Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

One of democracy's most unreliable cliches is that anyone can run for and win elected office

if they really just put their mind to it. This cliche, while inspiring to third graders seeking election as classroom captain,

fails to account for lobbyists, political action committees, focus groups,

the electoral college, polls, gerrymandering, hackers, fake news, social media, and occasionally the weather.

But while these political warts hadn't yet surfaced in early Greco democracies, the Greeks,

in their infinite philosophical wisdom, no doubt sensed robocalls were coming, when instead of holding

elections for government offices, they simply pulled names out of a toga cap.

Well, not a cap, per se, and not everyone's name was up for grab, just the men.

But to fill many of the most important positions of government,

the Greeks held lotteries. One minute you could be irrigating your grove. The next, you were

banging a gavel. In his new book, Can Democracy Work, James Miller wrote, to anyone accustomed

to the importance of periodic elections in most modern democracies,

the use of a lottery to select a city government seems counterintuitive.

Yes, especially if you believe that standing in line to vote for hours, as millions of Americans

did this week for the midterm

elections, is one of the fundamental pillars of democracy.

The Greeks weren't really feeling that, especially a fellow named Kleistinese. Born around

570 BC, his family was well-to-do, the sort of people who, as Miller put it,

preferred a system of letting prominent men of noble birth, like Kleistinies,

vie for popular support with help from their networks of wealthy friends and clients.

In some ways, Kleistinese was a man of the people.

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