Aristocracy is a term with Greek heritage.
 Its original classical understanding has been taken up by the modern concepts that can be loosely equivalent to meritocracy or technocracy
 Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Xenophon, and the Spartans considered aristocracy (the ideal form of rule by the few) to be inherently better than the ideal form of rule by the many (democracy), but they also considered the corrupted form of aristocracy (oligarchy) to be worse than the corrupted form of democracy (mob rule)

