Marcus Licinius Crassus

• 1. Introduction

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  Marcus Licinius Crassus stood at the center of Rome's most dangerous political experiment, a man so wealthy that Plutarch calculated his fortune at 7,100 talents of silver before his final campaign. He was called "the richest man in Rome," and not without reason. He had turned civic disaster into personal fortune, bought up burning buildings while their owners wept, and built a private fire brigade that doubled as a real-estate racket. He crushed the slave revolt of Spartacus, shared power with Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great, and then walked into the Syrian desert chasing military glory he never found. His death in 53 BC at the Battle of Carrhae would crack open the republic he had spent decades propping up. What drove a man who had everything to risk it all on a war he was ill-equipped to fight? And how did one person's ambition, avarice, and rivalries help tip Rome toward civil war and, eventually, empire?

• 2. Family and Early Losses

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  The Licinia gens was old and respected among Rome's plebeian families, but Marcus Crassus did not inherit his later fame for wealth. Plutarch is explicit on this point: Crassus was raised in modest circumstances, and his great wealth was acquired rather than inherited. No ancient source gives him or his father the Dives cognomen, the word meaning "rich" that attached to a separate branch of the family and has caused historians confusion ever since.

  His father, Publius Licinius Crassus, had served as consul in 95 BC and censor in 89 BC, a career of genuine distinction. But that distinction could not protect the family when factional violence swept Rome. In the winter of 87-86 BC, Crassus' father and younger brother were either killed or took their own lives, hunted down by the supporters of Gaius Marius following their victory in the Bellum Octavianum. His eldest brother Publius, born around 116 BC, had already died shortly before the Italic War.

  Crassus inherited something stranger than money from his family. His grandfather, also named Marcus Licinius Crassus, was given the Greek nickname Agelastus, meaning "the unlaughing" or "the grim," by the poet Gaius Lucilius, who is credited as the inventor of Roman satire. Lucilius' joke was that this ancestor smiled exactly once in his entire life. There is also a more distinguished branch of the broader Licinii family: Lucius Licinius Crassus, described in the source as the greatest Roman orator before Cicero and Cicero's own childhood hero. Marcus Crassus himself was a skilled orator and one of the most energetic advocates of his era, a fact easy to overlook given his later reputation as purely a man of money.

  When he eventually married, Crassus took as his wife Tertulla, who had first been married to his deceased brother. This was unusual enough that the source notes it as a distinct personal fact.

• 3. Fire and Fortune

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  Sulla's proscriptions after his victory in the civil war created an extraordinary market in confiscated property, and Crassus became one of its greatest exploiters. The source is blunt about the ethics: Sulla deliberately spread the blame among those willing to acquire proscribed estates, and Crassus is said to have added at least one man to the proscription list whose name was not already on it, simply because he coveted that man's fortune.

  The fire brigade scheme is the detail that sticks. Rome in this period had no public fire department, and fires were nearly a daily occurrence. Crassus built a private brigade of 500 men, trained and equipped at his expense. When alarm went up, they rushed to the scene and did nothing. Crassus then approached the distressed owner and offered to buy the burning structure at a miserable price. If the owner sold, the brigade put out the fire. If the owner refused, the brigade watched it burn. Crassus then rebuilt the acquired properties using slaves he had purchased specifically because they were trained as architects and builders. He also bought neighboring properties cheaply, since their owners feared the spread of fire. Plutarch says Crassus eventually came to own "the largest part of Rome" through this method.

  The scale of what he accumulated is staggering by any measure. Pliny estimated his wealth at approximately 200 million sesterces. Plutarch put it at 7,100 talents of silver, which the source notes represented 229 tonnes of silver, worth roughly $167.4 million at August 2023 silver prices. Plutarch himself described much of it as gotten "by fire and war, making the public calamities his greatest source of revenue."

  The Vestal Virgin episode adds another shade to the portrait. Crassus befriended Licinia because he coveted her pleasant villa in the suburbs. He paid her such constant court that he was formally prosecuted by a man named Plotius for criminal intimacy with a Vestal, which carried severe consequences in Roman law. Crassus was acquitted, and Plutarch notes the irony: it was specifically his avarice, his transparently mercenary interest in her property, that convinced the judges his motivation could not have been romantic. He did not release her from his attentions, however, until he had obtained the villa.

• 4. Spartacus and the Limits of Victory

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  Crassus was elected praetor in 73 BC, the same year Spartacus launched the revolt historians call the Third Servile War. After several Roman legions had been defeated and their commanders killed, Crassus offered to equip, train, and fund new troops entirely at his own expense. The Senate accepted and sent him against Spartacus.

  His early record was poor. He struggled to anticipate Spartacus' movements and found his troops' morale in a state of near collapse. When part of his army fled a battle and abandoned their weapons, Crassus reached back to a punishment Rome had not used in generations: decimation. One in every ten men was selected by lot and executed. Plutarch records that "many things horrible and dreadful to see" occurred during the punishment, carried out in front of the surviving soldiers. Appian's account is more clinical: the troops' fighting spirit improved dramatically afterward, because Crassus had demonstrated he was more dangerous to them than Spartacus was.

