In an essay recently published in The Free Press, the political commentator Martin Gurri made a nicely arch response to the fashionable hand-wringing about supposed threats to “our democracy.”

　　I come with good news. We can’t lose our democracy because we never had one. Our system is called “representative government.” It enjoys brief spasms of democratic involvement—elections, trials by jury—but by and large it glories in being densely and opaquely mediated, and many of its operations are patently undemocratic—appointed judges, for example, or the Electoral College. This is a feature, not a bug, of the system. By making sure the right hand of power seldom knows what the left hand is doing, the Framers sought to prevent various flavors of tyranny—including, in James Madison’s words, “an unjust combination of the majority.”

　　I suppose it was to avoid the appearance of partisanship that Gurri called our political regime “representative government” rather than using the name the Founders used, that is, a republic. This was no doubt a prudent choice of words on his part. So shallow is knowledge of history among our politicians, journalists, and the political nation in general that most would struggle to describe the difference between a republic and a ham sandwich. Heedless of capitalization, they would inevitably associate it with the name of one of our political parties, whose structure is no more republican than the Democratic Party’s organs are democratic. Or they might think of the Staatsname of other current republics like the Democratic Republic of North Korea, or the Islamic Republic of Iran. These associations would also be unenlightening. So “representative government” was no doubt Gurri’s best choice, but it is far from adequate as a description of how the Founders intended the country to govern itself.

　　What did the term “republic” mean for them? Unlike modern politicos, our Founders were keen students of history. Benjamin Franklin’s Library Company of Philadelphia, founded in 1731, which became effectively the Library of Congress during that assembly’s long residence in the city, was well-stocked with histories. The shelves of John Adams’ library, the largest in colonial America, were also loaded with works of history. His writings, like those of Jefferson and Madison, teem with references to the republics of past times: to the ancient Romans above all, but also to the medieval Italian republics, to the Venetian, Swiss, and Dutch republics, and to the English Commonwealth (the word is just an English translation of the Latin respublica).

　　Some of the Founders read Latin, Greek, and French as well as English. They read Thucydides (often in Hobbes’ translation), Livy, Sallust, Cicero, and Tacitus; they read Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans in Sir Thomas North’s translation; they read Polybius in the translation of James Hampton (in whose pages they could learn about the federal republics of ancient Greece); they read Edward Mortley Montagu’s Reflections on the Rise and Fall of Ancient Republics; of the Italians, they read Leonardo Bruni’s History of the Florentine People, Guicciardini’s History of Italy, and Machiavelli’s History of Florence; they read John Jacob Mascou’s History of the Ancient Germans; they read David Hume’s six-volume History of England and Obadiah Hulme’s Historical Essay on the English Constitution. As soon as each volume of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire left the presses, between 1775 and 1788, copies flew across the Atlantic and were eagerly consumed by Americans. Americans had good reason to be interested in the collapse of states in those years, when the new Confederation in North America was being torn apart by its weak central institutions.

　　So what understandings of the term “republic” might they have gleaned from their reading? First of all they would be aware, like Gurri, that a republic is not a democracy. (This is not as obvious as it seems: I remember a student— a Harvard history major!—writing on an exam I gave some years ago that “republic is just an old name for democracy.”) The Founders knew what a democracy was and had no interest in giving America a democratic constitution. They knew their history. As John Adams wrote in a letter to John Taylor in 1814, “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” The historical experience of classical Athens was taken by nearly all the historians the Founders knew to prove Adams’ assertion. The great political theorists of the fourth century BC—Plato, Aristotle, Isocrates, and Xenophon—had all proposed various fixes for the defects of democracy. The most influential of these was Aristotle’s “mixed” regime, where elements of democracy and oligarchy were balanced against each other to produce stability. Later, Polybius and other writers in the Aristotelian tradition added a monarchical principle for added stability. Aristotle called his mixed regime politeia.

　　When his Politics was translated into Latin around 1436–37 by the Florentine historian Leonardo Bruni, politeia became respublica. Bruni’s translation was the most popular Latin version for centuries. The 1597 Geneva edition was in John Adams’ library. (Adams also possessed the 1776 edition of the Politics in the English translation of William Ellis, first printed in 1597, where the constitution named politeia was translated, unhelpfully, as “state.”)

