On the weekend, I had blogged about the then ongoing Liberal leadership thing ... the eventual winner was not Michael Ignatieff, but a guy named Stephane Dion ... here's how a piece in the National Post begins its analysis:

So Claudius is king. You know the story: while all about him members of the Roman court are furiously intriguing and poisoning each other's wine, Claudius -- shy, stuttering, perpetually overlooked -- survives them all to become emperor.

Like Claudius, Stephane Dion is the unintended beneficiary of the fratricidal wars among his party's ruling class, emerging from the ruins of the party establishment as the consensus party leader. But like Claudius, his relentless rise can hardly be chalked up to mere luck.

There is a lesson here for his adversaries outside the party. The failure of the Liberal establishment to agree on a single candidate, dividing instead between two deeply flawed alternatives and unable to the end to bridge the gap, marked the last gasp of the party old guard, the final convulsion of denial after being driven from power last January.

Wow ... I didn't know Andrew Coyne (who penned the piece) had any Classical pretensions ... then again, if he had truly thought about things, he would have seen Jean Chretien as Claudius. For my part, I wonder whether Dion will live up to his Syracusan namesake ...