In a famous piece of Law, Plato explains how, in times of convulsions for the city, the theaters were taken by a fickle and noisy audience, who did not know the laws of rhythm and harmony, until an evil theater ended up supplanting both the aristocracy In music as in politics. Since then, and to this day, the analogy between the agora and the theater has been a constant point of reference in the invectives against the representational aspect of public life. For the enemies of democracy, there is nothing easier than to press against its network of representations proclaiming that in the formidable media scene everything is theater, pure theater. Everything is image and spectacle. Playing with the irreducible ambiguity of the notion of "democratic representation", at the same time a source of authority and tool for the visualization of interests and needs, this essay tries to dismantle the roots of this conceptual association, highlighting some of its virtues. Against Plato and, above all, against its contemporary epigones, he claims the role that representative practices could play in the construction of a democratic public sphere.