In January of 49 B.C., the army of C. Julius Caesar stood on the banks of the Rubicon River, the boundary between Caesar's legally assigned province and Italy proper. Caesar faced a decision. The Senate in Rome had demanded that he step down from his governorship of Gaul after nine years and had, indeed, already named a successor; when nothing happened, it had then passed the senatus consultum ultimum: “the last decree” of political emergency, essentially declaring Caesar a public enemy. We are told that the recalled governor of Gaul hesitated at the Rubicon before responding to the Senate's actions. Not to cross the river (i.e., to submit to “the last decree”) meant disaster for himself; but to cross the river meant disaster for the entire world, the beginning of a civil war. Caesar pondered these two fatal alternatives, but not (our sources say) for long. Within a day, he launched his forces down the Italian peninsula toward Rome.

Whatever else Caesar's decision at the Rubicon was, it was an act of monumental egotism. This egotism stands out starkly in a statement made by Caesar a year and a half later, as he surveyed the decisive battlefield at Pharsalus, littered with thousands of Roman dead. According to an eyewitness (C. Asinius Pollio), Caesar remarked: “This is what they wanted [Hoc voluerunt]. I, Gaius Caesar, after so many great deeds, would have been condemned in the courts, if I had not turned to my army for help.” Thus, speaking to his friends, Caesar adduces no great issues behind the civil war, only the outrageous possibility that he, the conqueror of so many Gallic peoples, might have to undergo a civic procedure that ordinary Romans confronted every day. Hoc voluerunt: Another translation might be, “They asked for it.”