Oligarchs and Their Discontents - Melissa Lane

Mar 31, 2026

A deep dive into Roman and Athenian elite politics through readings of Coriolanus and classical history. Scenes of oligarchic power, accommodation, and violent reaction are examined. The talk traces coups, legal nullifications, and how accountability and amnesty shaped democratic recoveries. Modern parallels for taming oligarchic threats are sketched.

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ANECDOTE

Coriolanus Shows Roman Plebeian Secession

Shakespeare's Coriolanus dramatizes Roman class conflict with patricians and plebeians withdrawing labor in 494 BCE to force concessions.
The play shows both accommodation (Menenius compares elites to the nourishing belly) and plebeian secession that created tribunes to protect the poor.

INSIGHT

Two Oligarchic Strategies In Rome

Two oligarchic responses recur: accommodation (accept limited popular power) and irredentism (attempt to roll back gains), exemplified by Menenius and Coriolanus respectively.
Roman accommodation was top-down: elites retained institutional advantages like Senate privileges and first voting blocs, limiting popular power.

INSIGHT

Athenian Bottom Up Accommodation

Athens developed a bottom-up accommodation where popular juries and accountability kept elites under pressure, unlike Rome's elite retention of power.
This pressure produced harsher oligarchic reactions that aimed to overturn democracy entirely.

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This lecture was recorded by Professor Melissa Lane on 5th March 2026 at Barnard’s Inn Hall, London.

Melissa Lane is the Class of 1943 Professor of Politics, Princeton University and is also Associated Faculty in the Department of Classics and Department of Philosophy. Previously she was Senior University Lecturer at Cambridge University in the Faculty of History and Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge.

She studied for her first degree in Social Studies (awarded summa cum laude) at Harvard University, and then took an MPhil and PhD in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, where she was a student at King’s College, supported by appointments as a Marshall Scholar, Truman Scholar, and Mary Isabel Sibley Fellow of Phi Beta Kappa.

Professor Lane is an author, lecturer and broadcaster who has received major awards including being named a Guggenheim Fellow, and the Lucy Shoe Meritt Resident in Classical Studies at the American Academy in Rome. She has published widely in journals and authored or introduced nine major books including Greek and Roman Political Ideas; Eco-Republic; and most recently, Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Ideas of the Political, which was awarded the 2024 Book Prize of the Journal of the History of Philosophy.

Professor Lane is the only person ever to have delivered both the Carlyle Lectures and the Isaiah Berlin Lectures at the University of Oxford.

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/oligarchs-discontents

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