. So the thirty, as far as we know, don't even serve on the council that exists in their period. They're really acting as these extraordinary puppet masters who are above and outside all the ordinary constraints of political office. And they use, this is the 30, these are the names of the 30. So we know all their names. Critias, who was their leader, had been a friend and associate of Socrates, but we have no record of any of them actually holding an office during the time that the 30 were effectively in power. And so what did they do? They pulled the strings with excessive violence. So their violence was even more extreme than that of the 400. They had attendants armed with whips, they used violence to destroy the democracy, initially against sycophants who were unpopular, but then to put to death their opponents who could have opposed them on the basis of wealth, birth, or reputation, and also because they wanted to plunder the property of many in the city. And so the 30 are really using their power to enrich themselves. As oligarchs, they seek nakedly to use political power to convert it into even more economic power. Now that policy ultimately drove Theramenes into opposition. He spoke out against this policy of private peculation and greed. And that led him, in turn, to be literally declared an enemy of the people. Critias spoke against him at a council meeting. He announced, I erase this man from the list, and the 30 are empowered to execute those not on the list of citizens. And indeed, there are many who would be dragged off and executed. How did the 30 fall? Well, that's a story that I want to tell in terms of violence and then the restoration of democracy through amnesty and accountability. So this is my final section. So we have to say first that it took violence to fight violence. The 30 were defeated in a desperate battle with democratic forces, again, those who'd been driven into exile, deprived of their citizenship, regrouped, and then attacked and killed many of the 30, including Critias, in the fighting. And then they reestablished the democratic constitution. Now you can imagine that the victorious Democrats were tempted just to put any of the surviving oligarchs to the sword. And in fact, it seems that in the aftermath of the previous oligarchic coup, the Athenians had vowed to kill anyone who would overthrow the democracy. But that's not actually what they choose to do in 403 after they've ousted the thirty. Instead, they choose a policy of amnesty, and this has three dimensions. So, first of all, they allow those oligarchs who choose to simply leave Athens and withdraw to their own enclave. Those who chose to remain would have peace established, a settling of property disputes, a sharing of religious sites, and a commitment to amnestia. That's the Greek word that gives us our word amnesty. And it's described as not remembering past wrongs. What that seems to have meant was not prosecuting people beyond the disputes that had been settled. So not trying again to stir up complaints that had been settled through this process. And then thirdly, for the 30 themselves and their key henchmen, the amnesty would require that they submit accounts for their period and power, and no approval would be given to anyone who had committed homicide with their own hands. So amnesty was not remembering, but that did not mean complete forgetting. People remembered what the 30 had done, but they didn't use those memories as weapons to continue trying to undo the peace that had been established. Still, they would remember it. And for example, the trial of Socrates in 399 would decades later be described as having convicted him because he was shown to have been the teacher of Critias. That's how an orator described the trial of Socrates some decades later. Now, what I want to close on then is what that final demand in the amnesty settlement actually meant. And that was again the requirement that members of the 30 had to give accounts for their period in power. Now, when we look back at the aftermath of the 400, we can see a kind of distancing from the legitimacy of those who had held office under the 400. So when the new democratic treasurers came into power after the 400 had been ousted, they used a new stone slab to inscribe their accounts, as if, as one historian has said, to emphasize their distance from the boards of the previous year. So it was a kind of subtle distancing. But the problem of how to hold the 30 accountable was more challenging because, as I argued, they had held power without holding office. So the question then is how to read the amnesty demand that they submit accounts. Now many historians have read this as if it was just business as usual, as if this was just a matter of procedural routine. Accounts had always been required under the preceding democracy, so the 30 had to submit their accounts in order to have their citizen rights confirmed. But I think that's a mistake. Because I think the crucial thing about these irredentist oligarchs, the 30, is that they had precisely rejected any principle of accountability for themselves. That's why they exercised power outside the constraints of office. And so instead, rendering accounts, that requirement of these oligarchs, was a way of reinstituting a democratic norm. It was a way of insisting that all power must now be rendered legally accountable precisely because it had not been exercised that way during the oligarchic coup. Now, this Athenian model of amnesty and accountability offers a new way to think about the dilemmas facing post-populist regimes today. So consider Poland in 2023 when parliamentary elections overturned a populist regime. And these are reflections of a Polish judge afterwards thinking about the dilemma that was faced then and how the restored democracy should treat the officeholders of the populist period. And he described the reformers as being caught between these two alternatives. Should they continue to adhere rigorously and meticulously to legal provisions as long as they still formally apply? Or was that in a way to miss the point? Could that sort of adherence to the minutiae of legal provisions only serve to entrench the pathological system by pretending, in effect, that nothing had happened in between? So as I see it, the Athenian democracy in 403 had found a third way to tame the oligarchs. They acknowledged that legal norms of the democracy had been overturned, but they reinstituted them in order to restore the rule of law. So, in other words, radical irredentism, this adventurism of oligarchs to try to impose a reactionary revolution, was tamed only by enforcing radical accommodation once again, the bottom-up accommodation on which Athenian democracy had previously hinged. And so we must reflect on how to tame oligarchs. That problem in democratic politics has always been with us. And the challenge is to overcome the bitterness that can lead to civil war, lest we suffer again the fate of Corkyra, whereas Thucydides described ideological strife produced distrust everywhere, and nothing, no binding word or awe-inspiring oath, could end it. Thank you very much for your attention.