Julius Ceasar, like many great military commanders, was a bit of a gambler. According to the Roman historian Suetonius, the general made a quotation of the Greek poet Menander when he made the fateful step of crossing over the provincial boundary of Gaul [1], crossing the Rubicon River, and entering into Italy proper with his legions. The decision, a point of no return, ended up working successfully for him, and is thought to be one of the greatest examples of forcing a dramatic decision by allowing no room for retreat but only victory or death. For Julius Ceasar, both came within a few years, although it did not obscure his achievement, if it can be called that, in permanently ending the Roman Republic, which was never to rise again.

The technique that Julius Caesar used was not unheard of in the annals of warfare. The Mongols, ironically enough, intentionally left a space open in their broad encircling maneuvers to encourage enemy armies to break from encirclement and attempt to flee. Those armies that did not retreat would usually stand and die, but inflict much more damage than those who broke and run and were destroyed in their flight. Sometimes there is no good option, only a choice between the lesser of evils. By the time the armies of Genghis Khan had surrounded you, you probably did not have any good options left, unfortunately. Rather, one simply had to choose whether to stand and die or run and probably die as well.

The Semitic peoples have always been known for their ability to stand and die. Whether one looks at numerous brutal sieges of Jerusalem, or the sieges of Carthage, Tyre, or Samaria, the people of Canaan, Israel, and Judah have always been skilled at fighting desperately while cornered, even if the battles have traditionally not gone very well. At least according to some historians, the long sieges allowed at least some people to flee from the disasters of their capitals to live another day, even if the regimes and nations that they belonged to appeared doomed by vastly superior armies like the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Romans.

The Spanish too were skilled at using Julius Caesar’s technique of making retreat impossible during their invasion of Latin America. Sometimes, as in Cortes’ invasion of Mexico or Pizarro’s invasion of Peru, it worked very well, leading to massive conquests. At other times, it did not work out so well, as in De Soto’s invasion of the Gulf Coast, which lacked a mighty emperor who could be captured or killed, or in Valdivia’s invasion of Chile, whose fierce tribes ended up killing him and all of his men in a famous last stand, which nevertheless did not stop Spain or Chile from eventually conquering the Mapache peoples. Eventually demographics trumped the spirit of others, even if the fight was long and hard. And yet one has to think that the fight was ultimately successful in providing the Mapache people with their own strong identity, even if it did not end in the preservation of their independence. Sometimes we lose when the die is cast, but do not lose everything that we hold most dear. Sometimes we may win, and still not win everything we seek. Life is more complicated than that, but our bravery in the face of it is no less important for all of that.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alea_iacta_est