Paragraph Answer - Coursework Example

The latter was overthrown, but there emerged a need to develop new rules for living in the community. Moreover, these rules had to be followed by all the parties and suit everybody. After the patrimonial aristocracy was defeated, Cleisthenes became the head of Athens, 508 BC. He immediately embarked on reforms that were to consolidate the victory of the demos and put an end to the danger of the revival of the power of one person or aristocracy. In fact, there occurred the democratization of the political system of Athens.

By the middle 5th century BC, Athens developed a complete and in own way perfect form of the ancient slave-owning democracy. Athenian version of democracy to a certain extent made possible the expression of every citizen of the state; while the main aim remained was the power and prosperity of the state. The elimination of the king’s regime in the Ancient Rome marked the end of the process of destruction of the patrimonial organization of the previous epoch, whose speakers were the aristocracy, and the establishment of the civil society and early state (civitas).

Republican victory over the clan aristocracy showed the victory of slave ownership over the classical patriarchal ownership (family household). It also signed the radical change of the role of the Senate. In the royal era, the Senate was the council of elders of the kings. They determined the fate of the Senators and the Senate individually and spontaneously. Kings either increased the number of senators or eliminated them all. In the era of the republican Senate, it was the supreme governing body in the state, a stronghold of nobility.

The resulting Roman Republic was not democratic state (slave-owning democracy). It became an aristocratic republic, in spite of the fact that all positions in the state were elected. All decisions were taken by Senate. In this respect, there ended an era of the kings and began the era of the domination of the nobility. Nobility was a new aristocracy that formed as a result of the equalization in rights of plebeians and patricians and the merging of the patricians’ families with plebeians top.

So, the prevention of the tyranny of the single rule of one person did not work accurately, because the newly formed nobility gradually seized the leadership of the Senate and the senior civil posts. After the elimination of the tyrannical regimes in the Ancient Greece and Rome, the societies were aiming to prevent the establishment of such regimes in the future. According to the Ancient conception of democracy, equally free people had to be equal in all respects; oligarchy arises from the fact that in some respect superior people claim too much.

From the above, it is clear that both, in Athens and in Rome, they established a kind of democratic regimes that contained a number of the core features of the modern understanding of democracy. Among the latter was attracting people to the most important political decisions through the citizens’ assembly. The access to the assembly had all the citizens of the certain age. All citizens were formally equal in their right of participating and managing public affairs. The ancient