We’re used to seeing various personages in American culture compared to ancient Roman types … here’s a somewhat different one making the rounds (it appears) of the Australian press, FWIW and inter alia:
The late Professor Norberto Bobbio, one of Italy’s greatest postwar political thinkers, authors and legal philosophers, once described Silvio Berlusconi as the incarnation of the demagogue of ancient times: “Berlusconi, in essence, is the tyrant of the classics, the man who believes it licit to do what mere mortals only dream. The defining characteristic of the man-tyrant is the belief he ‘can’ everything.”
via Scandals never hurt Silvio, Italy’s everyman | Brisbane Times.
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