What is a democracy? How did the original users of the word define it and practice it? How do we typically define democracy in the context of modern nation states? The word “democracy”, while it refers to a system of government “by the people”, can be interpreted in a variety of different ways. In this article, I want to focus on the idea of direct democracy, which some people also refer to as “true democracy”. Culturally, we make a lot of assumptions about the nature of this idea — assumptions which are based on a rich philosophical literature, and so tend to largely go unchallenged.