　　When the Romans conquered the Mediterranean in the second century BC, the historian Polybius explained the growth of their power largely in terms of their (unwritten) constitution, which he recognized as a form of mixed regime. The Romans were proud of their republic even in the dark decades of civil war, blaming Rome’s parlous condition on the moral defects of powerful warlords rather than on any weaknesses in her constitution. According to Cicero, Rome’s basic constitutional principles had been laid down by one of the early kings, Servius Tullius. Servius had established the bedrock principle that political power should be proportionate to a man’s income and his contribution to Rome’s military power. Poorer citizens could participate in assemblies but decision-making power was kept in the hands of the most influential citizens. The censors, a magistracy responsible (among other things) for deciding which citizens could belong to the Senate, judged them fit for membership not only on the basis of their moral rectitude, but also on their income. A man without sufficient income to support himself and his family comfortably without engaging in trade or a paid profession was ineligible.

　　Post-classical Athenians, by contrast, continued to call their city-state a democracy even after all the real power came to be exercised behind the scenes by wealthy oligarchs. The great authority on Hellenistic Greece, Peter Green, once wittily remarked that Athenians came to see democracy as a privilege best restricted to the upper classes. Modern parallels spring to mind. The Romans for their part were not in the least embarrassed about the preponderant power of the wealthy in their system. It was a feature, not a bug. But in Rome, the possession of wealth and preponderant power imposed upon the great the responsibility to put themselves and their treasure at the service of the republic. It was assumed that the wealthy would also be the best educated, the most likely to have experience in civil and military affairs, and, as persons of long residence in Rome, the most loyal and public-spirited.

　　If we began again to use the correct historical term for our regime—a republic—we might be able at least to have an honest discussion about who holds power in the American system.

　　In the middle republic (third and second centuries BC), the principle of merit was added to the Servian constitution: distinguished service to the state was also to be a source of dignitas or merited status. Thus “new men” like Cicero could be taken into the ruling elite on the basis of outstanding abilities and contributions to the republic’s welfare, the salus reipublicae. To prevent the powerful from oppressing the common people a new magistracy was invented, the tribunate, consisting of ten tribunes of the plebs. The existence of this magistracy led to the emergence of populist politics at the end of the second century BC, but Rome never became a democracy. Roman populism ultimately brought Julius Caesar and Augustus to power, over the opposition of the Senate. Rome’s populists were almost always led by nobles who were more devoted to acquiring power for themselves than serving the interests of the common people.

　　Cicero in his dialogue On the Commonwealth (54–51 BC) praised the old republic for favoring the best men or “optimates,” observing “the principle which ought always to be adhered to in the commonwealth, that the greatest number should not have the greatest power” (ne plurimum valeant plurimi). Rome should never be a democracy; that would be too dangerous for ordered liberty, which was guaranteed by law, not popular power.

　　In a democracy, Cicero believed, sensible public deliberation was impossible. In one of his speeches, Cicero mocked Greek democracies for their foolish practice of herding large numbers of ordinary citizens into amphitheaters and allowing them to shout at each other. The Romans, more sensibly, conducted deliberation in the Senate, among educated men with experience of government. The Senate proposed legislation and the people in their assemblies had the right to vote on the Senate’s proposals, up or down. This practice, that the wise should deliberate and propose, the people approve, was the normal procedure used by most European republics in the centuries before the founding of our American republic. It was recommended, among others, by James Harrington, a seventeenth-century British authority on republics widely read in America.

　　By establishing a House of Representatives to conduct its own deliberation and to propose all legislation involving taxation (a principle now apparently forgotten in Washington, DC), the Founders were attempting to rebalance the republican tradition they inherited in a popular direction, so that the interests of the wealthy could never prevail over those of the people. Nevertheless, they continued to uphold the view that the presumably wiser and better-educated men in the Senate—Jefferson’s “natural aristocracy”—should prevail in matters of foreign policy and the oversight of the other branches of government. The aristocratic element was also, originally, meant to prevail in the choice of the president, although the Electoral College was soon corrupted by party politics, at which point it lost its deliberative and most of its decision-making power.

