Suetonius may have been the worst historian in history, or at least the historian responsible for popularizing the most falsehoods in history. In fact, we owe the confusion over the exact words that Julius Caesar said as he crossed the Rubicon to the despicable Suetonius.

In January 49 BC, Caesar’s army crossed that river marking the boundary between Cisalpine Gaul and Italy – the limit for his command – in the lead of one of his legions, putting himself outside the law. A literate man who had spent much time in the cultivated East, he found the right quotation in a play by the Greek Menander: “let the die be cast.”

Suetonius, a monolingual hack who couldn’t tell Menander from his own ass, mistranslated the Greek quotation (“anerriphtho kybos”) into the Latin “alea iacta es” (“the die is cast”). Plutarch has the correct quotation, which Caesar provided in the original: “He declared in Greek with loud voice to those who were present 'Let the die be cast' and led the army across.” (Life of Pompey, 60.2.9). But modern readers have found Plutarch less entertaining than the fake news factory that is Suetonius.