Burn Your Bridges

Two famous historical commanders are regularly credited with inventing this idea: Julius Caesar, who crossed the Rubicon river into Italy in 49 BC in an act of open rebellion with no way back, and the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes, who supposedly burned his ships in 1519 so his men couldn't retreat to Cuba. Both stories are dramatic, and both are slightly wrong in the telling. Caesar never actually burned a bridge; the "point of no return" was the river crossing itself, not any bridge-burning. Cortes, meanwhile, had his ships deliberately scuttled (sunk), not burned, according to the more reliable historical accounts. The broader military tactic of destroying your own retreat route to force an army forward is genuinely ancient and well documented, from Muslim forces in 8th-century Spain to Chinese general Xiang Yu in 207 BC, but the English idiom itself only entered figurative use in the 19th century, long removed from any single specific incident.