One must be extremely careful and judicious drawing straight line comparisons from Ancient Rome to today. And as usual, the correct answer when confronted by a discussion along these lines, the correct answer is “it’s more complicated”.
Think about it, if Rome wasn't a democracy, then why did the Populares exist at all? In an oligarchy, wouldn't a political party that panders to the masses be utterly powerless?
While Romans didn't call what they had liberalism, they definitely practiced a liberal society. People were free to speak their minds, travel as they wished, and speak for or against people in power however they wanted (see: Catullus and the invention of slam poetry).
All of these freedoms were locked down tight the moment Augustus came to power. People were okay with it, because having your speech, movement, and life trajectory restricted is better than being dead in a civil war, but Roman society under the Empire was way less free than Roman society under the Republic.
For some values of "majority vote". The voting was by centuries / tribes, both of them being extremely unbalanced in voting power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_the_Roman_Republi...
If you demand that all matters must be decided by simple-majority popular vote in order to call a government "democratic" then there has never been a democratic government in all of history. Even Ancient Athens had assemblies, councils, tribunals, and other elected offices.
The plebian assembly, where all votes are equal and senators and equites aren't allowed, elected Tribunes who had an absolute veto over all government activity, including the senate and the consuls, and controlled the treasury.
This is like saying that US senators are with equal state representation, some senators representing hundreds of thousands and others representing tens of millions, therefore the US is an oligarchy. You can't just ignore the rest of the government and its other electoral mechanisms.
No, the voting was by tribe, with the vast majority of voters crammed into the 4 urban tribes and the wealthy were enrolled in 31 much smaller rural tribes.
> and senators and equites aren't allowed.
Sure they were, as long as they were not patrician. By the first century BC, the vast majority of senators were plebeian.
> This is like saying that US senators are with equal state representation, some senators representing hundreds of thousands and others representing tens of millions, therefore the US is an oligarchy.
The US indeed has oligarchic tendencies already. Now imagine if the constitution guaranteed that citizens with $1M+ in property had 50+% of the vote, and that your "state" was not determined primarily by residence, but anybody without substantial property was automatically registered in California, Texas, or New York...
That's very, very wrong. First of all, the Roman Republic was an oligarchy. Political power was monopolized in the hands of very few families who formed the nobility. When somebody outside this incredibly tiny elite, a homo novus, completed the cursus honorum, it was a seen as sensation.
Furthermore, the most important offices of the cursus honorum were not selected by something we would recognize as a democratic election. If you did not belong to the equites or the first class, your vote in the comitia centuriata which elected the consuls, the praetors and the censors had basically no effect.