Alea iacta est
Oct. 13th, 2009 12:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
progEarlier today, ran into a reference to Julius Caesar's The die is cast, and its meaning in context. Here we are crossing the river, and while I have stacked up the odds in my favor to the best of my ability, from here on out its all down to ol' dame fortuna. Roll 'em.
As someone who loves the mechanisms and the history of cards and dice, this should really be one of my favorite quotations, right? But the fact is, for the time being anyway, I get vaguely irritated when I hear it. For most of my life, I thought the metaphor had a completely different referent: one of my well-meaning teachers, at some point early on, introduced me to this phrase, and taught that Caesar was comparing his crossing to metal-casting. ("Die" as in "tool and die", see.) And that made enough sense at the time - Caesar, in this version, was saying that the blow had been struck, the metal had been cut, shaped, and cooled, and there was no unbending it now. I had no reason to question this interpretation.
And indeed, I don't think that I did reëxamine it until, honestly, only a year or two ago, when it occurred to me that he was talking about rolling dice - as if he had just committed all his units in a tense war game! Luckily, the web had been invented and distributed in the intervening years, so it took only a moment for me to confirm that I was correct. It floored me. Not only was that a cooler version - because, you know, games and all - but it makes a so much more compelling story. Caesar at the height of his ambition, making the move that would forever seal his place in the tale of human history, and his pull-quote utterance is his admission of uncertainty despite it all. That's awesome.
So yeah, running into the quote now makes me itchy, annoyed that I was mis-taught something that strikes me as so relevant, and yet probably wouldn't have had a huge impact on my life had I learned it correctly. Whew.
As someone who loves the mechanisms and the history of cards and dice, this should really be one of my favorite quotations, right? But the fact is, for the time being anyway, I get vaguely irritated when I hear it. For most of my life, I thought the metaphor had a completely different referent: one of my well-meaning teachers, at some point early on, introduced me to this phrase, and taught that Caesar was comparing his crossing to metal-casting. ("Die" as in "tool and die", see.) And that made enough sense at the time - Caesar, in this version, was saying that the blow had been struck, the metal had been cut, shaped, and cooled, and there was no unbending it now. I had no reason to question this interpretation.
And indeed, I don't think that I did reëxamine it until, honestly, only a year or two ago, when it occurred to me that he was talking about rolling dice - as if he had just committed all his units in a tense war game! Luckily, the web had been invented and distributed in the intervening years, so it took only a moment for me to confirm that I was correct. It floored me. Not only was that a cooler version - because, you know, games and all - but it makes a so much more compelling story. Caesar at the height of his ambition, making the move that would forever seal his place in the tale of human history, and his pull-quote utterance is his admission of uncertainty despite it all. That's awesome.
So yeah, running into the quote now makes me itchy, annoyed that I was mis-taught something that strikes me as so relevant, and yet probably wouldn't have had a huge impact on my life had I learned it correctly. Whew.