Page "Athenian democracy" Paragraph 5

The word is attested in Herodotus, who wrote some of the first surviving Greek prose, but this may not have been before 440 or 430 BC.

We are not certain that the word " democracy " was extant when systems that came to be called democratic were first instituted, but around 460 BC an individual is known whose parents had decided to name him ' Democrates ', a name which may have been manufactured as a gesture of democratic loyalty ; the name can also be found in Aeolian Temnus, not a particularly democratic state.