&gt; Maybe there is a reason why the ancient Greeks drew their leaders randomly from their population<p>I&#x27;ve actually advocated doing this in the US, only half-facetiously.<p>As an aside, though, it&#x27;s common when discussing democracy to look back at Athens as an archetypal,  Platonic ideal of democracy (pun intended). However, Athenian democracy actually had a lot of characteristics that we would find completely objectionable and deplorable today.<p>Futhermore, it wasn&#x27;t particularly long-lasting. It&#x27;s hard to get an exact date range, because what people mean when they say &quot;Athenian democracy&quot; isn&#x27;t very well-defined (there were a few different stages that the Athenian democratic systems[0] passed through, so it depends on where you draw the line). But by almost any measure, Athenian democracy didn&#x27;t even last as long as the US democratic system[1], and it was <i>stable</i> for a lot less time than that[2].<p>[0] system<i>s</i> - there were more than one throughout Athenian history<p>[1] In before &quot;we have a republic, not a democracy&quot; - this is a contested point that really boils down to which definition of &#x27;democracy&#x27; and &#x27;republic&#x27; you use. For example, the definitions used by the Federalist Papers were not entirely self-consistent, and you can cite some that would support this belief, but you can also cite ones that don&#x27;t. And at the end of the day, it&#x27;s really just quibbling over antiquated definitions of words that don&#x27;t really represent how they&#x27;re used today.<p>[2] I&#x27;ve heard one classicist (a Hellenist, to boot!) conclude that the stable period of Athenian democracy was as short as 35-50 years. This is the lower bound of what most classical historians would respond if you ask them, but it&#x27;s just as easy to measure it in decades as it is in centuries - that&#x27;s how short it was.