Peter Stothard - Crassus: The First Tycoon

Crassus

The First Tycoon

Peter Stothard

ANCIENT LIVES

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Amasa Stone Mather of the Class of 1907, Yale College.

Copyright 2022 by Peter Stothard.
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Frontispiece: Beehive Mapping.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022931861
ISBN 978-0-300-25660-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ANCIENT LIVES

Ancient Lives unfolds the stories of thinkers, writers, kings, queens, conquerors, and politicians from all parts of the ancient world. Readers will come to know these figures in fully human dimensions, complete with foibles and flaws, and will see that the issues they facedpolitical conflicts, constraints based in gender or race, tensions between the private and public selfhave changed very little over the course of millennia.

James Romm
Series Editor

To Ruth

Crassus

The first tycoon of ancient Rome was also its most famous loser. If Marcus Licinius Crassus had died in 54 BCE he might have quietly entered history as Romes richest man, its first modern financier and political fixer, the brutal victor in a war against escaped slaves and an equal of Julius Caesar, whom he had played a huge part in creating. His modern face would have been from 1960, Laurence Olivier in Stanley Kubricks Spartacus. Instead, late in life, Crassus led an army on an unprovoked campaign against Parthia into what are now the borderlands of Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. He lost a desert battle and the eagle standards of his legions near a small town called Carrhae. His head became a stage prop in a Greek tragedy in a city that the Romans saw as too barbarian for such entertainment. Storytellers described his dead mouth stuffed with gold. The legacy of Crassus was a peculiarly catastrophic defeat that took a potent hold on the Roman mind. Thirty years later the emperor Augustus judged the return of Crassuss eagles as among his greatest achievements, worthy to be recorded by his greatest poets and sculptors. Crassus was no ordinary failure, just as he had been no ordinary successa man whose life as businessman and politician posed both immediate and lasting questions about the intertwining of money, ambition, and power.

The Secret Disrupter

Marcus Licinius Crassus was in his early sixties in the summer of 54 BCE, fit but old for a Roman army commander, red-cloaked and almost ready to cross the Euphrates for an unprecedented eastern war. Crassus was a meticulous planner, a master of political and financial risk. In these hottest months before the invasion he was making detail the servant of his grand design, just as he had all his life: the heavy equipment of his men, their means of supply, the guides that he needed for where later commanders would have maps. His war was to be waged at the edges of what he or any Roman properly knew. Before his seven legions could advance against Parthias King of Kings, extending Romes dominion through the deserts to China, there were humdrum administrative and financial tasks ahead, the kind for which he was already renowned.

Crassus was a Roman who rarely traveled out of Rome, and abroad hardly at all. He owned vast lands in Italy, but unlike other rich Romans, he rarely visited them or drew on them for pleasure or support. His home was Rome, and at different times, he had owned most of its three square miles, selling mansions for the rich and tenement blocks for the poor, lending to those who, unlike himself, wanted more than a single family house, those many Roman politicians with a reach beyond their grasp. He had long been renowned as his citys richest man, its secret financier, disrupter of old rules, fixer and puller of the puppet strings of power. This campaign was meant to mark a change in how men saw him. It was to be Crassuss most public act since his defeat of Spartacus more than fifteen years before, as well as Romes farthest move into the East in its two hundred years as an empire.

Crassus was not a novice on the battlefield. In what now seemed the distant past, 82 BCE, in his early thirties under the very walls of Rome, he had won a victory that had brought to power the citys first dictator, Lucius Cornelius Sulla. In his forties, he had defeated a slave army that had not only destroyed thousands of farms, many of them his own, but had terrified the city too. In the opening battles of this latest campaign against the Parthians he had won easy victories. But the strengths of his character stood elsewhere, in the arts of control and coercion, means that, with tact and skill, would remain hidden. He was a very secret disrupter. His method was to bind his friends and enemies, the fundamental business of politics, by means softer than the sword.

As the rival of Romes first man, Gnaeus Pompeius, twice his colleague as consul, the citys highest office, he had preferred lines of credit to legions. Pompey was five years younger but in 54 BCE was the leading man of Rome as Crassus had reluctantly to admit. Romans called Pompey the Great and the New Alexander, but only ironically if they were looking for Crassuss favor. As a manager of the fast-rising Julius Caesar, who was fifteen years his junior, Crassus had provided massive loans to buy his man the necessary offices of state; some said that he was almost the manufacturer of Caesar. As a promoter of himself he had less experience. Only late in life, or not very early in the morning, as one of the kings along his route had just disrespectfully noted, was he planning to march with fifty thousand men, seven legions with seven of their near sacred legionary eagles, to bring into the empire of Rome the Parthian Empire.

This perhaps too candid king was called Deiotarus, Divine Bull of Galatia, one of many local powers who owed his authority to Rome. But Deiotarus was not wrong in his noting of age and time. That summer Crassus looked even older than he was, his chin like an ax, if we trust the portrait from his family tomb, his nose bent downward in common Roman scorn. He knew his strengths. He knew how legions worked, how to make men responsive to orders, the delicate balance required between too much command and too little. He had adapted best military practice for the cohorts of the enslaved who designed, built, bought, and sold his properties. He knew that every grand design was built on detail; but it was a long time since he had had a grand military design of his own.

He had little knowledge of his Parthian adversary, King Orodes, whose coins in the marketplace suggested a not much younger man than himself, bearded, with a wart on his forehead and a star in front of his eyes. As the summer days passed by, Crassus was expecting an ambassador from the devious Orodes, as he deemed him to be, a new king who, he was told, had murdered his father and imprisoned his brother, Mithridates, in one of his riverside palaces. Mithridates was said to be a man more sympathetic to Rome, but only the naive would claim to be certain of that. Crassus was not naive.