The Various Forms Of Government In Ancient Greece

Introduction

“The Greeks were pioneers in science and the arts,” (Ferris, 2008, p. 232). History elucidated that every city or village is an independent country, doing their own things, with their own form of government. Brand (2017) writes, “many of these were no more than small towns or even villages which controlled sometimes very small territories,” (p. 1). The predominantly forms of government in all these ancient Greek city-states are the monarchy, aristocracy, tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. These forms of government have different styles of governance. This paper will first discuss the various forms of government in ancient Greece; the monarchy, aristocracy, tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy, Compare and contrast these forms of government,

The only form of government discussed above, capable of transparency, good governance, stewardship, freedom, and equality is the democratic system of government, where there are hierarchical administrative structures that ultimately report to the executive arm of government. Notwithstanding the nepotism, corruption, and inequalities that mired the Monarchy, Aristocracy, Oligarchy forms of government. We can argue that there are peace and stability in Monarchy, Aristocracy, Oligarchy forms of government, compared to the democratic system, for example, the madness of the mob in the Athenian poleis. These are a false sense of peace due to fear of repression and victimization. These forms of Government are the similarity in their style of governance, power is in the hand of the few individuals by hereditary or usurpation, it is an unrepresentative system of governments, unlike the democracy, where power is in the hand of the citizens. The example classical democracy is the ostracism system in Athens. “Each year, citizens could write the name of an undesirable politician on a piece of baked clay called an ostracon. If a person’s name appeared on 6,000 ostraca, he could be exiled,” (Farah & Karls, 1999, p.