An unlikely pairing

Apparently, people in bygone times preferred to stay by their home fires during the cold month of January, for it has a number of “blank” history days. January 9th was one such day. For January 10th, I found two events worth mentioning, neither of them medieval, though. On January 10th, 49 BC, Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River with one legion, thus igniting civil war in Rome, for it was a capital offence for the governor of a province to lead his army beyond his province. When Caesar, the governor of Gaul, crossed the Rubicon River into Italy, his action gave rise to two well-known phrases. To “cross the Rubicon” means there is no going back. And Caesar is said to have uttered the words, “Alea iacta est,” or “The die is cast,” which is repeated even today. He won the civil war, by the way, was elected Dictator of Rome in the following year, although that did not turn out so well for him.
Also on January 10th, this time in 1776, a book was published that can truly be said to have changed the world. On this date, Thomas Paine published his manifesto Common Sense, a 78 page pamphlet calling for immediate independence from Great Britain. It became an instant bestseller and is believed to have exerted enormous influence upon those colonists who were still hesitating, not sure if independence was the right course or not. (John Adams estimated that one-fourth of the colonists were patriots, one-fourth were Tories, and the remainder were perched on the fence, not sure which way to jump.) For many, Common Sense nudged them into the camp for independence. Common Sense played a similar role in the French Revolution. Later, at a time when American morale was flagging badly, Paine again stepped into the breach with his American Crisis, which contained the famous lines, “These are the times that try men’s souls,” heaping scorn upon the “summer soldier and the sunshine patriot.” He would later write The Rights of Man in defense of the French Revolution.