Each city-state had its own form of government. Narrow-based oligarchies - rule by an aristocracy - were generally replaced by broad-based oligarchies, which were usually comprised of either a broader council of several hundred or often several thousand in an assembly comprising landowning citizens who also made up the armoured infantry on which the security of the city-state depended.
Starting with Athens in the 5th Century BCE, an experiment in democracy (literally people-power) started to spread to other cities, but this was adversely affected by Athens which turned the anti-Persian League into an empire of its own, and bringing on the devastating Peloponnesian War. Cities which had embraced democracy reverted to broadly-based oligarchies.
After this, the radical democracies of Athens and its copyists, where all decisions were taken in the fortnightly citizen assemblies and the Council carried out its decisions, they generally were watered down to the citizens voting on motions put to them by the Council. And attendance at the Assemblies declined, so that the Council had to offer inducements to get them to attend the city's Assembly. The gloss and novelty of the early period had worn off quickly, and the mistakes made by the democracies had made for a drop off in popular enthusiasm which was substantially replaced by apathy, into which void the influentials moved, and resumed governing with the people asked to confirm laws and policy already decided on.
Even during the high period in Athens of fifty years, in emergencies the oligarchs or the landowner/warrior class took over to solve the problem rather than leave it to endless debate in the Assembly, using a simple takeover, or calling assembly meeting in the countryside when it was insecure due to enemy besiegers, so that only those who could afford a suit of armour would dare attend.
So broadly based oligarchies continued to exist, and democracies became pale shadows of the real thing which Athens had pioneered. After Macedonia had become dominant and Alexander died, the Greek world became dominated by his successors the Hellenistic kings in eastern Europe and Asia, and in the central Mediterranean tyrants and kings had established themselves well before this ruling the Greek cities there.
yes Sparta did have a military oligarchy.
It is called oligarchy.
Oligarchy
There is no oligarchy in the modern world. This is the sentence that uses the word oligarchy.
Rome itself had an oligarchy. It is a political system which has an oligarchy not people. The term means rule by the rich. The oligarchy in Rome was made up by the patricians aristocrats and the entrepreneurial class ob bankers, money lenders and investors in mining and shipping.
Because It Just Woldnt Last
It was 800-500 BC I learned this in Social Stdies.
it was an oligarchy
Govern. by smalll group of people...oligarchy.
no brazil is not a oligarchy
what is the country for oligarchy
The oligarchies couldn't last because they ruled only a few people.
Monoarchy is the antonym of oligarchy.
"For the real difference between democracy and oligarchy is poverty and wealth. Wherever men rule by reason of their wealth, whether they be few or many, that is an oligarchy, and when the poor rule, that is a democracy. "This is from Politics by Aristotle (Forms of Government Book III, Chapters 7-8, last paragraph).
I didnt
An oligarchy
An oligarchy.