The opening of Bob Dylan’s “Crossing the Rubicon,” on Rough and Rowdy Ways, makes one think of Julius Caesar (“I crossed the Rubicon on the 14th day”), revisualized through Dante (“Three miles north of purgatory”) and set within a broadly Christian frame (“I prayed to the cross and I kissed the girls and I crossed the Rubicon”).

But Homer arguably works his way in to contaminate it (a technical term for muddying the allusive river through multiple sources used all at once)–a Greek bearing gifts to unsuspecting Romans. Here are the first two verses, quoted in part above:

I crossed the Rubicon on the 14th day of the most dangerous month of the year
At the worst time at the worst place – that’s all I seem to hear
I got up early so I could greet the Goddess of the Dawn
I painted my wagon – I abandoned all hope and I crossed the Rubicon

The Rubicon is the Red River, going gently as she flows
Redder then your ruby lips and the blood that flows from the rose
Three miles north of purgatory – one step from the great beyond
I prayed to the cross and I kissed the girls and I crossed the Rubicon

“[T]he Goddess of the Dawn” is a figure not from the Christian world, but from Homeric epic. Robert Fagles, the translator Dylan seems to favor, never uses that precise phrase. Twice, though–both in the Iliad–he uses the very similar phrase “Goddess Dawn,” and the second of these is contextually quite relevant.

It is found in a story Nestor tells in Book 11, about a military expedition from his younger days that involves a river (or two rivers, actually), which he uses to lament his old age, and thus his lack of military prowess that could be of use in the absence of Achilles.

Nestor says this:

But Neleus would not let me arm for action–
he’d hidden away my horses,
thought his boy still green at the work of war.
So I had to reach the front lines on foot
but I shone among our horsemen all the same–
that’s how Athena called the turns of battle.
Listen. There is a river, the Minyeos
emptying into the sea beside Arene’s walls, 860
and there we waited for Goddess Dawn^[1] to rise,
the Pylian horse in lines while squads of infantry
came streaming up behind. Then, from that point on,
harnessed in battle-armor, moving at forced march
our army reached the Alpheus’ holy ford at noon.
There we slaughtered fine victims to mighty Zeus,
a bull to Alpheus River, a bull to lord Poseidon
and an unyoked cow to blazing-eyed Athena.
And then through camp we took our evening meal
by rank and file, and caught what sleep we could,
each in his gear along the river rapids.

To repeat: When the song begins, we think first of Julius Caesar and his army due to the song’s title, but I suggest that “Goddess Dawn” sends us back to this much earlier army on a riverbank as well. Notice that the passage from Fagles’s Homer even includes the location of a sacred river-crossing, “the Alpheus’ holy ford,” though the Greek text does not say that. (It says “holy stream”). Homer and Dylan even use the same kind of authoritative-sounding declarative statement as a narrative device (“There is a river, the Minyeos”; “The Rubicon is the Red River”).

This kind of kaleidoscopic allusive effect is par for the course in Dylan, and here it nicely complements his Christianization of the pagan past. To buttress this claim, I would add that the sacrifices found at Nestor’s river (to Zeus, to the Alpheus River, to Poseidon, to Athena) are replaced in “Crossing the Rubicon” with prayer to the cross. ^[2]

But the change in sacrifice is, I believe, already signaled before we get to this prayer. Pay attention to the date at the beginning of the song: “the 14th day of the most dangerous month of the year.” Richard Thomas has pointed out connections to both the Ides of March and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He also notes the Homeric provenance of the Goddess Dawn. However, he only mentions the Odyssey in this connection. But if I am right that the allusion is actually to Iliad 11, not excluding its sacrificial aspect, a further referent for the first line–and perhaps a better one–emerges.

It is worth pointing out that neither the Ides of March nor Lincoln’s assassination occur on the 14th; both are on the 15th. The 14th would be the eve of the Ides of March, as Thomas notes. But it would not quite be the correct day of “the most dangerous month of the year.” I suggest, therefore, that the context is primarily neither Roman nor American, but Jewish or Israelite.^[3]

What would “the most dangerous month of the year” have been for the ancient Israelites? Arguably, it would have been the first month of the year, the month of Passover, when “the LORD smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 12:29, KJV). And when does Passover occur? “In the fourteenth day of the first month at even is the LORD’s passover” (Leviticus 23:5). The sacrifice of the Passover, which protects the Israelites, is, in Christian thought, a type of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, mentioned at the end of the verse.

This reference would allow us to see a further Old Testament one in the river. Dylan plays with the Latin etymology of the name, true. When he says, “The Rubicon is the Red River” we should remember that the Latin verb rubere means “to be red”; the adjective rubicundus means “red” as well. The poet Lucan makes the same “joke” as Dylan in Civil War 1.214, where he refers to the puniceus Rubicon—puniceus is another word for “red.”^[4] But, if we’re thinking of the Passover, we might recall that it is the tenth in a series of plagues, the first of which was the water of the Nile being turned into blood. (Dylan explicitly mentions blood in stanza two: “Redder than your ruby lips and the blood that flows from the rose.”)

If all this is plausible, or even most of it, it gives us a way to thicken the song’s intertextuality in new directions, connecting even more closely its classical and Christian elements.