Democracy comes from ancient Greece. In Athens, a lottery was seen as democratic, but in Sparta, every citizen had a chance to vote on who they wanted to be in government. In Antiquity, ‘every citizen’ did not mean everybody, as women, enslaved people and poor people had few political rights or even none at all. Our democracy is very diff erent from that of ancient Athens. An important difference is that in ancient Athens they had a direct democracy, whereas we have an indirect democracy.