When you hear the word tyrant, what does it make you think of? Maybe it makes you think of a leader who is very bad at his job and who doesn't respect the people he leads. He probably wouldn't be a leader at all if the people under his power had a choice -- something like a dictator.

But in ancient Greece, tyrant was more a word for a kind of leader, and tyrants were not always bad leaders. However, many of them were bad enough to give tyrants the bad reputation they have today.

To the ancient Greeks, a tyrant was somebody who took control of a government by force. He didn't care about the old kind of government. The tyrant gave himself absolute power. How fairly the tyrant used his new power depended on his character.

Often the poor people of the land supported the tyrant. They helped him to take power from the rich people who used to rule. They thought he would treat them more fairly than the rich people. Because of this, rich people did not like tyrants; this is one reason that we think of this word as meaning something bad today.

Tyrants were not the only leaders in ancient Greece. At different times there were also monarchies (kings led), aristocracies (the oldest families led), oligarchies (the richest families led), and democracies (kind of like ours).

Sparta had a kind of government all its own, a special kind of monarchy. To learn about how the Spartans did things, click here.

To begin I'll talk about the other kinds of leaders I just mentioned. Then I will talk about two city-states that had tyrants, Corinth and Athens. They are good examples of what tyrannies were and how they began and ended. Changing to tyrannies often involved violence and a lot of plotting.