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The Pros And Cons Of Monarchy In Ancient Greece

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Monarchy. Let’s see what is Monarchy? It is a king or queen who gets all the powers of authority from inheritance and power stays in the same family, usually the bloodline from father to son. In Ancient Greeks, there weren’t too many monarchies, but there was some present and even Athens went under the monarchy at the end of the classical period which ended with the death of Alexander the Great. His father Phillip II of Macedon who became king after the deaths of his two brothers conquered Athens after the Peloponnesian war and ended democracy in the great city of Athens. (Wasson, 2014) Tyranny. It is when the power changes to another by force instead of inheritance. It wasn’t really uncommon in many places in Greece to have tyrants who were even praised and loved by their own people, because not tyrants were bad as we imagine them today. According to Mark Cartwright “Pesisistratos in Athens (from c. 560 BCE) - a typical benevolent tyrant who actually paved the way for democracy” were not a typical form of tyranny which we come to think of today. Come to think of it, it there is a ruler in a city who has made things worse for its subjugates and an able ruler throws him off and takes care of its city and population would be …show more content…

As we have learned that Democracy came from the word ‘demos’ which means people, that makes people the ruling party or majority rule. Ancient Greeks who were experimenting with different kinds of political system and were much interested in which system works best. By far the most radical kind of democracy is a direct democracy which lasted less than two centuries in a Greek city-state of Athens. Citizens of Athens were directly involved in the process and participated in decision making and they were proud of it, they deemed their system to be the best and superior to other systems in other Greek city-states. As Cartwright stated an excerpt from Pericles himself who was one of the greatest supporters of democracy in classic

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