itsnotgambling.substack.com/p/representative-futarchy

This misdescribes how the Roman Republic worked. Romans did not respond to scale by inventing a representative legislature of the modern kind.

Britannica explicitly says that because Roman assemblies kept meeting in Rome, most citizens outside the city were effectively excluded, and that “Two millennia later, the solution—electing representatives to a Roman legislature—would seem obvious.” In other words, representative government was not the Roman solution.

Britannica’s article on the Roman assemblies further states that during the Republic, two different assemblies elected magistrates, exercised legislative power, and made other important decisions, and that only adult male Roman citizens could attend the assemblies in Rome and exercise the right to vote. That is direct citizen voting in assemblies, not government by representatives acting in citizens’ place.

So the problem of distance and scale in Rome was real, but the specific claim that this produced the new concept of political representatives is historically wrong.