The Die Is Cast

The story

In January 49 BCE Julius Caesar was still, in law, a governor with an army that was not supposed to enter Italy proper. The Rubicon was the boundary of his province. Suetonius, in Rolfe’s 1913 translation, has him pause there and say that they might still draw back, but once they crossed that little bridge the whole issue would be with the sword.

He did not ride up in daylight at the head of a parade. Chapter 31 says that after sunset he left with a small company, took the mules from a bakery nearby, and harnessed them to a carriage. His lights went out. He lost the way, found a guide at dawn, and reached the road on foot by narrow paths. Then he caught up with his cohorts at the river.

Chapter 32 adds a sign while he was still in doubt. A figure of great size and beauty sat nearby playing a reed. Shepherds came, and soldiers left their posts, trumpeters among them. The figure snatched a trumpet, blew the advance, and crossed to the far bank. Then Caesar said, in Rolfe’s English, “Take we the course which the signs of the gods and the false dealing of our foes point out. The die is cast.” The Latin Suetonius writes is Iacta alea est. The familiar schoolbook order, alea iacta est, swaps the words.

Plutarch tells the same night and names Asinius Pollio among the friends who were there. Perrin’s 1919 translation gives the phrase as “Let the die be cast,” and calls it the sort of thing men already said before a desperate attempt. It was a proverb put to use, not a sentence coined on the bank. Fouquet’s miniature, painted in the second half of the fifteenth century, shows the army in the river. The oddest sourced detail is earlier in the night: the bakery mules, the dead lights, and a general walking back to the road.