  Crassus then attempted to trap the slave armies geographically. When Spartacus retreated to the Bruttium peninsula, Crassus built a ditch and rampart across the peninsula of Rhegium, from sea to sea. It was an engineering feat by any measure. On a night of heavy snowstorm, Spartacus' forces broke out anyway, filling part of the ditch with dirt and tree branches and slipping through.

  The final battle, fought at the Silarius river after Pompey and Varro Lucullus returned to Italy from overseas, ended with Crassus' decisive victory. Six thousand surviving slaves were captured. Spartacus himself is believed to have died in the fighting, though his body was never found. He had attempted to reach Crassus personally during the battle, cutting through the general's guard, but succeeded only in killing two centurions before the Romans closed around him.

  Crassus ordered all six thousand captives crucified along the Via Appia and directed that the bodies not be removed, left to rot along Rome's main road south as a deliberate warning. Then came the political insult. Pompey arrived after the victory, dealt with the scattered fugitives, and wrote to the Senate that Crassus had conquered the slaves but that he himself had extirpated the war. Crassus, Plutarch notes, did not dare ask for a major triumph, and accepted only the minor honor called the ovation, celebrated on foot.

• 5. The Triumvirate and Its Contradictions

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  Crassus was elected censor in 65 BC alongside the conservative Quintus Lutatius Catulus Capitolinus, himself the son of a consul. Through the decade that followed, Crassus functioned as Julius Caesar's patron in everything but formal title. He financed Caesar's successful run for pontifex maximus, the chief priesthood of Rome, and backed Caesar's efforts to win military commands. Caesar had lost the priesthood of Jupiter, the flamen dialis, when Sulla stripped him of it earlier in his career.

  It was Caesar who brokered the deal between Crassus and Pompey that neither could have arranged themselves, given the depth of their mutual contempt. The First Triumvirate, formed in 60 BC, with Caesar becoming consul in 59 BC, gave the three men collective dominance over Roman politics. It was informal, carried no legal standing, and depended entirely on the personal relationships of the men involved. Crassus and Caesar maintained what the source describes as a lifelong alliance. Crassus and Pompey loathed each other and their shared consulship in 70 BC had been, in Plutarch's words, "barren politically and without achievement" because they differed on nearly every measure.

  The alliance nearly broke apart before it was stabilized again at the Luca Conference in 56 BC. After Luca, Crassus and Pompey served jointly as consuls for the second time in 55 BC. A law passed during that consulship assigned Syria to Crassus and the two Hispanias to Pompey, each for five years. In 54 BC, Crassus looted the treasury of the Jewish Temple. He left for Syria in November of 55 BC. The source draws the line of consequence clearly: Crassus' presence in the Triumvirate had acted as a counterbalance between Caesar and Pompey, containing jealousies that his death would release entirely.

• 6. Carrhae and Its Aftermath

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  Artavasdes II, king of Armenia, offered Crassus nearly 40,000 troops, including 10,000 cataphracts, on one condition: that Crassus invade Parthia through Armenia, where the king could supply and support the combined force along a safer route. Crassus refused. He chose the direct route across the Euphrates instead, the same crossing he had used successfully the previous year.

  The Osroene chieftain Ariamnes, who had served Pompey in earlier eastern campaigns, offered to guide Crassus. Ariamnes was in Parthian pay. He told Crassus the Parthians were weak and disorganized, then led the Roman army into the desert, away from water. At Carrhae, modern Harran in Turkey, in 53 BC, the Parthians met the Romans with an approach Crassus' heavy infantry were not designed to answer: mounted archers using hit-and-run tactics and feigned retreats, shooting backward from horseback. Crassus refused the plan proposed by his quaestor Gaius Cassius Longinus to reconstitute the battle line and kept his men in testudo formation, shields locked overhead and at the sides. The Parthians had brought camels loaded with spare arrows to resupply their archers continuously, and the Romans absorbed the barrage until dusk before retreating to Carrhae, leaving their wounded behind.

  Crassus' son Publius died in the battle. The loss broke something in Crassus. His men, near mutiny, demanded he meet with the Parthian general Surena, who had offered a parley. Crassus agreed. When he mounted his horse to ride to the Parthian camp, his junior officer Octavius grabbed the bridle, suspecting a trap. A sudden fight broke out. Every Roman present died, including Crassus.

  Plutarch records a story that circulated after his death: the Parthians poured molten gold into Crassus' mouth, mocking his famous hunger for wealth. His head was brought to the Armenian capital of Artashat, where Crassus' head arrived during the wedding celebration of Artavasdes' sister to Pacorus, son and heir of the Parthian king Orodes II. Both kings were watching a performance of Euripides' Bacchae. An actor named Jason of Tralles, according to Plutarch, took the head and used it as a stage prop in place of Pentheus' severed head, singing the lines assigned to Agave. A Roman prisoner named Caius Paccianus, who resembled Crassus, was dressed in women's clothes and paraded as a mock triumphal procession, with his captors calling him "Crassus" and "imperator."

  Within four years of Crassus' death, Caesar crossed the Rubicon. Dante placed Crassus in the Divine Comedy as an example of greed, and he remains a central character in Howard Fast's 1951 novel Spartacus, which became the basis for the 1960 film in which Laurence Olivier portrayed him.