Not that strange if you've read Plato. I read in Hannah Arendt that 'democracy' may have been a pejorative used by antidemocrats like him; actual early democrat

Not that strange if you've read Plato. I read in Hannah Arendt that 'democracy' may have been a pejorative used by antidemocrats like him; actual early democrats talked about isonomy and isegoria: more or less what we call equality under the law and free speech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isonomia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isonomia I'm not a classical scholar, but I get the impression that later times preferentially transmitted the less democratic points of view. I.F. Stone also wrote about this in The Trial of Socrates.