Rubicon

Rubicon (pronounced roo-be-kon)

(1) A river, some 50 miles (80 km) in length in northern Italy, flowing eastwards into the Adriatic.

(2) A point of no return expressed as crossing the Rubicon (sometimes not capitalized; both considered correct).

(3) A penalty in piquet by which the score of a player who fails to reach 100 points in six hands is added to his opponent's total.

The Latin rubicō was derived from the adjective rubeus (red).  The river's name was from rubicundus (ruddy) and was a reference to the color of the soil on its banks.  Two-thousand odd years later, the mining company Rio Tinto similarly picked up its name from the river where copper was first mined.  Rio Tinto in Spanish translates as "colored river", the color caused by copper deposits leeching into the waters.  The figurative phrase "cross (occasionally "pass") the Rubicon" meaning "take a decisive step" or "past the point of no return" is from the 1620s, a reference to the crossing in 49 BC, in defiance of Roman law, when Julius Caesar (100-44 BC; Roman general and dictator of Rome 49-44 BC) left his province to attack Pompey.

The die it is cast

A kind of Mason-Dixon Line from Antiquity, during the Roman republic, the Rubicon marked the boundary between the Roman province of Cisalpine Gaul and Italy proper, controlled directly by Rome to the south.  Governors of Roman provinces were granted an essentially absolute executive authority in their territory, the governor serving as general of the Roman army within his province.  Roman civil law specified that only elected consuls and praetors could hold such authority within Italy so any provincial governor entering Italy at the head of his troops forfeited his office was therefore no longer legally allowed to command troops.  It was more than an administrative point because exercising military authority without authority was a capital offense and this extended to the soldiers under command.  The point of the law was to prevent generals with political ambitions from marching on Rome with their own army.

2015 Jeep Wrangler Rubicon.

In 49 BC, Julius Caesar led a single legion over the Rubicon from Cisalpine Gaul to Italy to make his way to Rome; in doing this, he deliberately broke the law and made war inevitable.   Writers at the time noted Caesar paused on the northern bank and waited a while, attributing this delay to his contemplation of the enormity of what he was about to do; a general needs to think a bit before committing mutiny.  As described by Suetonius Tranquillus (circa 69–circa 128), as he crossed the Rubicon, Caesar uttered the famous phrase ālea iacta est (the die has been cast).  The phrase crossing the Rubicon has endured to refer to individuals or groups committing irrevocably to a risky or revolutionary course of action.  It means the point of no return, what’s done is done and can’t be undone.

Julius Caesar and the Crossing of the Rubicon (1493-1494) by Francesco Granacci (1469-1543).

An insight into the tastes of those who actually paid for art during the Renaissance, the imagery presented in Granacci's work would have been far removed from how Caesar, a practical military man at the head of a legion, would have done a river crossing into hostile territory.  The painting does though reflect the influences from the art of Antiquity, especially in the representation of armors.  Granacci  trained in Florence, with Michelangelo (1475–1564), in the workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio (circa 1448-1494), and the two then studied sculpture in the Medici garden at the Casino Mediceo di San Marco under the supervision of Bertoldo di Giovanni (circa 1420-1491).  One of the noted artists of the era and a long-time collaborator of Michelangelo, his best remembered work is probably the high altarpiece for the church of Sant'Apollonia, Florence (1530).

BeiBao Lindsay Lohan spare wheel cover on Jeep Wrangler Rubicon.

Caesar's swift military action forced the lawful consuls and a large part of the Roman Senate to flee Rome in fear and his subsequent victory in the civil war and takeover of the state ensured punishment for the infraction would never be imposed.