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Caesar rides out with a laurel crown on his head. A small blue globe of the earth is balanced on his open palm. Yvon hands him the world before the war that wins it has even started.

The Rubicon is not much of a river. A man could wade it without wetting his belt. But the law of Rome is written in its water: this stream is the legal edge of Italy, and a general who crosses it under arms is no longer a general. He is an invader, and every man who follows him is a traitor. The trap on the far bank has been years in the making. The alliance that ran the Republic is dead. Crassus was killed with his army in the east. Julia, Caesar’s daughter and Pompey’s beloved wife, died in childbirth. Pompey has gone over to the Senate men, and they have sworn to prosecute Caesar the moment his command expires and he is a private citizen again. This month the Senate voted its final decree, the one that suspends everything, and ordered him to disband. Behind him stands the Thirteenth Legion, which has followed him for eight years of Gaul and would follow him into the sea. He gives the day to appearances. At Ravenna he inspects a school of gladiators, bathes, and sits through a public banquet as though nothing is happening. After sunset he slips out with a few officers in a hired cart. Suetonius swears the mules pulling it were borrowed from a bakehouse next door. Caesar spends part of the night lost, wandering lanes in the dark. Toward dawn a local guide is found to bring the party down to the river, where the cohorts are waiting. He halts on the near bank, and for once in his life, hesitates. To his officers he says the plain arithmetic out loud: to stop here is ruin for me; to cross is ruin for everyone. The soldiers will tell it differently afterward. A figure of more than human size appeared on the bank, seized a trumpet from a signalman, sounded the advance, and crossed. What Caesar actually says is a gambler’s line, and he says it in Greek, quoting a comic playwright the way educated men quote for luck: let the die be cast. Latin history will file it as alea iacta est. The horses step into the water. The news outruns him to Rome and lands like a wave. Pompey once boasted that he had only to stamp his foot for legions to spring out of the soil of Italy. He stamps it now and finds nothing there. Within days he and most of the Senate abandon the city, in such haste that they leave the state treasury sitting in the temple of Saturn for Caesar to collect. The civil war that begins in this stream will be fought in Spain, Greece, Egypt, Africa, and back again for four years, and Caesar will win all of it, and rule alone, briefly. The Republic has five years to live.