All this talk about “Crossing the Rubicon”….

The phrase gives a feeling of finality or something.

But what does it actually mean?

Well, when Julius Caesar was still just a war hero with glorious reports of daring conquests of the fearsome (and largely kingless Gauls), there was a region around the city of Rome inside of which generals were required to de-militarize and appear as mere civilian citizens. Within this region (except during specially declared occasions of tribunal celebrations), anyone appearing in military attire or bearing weapons of war were considered to have committed treason against the 500-year-old Roman Republic. Entering this region adorned in military garb was an act of war against the state.

To the north of the city, this boundary was a stream called the Rubicon River.

Thus it was that, when Julius Caesar marched a legion of Roman soldiers south towards the city of Rome in the year 49BCE, it was a point of no return for the Republic as he crossed the Rubicon River.

From that moment, the Roman Republic entered a civil war from which the Roman empire emerged 18 years later under the rule of his nephew, Augustus Caesar. Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon marked the moment of no return in Rome’s transition from a sort-of democracy to an authoritarian regime that lasted another 500 years in the West and a millennium and half in the East.