Athens Vs Sparta

As an introduction, Greece had a vast number of ancient city-states as one can easily gather from the map above. Many of these include Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Megara, Argos, Macedonia, Epeiros, Sicily and so many more. A lot is said about Athens and Sparta, but very little is spoken of the others. How were the government structures set up? Which of the city states had a monarchy, aristocracy, tyranny, oligarchy, and which city-state had a democracy? How were they similar? And how were they different? These are the issues I'd like to address. To begin each section and thoroughly answer everything, first I plan to define what each term is, and then I plan to speak on which city-states the term applied to.

According to Dictionary.com,

(Aristotle, The Politics, Book III, 340 B.C.E.).” Tyrants were rulers that came to power through cruel, unjust, and unconstitutional manners, "oftentimes murdering their predecessor (Cartwright, 2013).” Syracuse in Sicily had a long run of extremely well known tyrants to take over. And although it can be noted that not every tyrant was an evil and cruel leader, some were. One example of a famous tyrant rule was that of "Dionysios from 405 BCE and his son Dionysios II, who took over in 367 BCE (Cartwright, 2013).” Athens too had a few tyrants take over from time to time as well as a few other city-states, but not nearly as much as that of the Sicily's tyranny

But this particular aristocracy was also ruled by a few. This would make Sparta an oligarchy. Sparta was ruled by its two Kings, five Ephors, and 60 elder Gerousia (Brand, n.d., pg 29). Sparta was not the only oligarchy though. For example, Corinth had a harsh oligarchy until its people overthrew it (Four Forms of Government in Ancient Greece PDF, n.d.). Megara and Thebes also had forms of an oligarchy system (Cartwright, 2013). Speaking of Athens, "411 BCE in Athens, 'the oligarchy of the 400' took power out of the hands of the Assembly and were themselves superseded by a more moderate oligarchy of 5000 (Cartwright, 2013).” Typically, oligarchies were military rule like. When the people did well, the oligarchies usually became