Origin
The term is most-likely a reference to the Rubicon river, which in the time of the Roman Empire marked the boarded between Cisapline Gaul and Italy proper. Crossing the river with an army, as Julius Caesar did in 49 B.C., was illegal by Roman law and is commonly seen as the "point-of-no-return" for Caesar's revolution. As such, a "rubicon" can be used idiomatically as any strict dividing line or point-of-no-return.
Read more about this topic: Cerebral Rubicon
Famous quotes containing the word origin:
“In the woods in a winter afternoon one will see as readily the origin of the stained glass window, with which Gothic cathedrals are adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen through the bare and crossing branches of the forest.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Each structure and institution here was so primitive that you could at once refer it to its source; but our buildings commonly suggest neither their origin nor their purpose.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The origin of storms is not in clouds,
our lightning strikes when the earth rises,
spillways free authentic power:
dead John Brown’s body walking from a tunnel
to break the armored and concluded mind.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)