Today, we use the phrase “the die is cast” when we want to say we took a decision and we can no longer turn back. In Italian, it translates as il dado è tratto. While the expression is common in both languages, not everyone knows that, according to tradition, the first to utter these famous words was no other than Julius Caesar.  

Many of us learn in school that his exact words had been the Latin alea iacta est, but things may be a tad more complex than that. The phrase appears in Suetonius’ The Lives of the Caesars, where the historiographer wrote about Julius Caesar himself and eleven emperors from Octavian Augustus to Domitian, covering about two centuries of Roman history.