Oligarchy - Oligarchy means the rule of the few, and those few are generally the people who are richer and more powerful than the others, what you might call the aristocrats or the nobles. These are not always men: just as monarchies have both kings and queens, women sometimes appear in councils of aristocrats, and even when they are not members, they are often there telling their husbands or their sons what to do. So oligarchies are generally bad for the poor, but they are pretty good for women, at least for rich women from powerful families.

Usually the way it works is that there is a group of people who are in charge, somehow. Sometimes they may be elected, and sometimes they are born into their position, and at other times you might have to have a certain amount of money or land in order to be in the council. Then this group of people meets every so often - every week or every month - to decide important questions, and to appoint somebody to deal with things. Like they might decide that it should be illegal to steal, and then they would appoint one of the nobles to be a judge, and decide if people were guilty of stealing, and decide what to do with them if they were.

Oligarchies were not as common as monarchies in the ancient world. Right after the Dark Ages, most of the city-states in Greece were oligarchies, between about 1000 and about 500 BC. The Etruscans were also oligarchic. The Roman Republic, which started around 500 BC, was in some ways an oligarchy too.

In the Middle Ages, the cities of northern Italy were ruled by groups of rich people. Some were more like democracies, but others were more oligarchic.
http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/gov ... garchy.htm

Tyranny - In Greece and Western Asia, mainly in Turkey, there was a period of time around 650-400 BC when many city-states were ruled by tyrants. "Tyrant" is probably a Lydian word, from Western Asia. Tyrannies usually grew out of oligarchies like this:
in an oligarchy, each of the aristocrats is always trying to get more power than the others. But the other aristocrats keep them from doing it.
But if one of the aristocrats thinks of asking for help from the poor people, he can get ahead that way, and may make himself tyrant. So a tyrant is like a king, but a king who does not have the law or religion behind him, and only rules because the poor people support him. Tyrants are something like Mafia bosses like the Godfather.

Naturally the other aristocrats hated tyrants, and tried to stop them and go back to an oligarchy again. In order to stay in power, the tyrant has to promise the poor people that he will do good things for them, so they will support him. Usually the tyrant promises one or two of these things:

1) cancellation of debts
2) abolition of debt-bondage
3) redistribution of land.

You can see that tyrants are usually really good for the poor people, and only bad for the other aristocrats. In English today, tyrant means a bad king, but that is because the aristocrats hated tyrants, and in ancient Greece only the aristocrats could write.

One of the most famous tyrants was Pisistratus in Athens. Another was the tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysos, whom Plato went to teach.

http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/gov ... yranny.htm

Democracy - Democracy means the rule of the people (in Greek). That is where each individual person has a vote about what to do. Whatever the most people vote for wins. There is no king or tyrant, and anybody can propose a new law.
One problem that immediately comes up in a democracy is who is going to be able to vote. Should people vote who are just visiting from some other city-state? How about little kids, should they vote? Or should there be some limits?
The earliest democracy in the world began in Athens, in 510 BC. When democracy proved to be successful in Athens, many other city-states chose it for their government too. But most of them allowed even fewer people to vote than Athens did: most of the other city-states only allowed free adult male citizens to vote IF they owned land or owned their own houses (that is, the richer people).

Another problem for democracies is that it is very inconvenient for men to always be going to the meeting-place to vote. Most men have work to do, planting their grain, making shoes, fighting wars or whatever. They can't be always voting. So most democracies sooner or later end up choosing a few men who will do most of the voting, and the rest only come when there is a really important vote. It is hard to decide how to choose these few men, and different cultures did it different ways. Athens did it by a lottery. If you got the winning ticket then you were on the Council of 500. Men served for a year.

Democracy spread around the Mediterranean, but it was pretty much wiped out by the Roman Empire about 100 BC. Still, places like Athens continued to use democratic methods to make their own decisions on local matters for a long time after that.

A thousand years later, in the Middle Ages, some cities in Italy - Siena, Florence, Genoa, Pisa, Venice - went back to having a democratic government. These were all organized in slightly different ways, but none of them allowed the poor to vote, and some had a lottery system like Athens.

http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/gov ... ocracy.htm


Republics - In a republic, instead of voting directly about what they want to do, as in a democracy, people instead vote for people to represent them, and those people decide what to do.
voters
The first republic was the Roman Republic, which was founded about 509 BC, just about the same time as the first democracy in Athens. The rules about who could vote were about the same as in Athens too: slaves couldn't vote, and neither could women, or children, or men who were not citizens. In addition, in Rome you could only vote if you owned land, so a lot of poor men could not vote at all even though they were free citizens.
The republic was a lot more efficient than the democracy, because most men who could vote only needed to vote in the big elections, and the rest of the time they could be at work. Only the Senators, the elected representatives, had to be voting all the time. And men who had been elected to be judges or to run the city, those were full-time jobs: consuls, tribunes, quaestors (KWEE-stores), and praetors (PRY-tores). (Only people who could vote could be elected, so only free men who were citizens and owned land could run for office).
But the aristocrats (the rich people) fixed it so that it was pretty much impossible to elect anyone who wasn't already an aristocrat to the senate or to be a consul or a tribune or anything. So this republic was a lot like an oligarchy in that it tended to be run by rich people.
Hasdrubal
Hasdrubal, a Carthaginian
general
At the same time, in Carthage (Africa), there was a very similar government. It was a republic as well. The chief magistrates or officials were two shopfets (suffetes in Latin) who were elected annually on a basis of birth and wealth: this is almost identical to the Roman system of electing consuls from among the patricians.
Military commands were held by separately elected generals: this is different from the Roman system, where the consuls were the generals. In addition to these leaders, there was a powerful "senate" of several hundred life members, again, as at Rome. The powers of the citizens, or the Assembly, were very limited: basically they could only vote for the magistrates. There was also a separate group of 104 "judges" who scrutinized the actions of generals and other officials to keep them honest.

After the Romans destroyed Carthage in 146 BC, and the Roman republic collapsed about 30 BC, there was not another one for about a thousand years. Then in the Middle Ages, around 1100 AD, there began to be small republics in various northern Italian cities like Venice, Florence, Siena, Pisa, Genoa, and Milan. Sometimes these cities joined together into the Lombard League, but often they acted independently. Like the Roman and Carthaginian republics, however, almost all the power still was in the hands of rich people, so that these republics were a lot like oligarchies.

http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/gov ... public.htm

Which of these do you want America; you better make your voice heard in this next election