As the Athens tourist board seldom mentions, their fair city was not just the cradle but also the mausoleum of democracy. The ancients defined “rule by the people” with a literalism that has mostly not endured: direct votes in mass gatherings, issue-by-issue, eyeball-to-eyeball. When the US founders balked at the D-word (it is not in the constitution) it was because the meaning was still the Greek one. The indirect vote that now governs their republic and much of the world is as far from that as modern architecture is from the Doric order.
正如雅典旅游局很少提到的，他们的美丽城市不仅是民主(democracy)的摇篮，也是民主的陵墓。古人以字面含义来定义“民治”（这种定义在很大程度上未能延续下来）：举行群众集会，一个议题接一个议题，面对面地直接投票。美国的国父们回避了这个字母“D”开头的词语（美国宪法里并不包含这个词），那是因为当时这个词仍然采用古希腊的那种定义。时至今日，美利坚合众国和世界许多其他地区采用的间接投票制度与古希腊民主之间的差异，就像现代建筑与多立克柱式(Doric order)的差异一样大。