According to David Wengrow and David Graeber, in their The Dawn of Everything, it goes back much farther. They posit three principals of social power - control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma, stretching from pre-history to today. Modern "democracy" is a form of the last. Rather than deliberations by the people themselves, as in town councils, "democracy as we have come to know it is effectively a game of winners and losers played out by larger-than-life individuals, with the rest of us reduced to merely onlookers."

How different, really, are our elections from grand sporting events? The news coverage of elections sounds just like coverage of soccer games - just much slower (which may be why so few participate).

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/the-dawn-of-everything