Crassus, ancient Rome’s most powerful man – who’d be worth £12 billion today

HISTORY

Crassus: the first tycoon

by Peter Stothard (Yale £18.99, 176pp)

He was a tough, tough man, Marcus Licinius Crassus, a real b*****d, even by the standards of ancient Rome. Although you had to be tough to survive in those harsh days.

Life can be short. Crassus was known for crushing the slave revolt – led by Spartacus – with breathtaking brutality; he was said to be the richest man in Rome, which is saying something; and with Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great he was a crucial third of the triumvirate that ruled Rome for a decade in the last days of the Republic.

Everyone has heard of Caesar; many are aware of Pompey and his conquests. But few of us know much about Crassus now. This thin, compelling biography of Peter Stothard, a renowned writer on the classics and a former editor of The Times, should set the record straight.

Stothard sees Crassus as the first magnate, a modern man in an ancient world, willing to use money, power, property and influence rather than brute military might to get his way.

But like many political leaders, he was weighed down by too much ambition and a sense of being deprived of some of the glory of ancient Rome. Above all, he longed for a triumphant march through Rome after great military deeds.

Like many before and after, he embarked on an ultimately catastrophic war in the East, against Parthia (roughly modern Iran). He was in his early sixties and saw himself imitating Pompey and Caesar, and even Alexander the Great.

His enemy, he assumed, would be typical eastern degenerates: his young adversary General Surenas would travel with 1,000 camels for his luggage and 200 carts for his mistresses.

But it cost him his reputation and his life, as Stothard’s gripping story—the first biography since Plutarch nearly 2,000 years ago—describes the last battle in the desert sands of the Euphrates.

Parthians, mounted on fast riding ponies, showered the legions with incessant arrows, and giant armored horses followed the attack, leaving the Romans no rest. A powerful leader who packs a punch after starting a war in the East? Where have we heard that before?

After he was killed, humiliations fell on him. His open mouth, shriveled by desert air, was filled with molten gold as a symbol of his lifelong greed, and his head was used as prop in a production of Euripides’ Bacchae for the watching king of Parthia.

His army—seven legions strong, about 50,000 men—was wiped out and the eagle standards, sacred symbols of Roman power, were captured. It was a shameful defeat, and Crassus’ legacy has left scars in the Roman mind for generations.

Thirty years later, Emperor Augustus regarded the return of Crassus’ eagles as one of his greatest achievements, celebrated by the best Roman poets and sculptors. But how did it come to this? How had a life of considerable success ended in such a failure?

Crassus was born in 115 BC into an aristocratic family. Both his father and grandfather had been consuls, directing the administration of Rome. But his upbringing had its ups, and shall we say, downs.

The last time he saw his father, his head was on a peak in the Roman Forum: he had committed suicide instead of being dishonored by defeat in the brutal civil wars that Italy fought with in the early years of the last century BC. covered scars. Crassus himself had to go into hiding in Spain, where he had to hide in a cave with some followers. Though it couldn’t be so bad, an ally sent good meals every night and some pretty slave girls who were told to come in and said they were “looking for a master.” #MeToo this was not.

Still, he will now be remembered as a man who looked like Laurence Olivier, the acting legend who played Crassus in Stanley Kubrick’s epic Spartacus movie.

So that’s a result: After all, Olivier was a famously handsome man, and if you look at the bust of Crassus in the Glyptotek Museum in the heart of Copenhagen, you’ll see the resemblance. It’s Olivier almost a T.

Crassus believed that you were only really rich if you could equip and train your own army.

When the Thracian gladiator Spartacus led an extraordinary revolt against the Roman oppressors from 73 BC to 71 BC, Crassus offered to take on the slave leader and the Senate agreed.

At first, outmaneuvered by Spartacus’ agile army, Crassus found the campaign difficult and his troops fled the battlefield. So he ordered his soldiers to club deserters to death. One in ten men was executed in this way and it had an invigorating effect on the rest of his army, as it were, showing that Crassus was just as dangerous to them as the enemy.

Finally, Roman power and discipline prevailed as the campaign moved to the toe of Italy. The body of Spartacus has never been found.

Some of the captured slaves were put to work in the filthy silver mines that Crassus owned in Spain, where the deadly soil and sulfur-filled air were enough to kill them. It was a very Crassus-esque deal – by the time they died they should have won enough silver to reimburse him for the cost of the army he had to muster to defeat them.

The remaining 6,000 slaves were marched back to Rome via the Appian Way. Every 30 meters the last man was hoisted up and crucified. Typically Crassus, efficient and brutal: it meant those at the front couldn’t see what was happening at the back and so wouldn’t revolt.

Afterwards, he specifically ordered that their bodies not be removed: they continued to rot and perish along the main route south, a horrifying warning to anyone thinking of taking Rome in the future.

But how rich was Crassus really? By some estimates, he would have been worth around £12 billion. Some of his wealth was acquired conventionally – through slave trade, silver mining and so on.

But most of it came through ownership. Think of the hardest, meanest real estate agent you’ve ever encountered, then double it: Crassus would make them look like a saint.

He owned vast lands in Italy and bought up ruined land from victims of the endless civil wars. At one point, he owned all three square miles or so of the city of Rome. He bought confiscated properties and, notoriously, burned and collapsed buildings.

Fires were frequent in Rome, and Crassus’ team rushed to a house fire at the first alarm. They would offer to buy the burning building from the ailing owner at the cheapest price. Unless they sold, his firefighters would do nothing and the buildings would be destroyed.

Many of his slaves were architects and builders, so he was able to buy up destroyed properties, renovate them with slave labor, and sell them for a big profit. Sounds familiar doesn’t it?

He had no need for palatial dwellings, although many upwardly mobile Romans did: Crassus could provide for their needs, but at a price, and of course he could lend them the money.

It is a remarkable and captivating story and Stothard has done his subject with pride. After all, a man portrayed by Olivier deserves the best.

For an equally scholarly, but considerably more rancid, insight into the ancient world, readers need look no further than The Mad Emperor: Heliogabalus And The Decadence Of Rome by Harry Sidebottom (Oneworld £20,349 pp).

dr. Sidebottom is an ancient history lecturer at Oxford University and the author of several critically acclaimed novels set in the ancient world, so he knows what he’s talking about.

Heliogabalus was a Syrian teenage boy when he became ruler of Rome in 218 AD, the middle years of the empire.

In the four years he was in charge, he humiliated the senators, married four times and was said to be a male prostitute. Two of his marriages were to the Holy Vestal Virgins and one to a man. The decadence, debauchery and sexual promiscuity that marked the adolescent’s time on the Imperial throne make for a heady reading experience.