In 40 A.D., the Roman Emperor Caligula marshaled his legions on the northern coast of Gaul and declared war against the god of the sea, mighty Neptune. At Caligula’s command, the legionnaires formed ranks, drew their swords and charged into the swirling ocean surf, swiftly vanquishing the deity’s unseen hordes.
The victorious legions plundered Neptune’s treasure, gathering it along the shore into baskets overflowing with the booty — common seashells — much to the bemused delight of their emperor. The seashells were brought to Rome as official spoils of war.
This farcical exercise served a darker purpose than the emperor’s frivolity. It was a calculated humiliation of Roman virtues: the law, traditions and institutions including the military, to affirm they had all been subordinated by the power and whims of an emperor’s erratic vanity.
Nearly two millennia after Caligula, another peevish, petty and vindictive narcissist Donald Trump became similarily obsessed with seashells and the message they allegedly conveyed. This modern version of the theater of the absurd manifested itself in the United States Department of Justice’s federal prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey.
The core of the state’s criminal indictment hinges on a May 2025 Instagram post. While walking along a North Carolina beach, Comey photographed a cluster of seashells arranged on the sand to form the numbers “86 47” beside each other. To the casual observer, it was a piece of normal political expression, utilizing resturant slang to mean “eject” or “remove” the 47th president.
Yet under the machinery of Trump’s weaponized justice system, the Department of Justice escalated Comey’s beach walk into an active, violent conspiracy. Federal prosecutors took the extreme position that the seashell photo constituted a “true threat” to assassinate the sitting president, claiming the image carried a coded command to unleash bodily harm. There’s no word whether the seashells have been named as co-conspirators.
Just as Caligula forced Rome’s fiercest warriors to collect beach debris as spoils of war, this indictment of Comey forces federal prosecutors and judges to treat sea litter as dangerous munitions. The strategic utility remains identical across the centuries.
By utilizing the formidable weight of federal law enforcement to litigate a perceived slight written in the sand, the executive branch accomplishes a psychological subjugation of the state.
It signals to the public and the political opposition that the mechanisms of justice are no longer bound by proportion, rationality or objective truth. Ultimately, both historical moments demonstrate that a tyrant’s truest power lies not in defeating genuine national threats, but in forcing an entire empire to participate in his personal delusions.
John S. Hancock lives in Concord.