Caesar's Rubicon: A Forged Inscription and the Hunt for a Lost River

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On January 10, 49 BC, Julius Caesar led the Legio XIII Gemina south across the Rubicon, a shallow stream about 80 kilometers long between Cesena and Rimini, named for the reddish color its iron deposits gave the water. It mattered only as a legal line between his province of Cisalpine Gaul and Italy proper, where a general's right to command ended, so crossing it with an army meant civil war. Suetonius describes Caesar hesitating on the bank until a supernatural apparition urged him on, and gives the line alea iacta est; Plutarch says he quoted the Greek playwright Menander. Pompey, the consuls and much of the Senate fled Rome.

In 42 BC Octavian merged Cisalpine Gaul into Italy, the border vanished, and so did the name. Centuries of floods on the plain between Ravenna and Rimini moved river channels, and late medieval drainage works straightened them into canals. Renaissance humanists then argued over which stream was the Rubicon. In 1933 Italy named the Fiumicino at Savignano di Romagna as the river and renamed the town Savignano sul Rubicone. Today the Fiumicino is one of the most polluted waterways in Emilia-Romagna.

• The night after the crossing Caesar dined with Sallust, Hirtius, Gaius Oppius, Lucius Cornelius Balbus and Servius Sulpicius Rufus.
• Backers of the Pisciatello planted a fake Roman decree banning armies from crossing there, which fooled the humanist Flavio Biondo.
• That forged inscription is now in the Museo Archeologico in Cesena.
• The Tabula Peutingeriana marks a river labeled Rubicum 12 Roman miles north of Rimini near the road junction Ad Confluentes on the Via Emilia.
• A 1991 study identified San Giovanni in Compito as Ad Confluentes and found the Fiumicino exactly one Roman mile away, 200 miles from Rome.