Charlotte Higgins: Gordon Brown invokes Demosthenes and Cicero - Badly

[Charlotte Higgins writes a culture blog for the Guardian.]

At last Gordon Brown has delivered what Jonathan Freedland called "a barnstormer of a speech".

In fact his speech to Citizens UK was a pretty rare moment in this campaign of almost American-style sweeping rhetoric – perhaps desperate times calling for desperate measures.

And where did Brown go to lift his rhetoric up a notch? Ah yes, to oratorical technique of the ancient Greeks and Romans. There were plenty of thundering tricola and alliterations and other little oratorical tricks. One example at random: "You may not make the headlines, but you can always make the difference" – a zeugma there.

Intriguingly, there was also a direct appeal to the great rhetoricians of antiquity. He said:

When Cicero turned to the crowds in ancient Rome, people said, 'great speech'. When Demosthenes spoke to the crowds in ancient Greece and people turned to each other, they said: 'Let's march.' Let's march for justice, dignity and fairness. That's what we have all got to march for, and let's march for it together.

Frankly, this is faintly baffling. On first hearing it, I thought, how unfair on Cicero – he did, after all, save the Roman Republic from the tyranny of Catiline: even if the writings of Cicero are beyond Brown, it's all recounted in Robert Harris's excellent thriller Lustrum, dedicated to none other than Peter Mandelson.

In fact, as far as I can tell, it's something of a misquote. Certainly David Ogilvy, the pioneer of advertising and no mean classicist, famously used a rather different version of it in his book On Advertising.