Following Donald Trump’s election, Steve Bannon, who only recently was released from a 4-month jail sentence ‘for defying a subpoena from a congressional committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol’, declared on Real America’s Voice, referring to his and Trump’s establishment detractors: ‘Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow[1], come on, baby. Give it to me. Where are they? Jack Smith’s[2] running for the hills. […] you weaponized the institutions, and you were part of it, and your staff was part of it […]. You will pay a price for that. It’s called justice. Rough Roman justice.’

What did he mean by this?

Was Bannon alluding to decimation, whereby as punishment for cowardice or insubordination in the army, one soldier out of ten was picked to be executed, sometimes by their own brothers-in-arms? Would Steve march into the MSNBC newsroom with a dozen lictors? Would he have ten journos draw straws and make sure both that Chris Haynes be one of them and that he get to draw the short one? Would Steve produce a membrane from his toga and read out Chris’ own words prior to Steve starting his sentence, that ‘he [Bannon] could talk all he wants about revenge’ and that ‘his number one concern should be finding a guest host for his podcast for four months’? Would Steve then force the nine other journos to bash Chris with their laptops, give him a thousand papercuts with his own printed articles and prick his eyeballs with penpoints? Would this policy be extended to every newsroom in America to get the message across? Would this sortition also apply to writers more amenable to Steve? Would they take the punishment anyway for the good of the Republic, because, as Tacitus wrote, ‘all great examples carry with them something of injustice—injustice compensated, as against individual suffering, by the advantage of the community’?

Or could it be that Bannon was thinking of crucifixion? Would Steve bust down the recently locked and barricaded door to the next room with the same dozen lictors? Would he find there half a dozen female reporters, then ask: ‘which of you is Rachel Maddow?’ Would all women answer, in unison or in canon, ‘I am Rachel Maddow?’ Would Steve draw a parchment from another fold in his toga and read out from it Rachel Maddow’s claim about the 2024 Trump campaign that ‘they’re not trying very hard to compete on normal political appeals’ and that ‘what they are trying to do instead is take power by menacing and chasing out of the country anyone who opposed their leader’? Would Steve then have everyone dragged to the closest thing New York has to a Via Appia and do to them what they did to Jesus? Would Steve misunderstand who ‘they’ refers to in the previous sentence and spare the writer of this article over it, in relation to Steve’s much-documented antisemitic streak, including articles he ran in Breitbart, his refusal to have his daughters attend school with Jews, his endorsement of the alt-right and of the European populist right, and his denouncement by many high-ranking Republicans?

Did Bannon perhaps instead have in mind proscription, a posted list of all Roman citizens who had been declared outlaws, whose goods were confiscated and whose slaying by any upstanding citizen was not only allowed, but also rewarded? Would Steve and his dozen lictors walk up the makeshift Via Appia, past the many martyred Rachel Maddows, all the way to the office of Jack Smith, Special Counsel for the United States Department of Justice? Would Steve then nail to the door a notice denouncing Jack’s ‘blatant election interference’ and ‘long track record of weaponizing the law for political gain’? Would this notice include the testimony of the New York Times’s James Risen, who accused Jack in 2022 of being ‘just aggressive against the powerless’ over his alleged part in the ‘Justice Department team that turned [James’] life upside down by trying, for seven years, to force [him] to reveal confidential sources that [he’d] used to report on a botched CIA operation’? Later, once the deed was done, would Steve come back, almost trip over his toga bumping into a few trigger-happy jolly fellows carrying various pieces of furniture from Jack’s office? Would Steve then retrieve Jack’s battered body and have his dozen lictors impale his severed head and hands to the rostra like Mark Antony did with Cicero?

Should Bannon try to turn his revenge fantasies into reality, thankfully for his enemies, they live two and a half centuries after the publication of Cesare Beccaria’s Essay on Crimes and Punishments, whose assessment that ‘some remains of the legislation of an ancient conquering people, compiled by order of a prince who reigned twelve centuries ago in Constantinople, then mixed with the customs of the Lombards, and buried in a voluminous jumble of obscure commentaries, form this old mass of opinions, which a large part of Europe has honoured with the name of laws’ has been integrated into most modern legal systems.

[1] MSNBC reporters

[2] Special Counsel for the United States Department of Justice