Not so long ago it was The Daily Telegraph which you could bank on for articles about Roman oratory, but these days – an exciting development for progressive classicsts everywhere! – it is The Guardian which seems to have a thing for Cicero. The past week featured two fascinating articles on the great man: both making the point that, more than anyone else from antiquity, perhaps, he is the figure who seems to hold a mirror most eerily up to ourselves.

The first article was by Charlotte Higgins, who bids fair to beat Philip Howard as the most prolific – and certainly the most entertaining – commentator on classical affairs writing in the broadsheets today. Her thesis that Obama’s rhetoric draws on all the tricks of the trade exploited by ancient orators is wonderfully made – so too her casting of the President-elect as the equivalent of a ‘novus homo’, an arriviste without the advantages of a military background, à la Eisenhower or McCain, or the dynastic pedigree of a Bush or Clinton. It is the last point that particularly intrigues me. One of the puzzles of the Roman Republic is the way in which certain families, generation after generation, were able to dominate the competition for honours – and recent American history has helped, perhaps, to make it just that little bit more comprehensible. At one point, after all, there were commentators suggesting that the 2008 election might end up being fought by Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. Perhaps that is why Obama, for all his talk of change, and the excitement of his breakthrough, is bound to disappointment those who are waiting for a full sluice-out of Washington’s Augean stable. In America, as in Cicero’s Rome, wealth and family connections will never easily be bucked. Just like Cicero, once he had obtained the consulship, so Obama, now that he is president, appears to be demonstrating that there is no choice but to pay them due obeisance.

The second article – as most articles these days seem to be – was about the credit crunch. Philip Kay has spotted a precedent in the wave of bankruptcies that followed Mithridates’ invasion of the province of Asia: an unsettling reminder to the Roman business class that a globalised economy might spell peril as well as opportunity. He cites De Imperio Cn. Pompei, a speech given by Cicero in 66 BC, for the explicit link that it makes between economic breakdown in one corner of the world, and financial chaos in another.

True enough – but we can hazard a guess, I think. Mithridates’ invasion was repulsed by Rome’s best general, Sulla, a victory that culminated in the wholesale despoiling of Greece and Asia Minor. Along with an assortment of columns from the 6^th C BC temple of Zeus in Athens, the works of Aristotle and a crack squad of Olympic atheletes, Sulla also helped himself to less esoteric prizes: gold, silver and slaves, and plenty of them. Then, on his return to Rome, he won a bloody civil war, and had his richest opponents proscribed, murdered, and stripped of all their worldly goods. Hardly Keynsian – but Sulla does, at any rate, seem to have been a man with a plan…

A lesson from history? The problem is, though, that we’ve already tried fighting a war in the Middle East, and it didn’t really help…