The present article is devoted to the problem which is debated actively today, namely whether Greek poleis and the Roman Republic were early states or they represented a specific type of stateless societies. Since I believe that Athens and Roman Republic were early states though of a particular type, the article is in many respects a direct discussion with the supporters of the idea that these polities were a kind of stateless societies. On the whole in this contribution a specific aspect of the problem of multilinearity in sociopolitical evolution is examined. The diversity of sociopolitical evolution is expressed in a tremendous variety of the early states proper among which the bureaucratic states represent just one of many types. The democratic early states without bureaucracy were early states of another type. In this article Athens and the Roman Republic are analyzed as examples of this very type.