Page "Athenian democracy" Paragraph 54

Instead of seeing it as a fair system under which ' everyone ' has equal rights, they saw it as the numerically preponderant poor tyrannizing over the rich.

They viewed society like a modern stock company: democracy is like a company where all shareholders have an equal say regardless of the scale of their holding ; one share or ten thousand, it makes no difference.

They regarded this as manifestly unjust.

In Aristotle this is categorized as the difference between ' arithmetic ' and ' geometric ' ( i. e. proportional ) equality.

Democracy was far from being the normal style of governance and the beliefs on which it was based were in effect a minority opinion.

Those writing in later centuries generally had no direct experience of democracy themselves.