　　But were history’s only democracies to be found in classical Greece? No. When Mr. Gibbon’s history began to be read in the early republic, Americans were given access to another concept of democracy, different from that associated with classical Athens, one that might be called honorary democracy or, less politely, fake democracy. This concept might remind us of the way the term is used by certain of our contemporaries.

　　Gibbon famously regarded the second-century AD ad, the period between the reigns of the emperors Domitian and Commodus, as “the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous.” The text upon which the great historian hung this judgment (to which, as an upholder of constitutional monarchy, he was predisposed) was an oration entitled An Encomium of Rome (ca. 154–55), written by Aelius Aristides.

　　Aristides, the most prominent Greek intellectual of his day, heaped praise on Rome as the greatest empire the world had ever known. It managed to combine unquestioned authority regulated by law with a free citizenry, and its government was not handed over to foreign princes but was administered by fair and disinterested citizen-officials, capable of ruling and being ruled in turn, as in the best days of classical Greece. For Aristides, the Roman empire was more like a city-state on a vast scale than a traditional despotism. Yet its courts of appeal, administered by Roman governors, were an improvement on city-state justice, and they treated everyone equally, no matter what their status. This was an achievement unprecedented in human history, and a great proof of Rome’s genius for government. Virtuous rule had made the empire flourish as no human government had ever done before. By widely extending citizen rights, the empire vastly increased the pool of talent upon which it could draw.

　　Aristides could think of no greater praise than to say that the Roman empire was like a democracy over all the earth, under a single best magistrate and bringer of cosmic order. The Roman system, he wrote, is the final state of mankind: “no other way of life is left”—it was the end of history, as it were. No longer does any city wish to revolt from it and to rule itself, and the Romans have made even the memory of war fade by doing away permanently with local struggles for preeminence. The whole world has become a garden with gleaming cities enjoying a perpetual festival of blessings from the emperor and the gods.

　　This, of course, is flattery under a mask of high-flown rhetoric, decorated with concepts from political philosophy. It didn’t matter that Aristides’s use of the word “democracy”—and he was by no means the only imperial subject who used the word in this sense—matched no known democratic regime in history and had nothing to do with political power in the hands of the people. It was just a word that had positive connotations in Greek; it would sound nice to his listeners and flatter them. Aristides was a professional orator-entertainer who went about the Greek world giving speeches before audiences educated to appreciate the fine art of eloquence. In this instance, Aristides was speaking before the imperial court, and he knew what to say to win their approval.

　　As far as I know, the founding generation never discussed Aristides’ faux democracy. They were serious men who understood the history of political regimes. But perhaps the time to revive Aristides’ concept has now come. Modern politicos who talk glibly of “our democracy” might be asked to explain to the rest of us just what they think democracy is. Is it just a nice-sounding word used to flatter themselves and their political allies, or do they support putting real power in the hands of popular assemblies on the basis of equality? If neither of those alternatives seems palatable, perhaps they might avail themselves of the correct adjective to describe our constitution:republican.

　　Martin Gurri is right: we are not a democracy. We are a republic, and that is no bad thing. Republics come in several flavors, aristocratic, popular, and mixed. Not all of them are militaristic and dominated by warlords and the wealthy, as the late Roman republic was. In late medieval and early modern times, most republics preferred trade and industry to making war. Even so, some of these commercial republics lasted a very long time, like Venice, which endured for 1,100 years, or Lucca, which lasted for almost 650 years. (Both were crushed by Napoleon.) If modern advocates for “our democracy” fancy themselves lovers of the people, they might appreciate the fact that our republic at its founding was already weighted towards the popular more than previous early modern republics had been. The Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution made it still more so. If we began again to use the correct historical term for our regime we might be able at least to have an honest discussion about who holds power in the American system, and whether they deserve to do so, instead of playing make-believe with terms that conceal more than they reveal.