Compare and contrast Athenian democracy and modern democracy.

This is a
complex question, but we'll take it step by step. First let's look at a definition of democracy.
According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, democracy is:

government by the people, especially rule by the majority; a
government in which the supreme power is invested in the people and exercised by them directly
or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free
elections.

By this definition, in a true or pure
democracy, everyone living in a country, or at least every citizen, would have a voice in the
country's governance. In practice, this is hardly ever true.

Next let's look
at the Athenian form of democracy. The word "democracy" comes from the Greek words
demos, which means "people," and kratos,
which means "rule." In other words, rule by the people. Athens is credited as having
one of the world's first democracies.

However, its rule certainly did not
include all the people, and not even a majority. Of the 100,000 citizens (that is,
those...

href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/democracy">https://www.britannica.com/topic/democracy
href="https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-greece/ancient-greece-democracy">https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-greece/ancient-gre...
href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/14/more-than-half-of-countries-are-democratic/">https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/14/more-tha...