Marcus Licinius Crassus

Marcus Licinius Crassus was born around 115 BC into the gens Licinia, an old and highly respected plebeian senatorial family. His father, the senator and former consul Publius Licinius Crassus, and one of his elder brothers were killed or forced into suicide during the Marian-Cinnan purges of 87 BC, when supporters of Gaius Marius hunted down Sulla's adherents. Crassus fled to Hispania, hid in a coastal cave for eight months, and then raised 2,500 men from his father's old clients in Spain. After Cinna's death, he sailed his small army to Greece and joined Sulla. At the decisive Battle of the Colline Gate in 82 BC he commanded the victorious right wing — Sulla's centre was buckling when news of Crassus' total rout of the Samnites turned the engagement around. Sulla rewarded loyal allies generously, and Crassus seized the opening to rebuild his family's confiscated fortunes. The proscriptions — Sulla's auctioning off of murdered enemies' estates — became Crassus' personal goldmine. Plutarch records that he even added one man's name to the proscription list simply because he coveted his property.

His methods of accumulation were systematic and ruthless. Rome was chronically vulnerable to fire, with timber-framed shops and tenements collapsing every week. Crassus maintained five hundred trained builder-slaves and a private fire brigade that would race to a burning house and negotiate a forced sale with the panicking owner before fighting the blaze; if the owner refused, his men simply watched the house burn and then bought the neighbouring properties cheap from terrified survivors. He rebuilt and leased the rebuilt structures, sometimes back to the original owners as tenants. Pliny estimates his fortune at 200 million sesterces; Plutarch's figure of 7,100 talents represents about 229 tonnes of silver. Plutarch's verdict is brutal: Crassus made "the public calamities his greatest source of revenue." During the same years he became Julius Caesar's principal patron, covering Caesar's catastrophic debts and financing his election as pontifex maximus. He cultivated political clients in the manner of a modern lobbying operation, knowing every voter's name and granting interest-free loans to anyone who might one day repay him in influence.

In 73 BC, after consular armies suffered humiliating defeats in the Third Servile War, the Senate gave Crassus the command against Spartacus. When a detachment of his army broke and fled in panic, he revived the ancient and almost forgotten practice of decimation, executing one in ten of the offending unit, chosen by lot, before the assembled legions. Plutarch reports that the soldiers thereafter found Crassus more terrifying than the enemy. In 71 BC he defeated Spartacus at the river Silarius. Six thousand slaves were captured alive and crucified along the Appian Way; their bodies were left rotting along Rome's main southern road as a warning to any future rebel. But the political credit was largely stolen by Pompey, who arrived from Hispania just in time to mop up survivors and write the Senate that "Crassus had conquered the slaves, but I have extirpated the war." The two men's rivalry never healed; even their joint consulship of 70 BC produced almost no legislation. To advertise his wealth, Crassus paid for a public sacrifice of a tithe to Hercules and feasted the people of Rome at ten thousand tables, distributing three months of grain to each family.

In 60 BC, mediated by Caesar, Crassus reconciled with Pompey to form the unofficial First Triumvirate — the three men's private deal to dominate Roman politics from behind the legal facade of the Senate. The arrangement steadied at the Luca Conference of 56 BC, and in 55 BC Crassus was again consul with Pompey. He then took Syria as his province, intending to launch an unprovoked invasion of Parthia driven by envy of Caesar's Gallic glory and his own desire for a great military triumph at last. Armenian king Artavasdes II offered him a safe northern route with 40,000 troops in support. Crassus refused, and instead led his seven legions directly across the open desert. At Carrhae (modern Harran in Turkey) in 53 BC, the Parthian general Surena's mounted horse archers destroyed the slower Roman infantry with the famous "Parthian shot," feigning retreat while shooting backwards over their saddles. Camels carried fresh arrows so the bowmen never ran out. Crassus' son Publius died in the battle; Crassus himself, near mutiny, agreed to a forced parley and was killed when the meeting collapsed into a brawl. A later legend claimed the Parthians poured molten gold down his throat to mock his hunger for wealth, and used his head as a stage prop in a performance of Euripides' Bacchae at the Armenian court. His death removed the financial and political counterweight between Caesar and Pompey, and within four years Caesar crossed the Rubicon. Crassus' career stands as the original case study of how money and military glory cannot finally be substituted for each other — the wealthiest man in Rome ended his life thirsting in a desert he should never have entered.