Marcus Licinius Crassus probably never saw a production of The Bacchae — there is no record of Euripides’ bloody tragedy being put on in Rome in the 1st century BC — but he played a starring role in it at the end of his life. Or, technically, just after the end of it.
Following his defeat in an ill-fated campaign in the desert, the body of Crassus was taken to the capital of the Parthians, where the disembodied head of the richest man in the Roman Empire, its shrivelled mouth filled with molten gold, became a stage prop. “Tonight, the role of Pentheus, an arrogant leader who was ripped to pieces after daring to defy an eastern power, will be played by . . .” Even if it’s not strictly true, and one must take ancient historians’ lurid tales with a pinch of salt, it is a fine metaphor. Thus passes the gory of the world.
I start at the end of Crassus’s life, as Peter Stothard does in this slim but elegant biography, because it reminds us of Enoch Powell’s almost unfailing dictum: that all political lives, unless happily cut short in midstream, end in failure. In ancient Rome, the failure was just more vividly presented.
Before his stage debut in 53BC, Crassus was one of the most celebrated and feared men in Rome, and by far the wealthiest. Seven years earlier, with his rivals Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus and Gaius Julius Caesar, whose rise up Rome’s longurius unctus (greasy pole) he had bankrolled, Crassus had formed an alliance to run the empire that Marcus Terentius Varro, a contemporary writer, called a Trikaranos, or three-headed monster. Such beasts seldom reach old age.
They were all murdered in a ten-year period. Pompey, who wore Alexander the Great’s old cloak and adopted his nickname, was assassinated in Egypt in 48, four years before Caesar’s ambitions reached a pointed end at the hands of Rome’s equivalent of the 1922 Committee. And Liz Truss thinks she had it rough.
Advertisement
Crassus was the first of the gang to die, and has long been the forgotten man in Rome’s first triumvirate. Stothard, a former editor of The Times and the author of The Last Assassin, an enjoyable account of the pursuit of Caesar’s murderers, brings Crassus to life (and death) adeptly in this first volume of Yale University Press’s Ancient Lives series. Further books will follow, largely by American academics, on Cleopatra, Vergil and Marcus Aurelius.
Crassus was born in 115, the second son of Publius Crassus, one of Rome’s most influential men, who had co-governed the city as consul and spent four years in charge of Spain. As censor, a senior magistrate, Pater Crassus regulated banquets and banned magicians, perfumes and foreign wines. The populist faction led by Gaius Marius beheaded him in the end, not so much for spoiling their fun as for taking the wrong side in Marius’s power struggle with Lucius Cornelius Sulla.
Young Marcus Crassus’s last sight of his father was of a severed head stuck on a ship’s prow as a trophy in the Forum. He fled to Spain, where he lived for a time in a cave, supplied with wine and wenches by a pal, before returning to Rome with an army to assist Sulla in the overthrow of Marius. His reward was immense.
As well as seizing the assets of Marians proscribed by Sulla, bringing him vast Italian estates and silver mines in Spain, Crassus fattened his wealth on a protection racket, exploiting the frequent destruction of Rome’s homes by fire. He formed the city’s first fire brigade, but it would help those in need only on receipt of a bribe, the sum rising with each falling ceiling. When there wasn’t enough business, fires would sometimes mysteriously start. Nice little villa you’ve got here, Gaius, it would be a pity if anything happened to it . . .
How wealthy Crassus became is impossible to say, although it seems rough that we say “as rich as Croesus” when the fabled king of Lydia appears to have been a relative pauper. Plutarch’s assessment of the gold that Crassus held would be worth almost $14 billion in today’s prices; Pliny the Elder estimated that the value of his estate was equal to the entire annual budget of the Roman Republic.
Advertisement
What he lacked, however, was that most crucial currency of Rome’s elite: military respect. In 73BC he got some fame for putting down the slave revolt in southern Italy led by the Thracian Spartacus, although there is no evidence to suggest that, like Laurence Olivier’s Crassus in the homoerotic bath scene with Tony Curtis in Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 film Spartacus, the real Crassus liked oysters and snails.
While that success was efficiently achieved and brutally concluded, the slaves crucified every 30 yards along the Appian Way back to Rome, it did not bring Crassus the respect that an overseas victory would have done. These were only slaves, after all, and instead of a full triumph he got a mere foot parade through the city.
Over the next few years Pompey and Caesar, five and fifteen years younger, enriched their standing, as well as their bank accounts, with the profits of war. It is easy to understand why Crassus, by then an old man, felt he needed his own foreign victory. And so began the rash assault on Parthia, a war that was meticulously planned — Crassus was a great organiser — yet conducted without any understanding of the enemy, which left him exposed to their swift, horse-riding artillery and camel corps.
Stothard tells the story of this campaign vividly and skilfully — the hunt through the desert for his prey has something of a wartime submarine movie about it — but we already know that this will not be a happy ending. His army of seven legions, 35,000 men, was wiped out in the blink of an eye. Rome’s first tycoon became merely the latest politician to be brought down by overconfidence.
Crassus: The First Tycoon by Peter Stothard, Yale, 176pp; £18.99
