I have had the best fun writing a piece that appears in today's G2, about the way Barack Obama's rhetoric relates to ancient models – and particularly how he seems to me to be something of a new Cicero. (Maybe it's the product of having recently published a book called It's All Greek To Me that makes me see everything as related to the classical world – but I'm not the only one. Ancient historian Mary Beard has just written an interesting blog comparing Obama to the first African-Roman emperor, Septimius Severus.)

There are those who will say – and with reason – that we are long way from the time when presidents delivered anything like intellectually heavyweight rhetoric. But in the post-Nixonian era of ever-shorter soundbites and ever-more demotic speechifying, Obama has certainly bucked the trend: in his oratory he at least does not project himself as being less intelligent than he actually is. It's true that Cicero's speeches, with their long, sweeping periods and their evident excitement at the possibilities that Latin can bring, are much, much more complex than Obama's. But in their rhythmic patterns, in the use of many Ciceronian rhetorical tricks (lots about this in the piece) and in their neat and clever construction I find Obama's speeches frequently recalling their distant Roman antecedents.

It's more than that though – it's also that Obama and Cicero were both men of letters, writers, thinkers and lawyers. They share a constant self-questioning, self-doubt, and excavation of their own identity and history (there's lots on this kind of thing in recent Cicero scholarship). They both project a personality through oratory that is absolutely fused with the personality of the state (a point I borrow from Ian Leslie's blog here by way of Tom Holland's fantastic book Rubicon). And they both regard rhetoric as a practice inextricable from the ethical pursuit of a civic ideal. Here's the brilliant classicist Joy Connolly writing in the introduction to her 2007 book The State of Speech, (about ancient rhetoric, but a work she felt impelled to write after 9/11 when "never had the daily practice of citizenship and the exercise of political power seemed so great"). "I concentrate on rhetoric's representation of the ideal orator, which I read as an exploration of the ethos of the ideal citizen. Just like the persuasive speech he utters, this citizen is a complex, paradoxical construction, at once imperious and responsive, masterly and fragile, artificial and authentic, who seeks civil concord through the exercise of a seductive authority." She's talking about ancient Rome – but this seems an incredibly apposite way to speak about Obama.

A brief nod to ancient Athens while we are here – the point I loved in my piece was that made by ancient historian James Davidson – that the passionate oratory that comes from contemporary pulpits in America, and is a particular feature of the black church, has its origins in ancient Athens. Brilliant.