Pretty sweeping statement to say democracy hadn't existed prior to, unless you've got semantic arguments to press it. I'll, of course, grant you that suffrage w

Pretty sweeping statement to say democracy hadn't existed prior to, unless you've got semantic arguments to press it. I'll, of course, grant you that suffrage wasn't prefect. But I'd also be willing to further that argument with the idea that we've still yet to see a proper democracy in any modern era, forwarded by Graeber and Wengrow in "The Dawn of Everything". You'll also note that, given these passages are true, an elected representative is simply the best aristocrat - which is a coin with two sides. I'd also go so far as to posit that democratic processes are an innate form of human organization. Think of every time you've been organizing and out with your friends. Even coming to an end where you synthesize, it's nonetheless effectively informal voting. So, I'd say that indeed there were many societies, regardless of whatever precise definition is formalized, which predated Machiavelli quite probably on the order of tens of thousands of years. From Dawn of Everything: "[...] political philosophers of later Greek cities did not actually consider elections a democratic way of selecting candidates for public office at all. The democratic method was sortition, or lottery, much like modern jury duty. Elections were assumed to belong to the aristocratic mode (aristocracy meaning ‘rule of the best’), allowing commoners – much like the retainers in an old-fashioned, heroic aristocracy – to decide who among the well born should be considered best of all; and well born, in this context, simply meant all those who could afford to spend much of their time playing at politics." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pnyx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pnyx : "The Pnyx was the official meeting place of the Athenian democratic assembly (Ancient Greek: ekklesia). In the earliest days of Athenian democracy (after the reforms of Kleisthenes in 508 B.C.), the ekklesia met in the Agora. Sometime in the early 5th century, the meeting place was moved to a hill south and west of the Acropolis. This new meeting place came to be called "Pnyx" (from the Greek word meaning 'tightly packed together.'"