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Monarchy, Aristocracy, Tyrany, Oligarchy, And Democracy

Decent Essays

Introduction
Ancient Greece, not being able to settle on the best way to govern, instituted several vastly different political structures across ancient Greek city-states. They equally contributed to the cultural change in the overall region’s history as well as the history of governments across the world. In this paper, I will compare and contrast monarchy, aristocracy, tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy, which will also provide insight at which influential characteristics of these governments are still present in modern-day politics.
The root of the word monarchy, “mono”, means “single”. In a monarchy, a single person rules the land. Most monarchies in history have been ruled by a king, whose council members advise him (Cartwright, 2013). Kings in monarchies gained power through inheritance of the throne (Cartledge, 2011). One interesting example of a monarchy can be taken from Macedonia and Epeiros, where the ruler relied on an assembly for advice. Even though Sparta also relied on assemblies, it was ruled by two kings, thus it was not an absolute monarchy (Cartwright, 2013).
Tyrannies were common, while monarchies were rare and only different in characteristics from tyrannies …show more content…

Fittingly, democracy (unlike tyranny and monarchy) is governance by the people. Even though monarchy had the interests of the people in mind, the people did not participate in a voting system which determined decisions, like in democracy. Cleisthenes, who introduced political reforms in Athens and called them demokratia (“rule by the people”), was credited with unifying the classes of society within politics (History.com, n.d.). Even though this paved the way to define modern-day democracy, it was not truly comparable, since ancient Athenian democratic participation was limited to a very small portion of the overall population (History.com,

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