Crossing the Rubicon (song)

"Crossing the Rubicon" is a song written and performed by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan and released as the eighth track on his 2020 album Rough and Rowdy Ways.

Thomas sees this reference to Caesar's murder as significant in that it positions "Crossing the Rubicon" as the first song of "the closing epic triad of the album, each founded on political assassination": Julius Caesar (44 BCE) in "Crossing the Rubicon", followed by William McKinley (1901) in Key West (Philosopher Pirate) and John F. Kennedy (1963) in "Murder Most Foul"[12] (with "Mother of Muses" serving the important structural function of being the "epic invocation" to this triad).

[13] Carl Wilson, writing at Slate, called the song "a diss-track/battle-rap/crawling-kingsnake number in which, like several times here, Dylan imagines himself as a strutting ancient Roman general, promising, 'I'll make your wife a widow / You'll never see old age'".

[14] Variety's Chris Willman also compared the song to hip-hop, calling it "Every Grain of Sand" meets "gangsta rap" for the way it alternates between murderous boasts and spiritual observations such as "I feel the Holy Spirit inside, see the light that freedom gives / I believe it's in the reach of every man who lives".

[15] Anne Margaret Daniel, writing at Hot Press, calls the "one-two punch" of "Crossing the Rubicon" and "Key West (Philosopher Pirate)" "my favourite section of Rough and Rowdy Ways.

Padua notes that while the film functions as a "profile of a young star at his peak of fame; the resonance here, when it's 'darkest before the dawn', is that of an old man looking back at his youthful arrogance and realizing it's time to pay his dues.

Thomas believes that the "redness" described by both Lucan and Dylan is a poetic reference to the waters being bloodied by the civil war after the Rubicon had been crossed by Julius Caesar.