Commentary When an early Blackfoot or Plains Cree tribe faced a problem of food supply or contagion such as smallpox in their territory, councils met to discuss it. Typically a group of senior men—war chiefs, shamans, hunters, and the like—talked, in turn, and considered the various aspects of the problem. The input of many experienced voices was heard. These were so-called primitive societies, yet this is how at least some of them worked. When the classical Greeks of Athens discussed taxes or faced war, they met in assembly to deliberate publicly. Men such as Demosthenes and Pericles discussed options in orations while others listened, noting dubious ideas for rebuttal in order that votes might result in effective action for the polis as a whole. A polis was not simply the city, as Robin Lane Fox notes in “The Classical World: An Epic History of Greece and Rome,” but the large …