The Ancients - The Rise and Fall of Crassus

Episode Date: December 18, 2022

Often overshadowed by his more successful peers (anyone heard of Julius Caesar?), Crassus' rise and fall from power is that of legend. A Roman General, Statesman, and once called the 'Richest Man In Rome', Crassus' power and influence is undisputed. But how did Crassus come to obtain such power, and just how far can the mighty actually fall?In this episode, Tristan is joined by Sir Peter Stothard to talk us through the rise and fall of this often overlooked figure. From his involvement in quelling the Spartacus rebellion, to his untimely death on the battle field, what is there to learn about this pillar of Roman society - and just how did his head end up as a theatre prop?For more Ancients content, subscribe to our Ancients newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast we're talking about a figure who lived at the time of big names such as Julius Caesar and Gnaeus Pompey Magnus. We're talking about the third person in this first triumvirate, a person who fought against the likes of Spartacus, who has been labelled the richest man in Rome, who created a fire brigade, who perished fighting in the east against the Parthians in one of Rome's most infamous defeats. His story is a fascinating

one and I'm of course talking about a man who was Marcus Licinius Crassus. Now Crassus, his story as mentioned is extraordinary and recently Sir Peter Stoddard has released a book all about Crassus. Crassus the first ty tycoon. Peter, he's a bit of a legend in the ancient history world. There are many legends in the ancient history world and Peter is certainly another of these. And so a few weeks back, he came to our History Hit HQ, our History Hit office, for an interview for the ancients all about his new book. So here we go. Here is the episode. We have got the brilliant Sir Peter Studard talking through the rise and fall of Marcus Licinius Crassus, a modern man for ancient times, the first tycoon. Peter talks through his story brilliantly and you're going to absolutely love it.

So without further ado, to talk all about the rise and fall of Marcus Licinius Crassus. Here's Peter. Peter, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast today. Great to be here. And such a brilliant topic. Marcus Licinius Crassus. And I love this line. The story of a modern man in an ancient world? Yeah, he was.

He absolutely was. He wasn't very fashionable in his time, and he wasn't very fashionable for many years later because he wasn't a great military leader, although he did do a bit of soldiering. He wasn't a great orator and speaker and a great politician, though he did a bit of that. But he was one of those politicians who worked behind the scenes. He was the banker, the briber, the sort of manipulator, the spider in the middle of the web, which is why we call him a tycoon. I call him the first tycoon, because I think he is the first of that kind of powerful man that we now recognize,

the guy who's much more powerful than he seems to be, which is what the word tycoon originally meant. Because it's such a brilliant topic, isn't it? It's got the money, it's got the intrigue, and it's got the power, doesn't it? Yeah, and he had the power, far more power than anybody really wanted him to have or thought that he should have. I mean, if you turned up in ancient Rome and said, who are the powerful people? Well, the Caesar, but he's away in Gaul, you know, Pompey, he's fighting in Spain or somewhere. You know, who's actually in charge? And Crassus is the man who, he was like the third man in that trio. But unlike the others who were always away conquering, Crassus spent nearly all his time in Rome. And so he owned most of Rome at

one point, buying and selling favors, houses, land, mines, a sort of proto-banker. I mean, the Romans didn't really have banking in the same way that we understand banking, but he was an influence peddler, an operator behind the scenes. And that's why we call him a tycoon, because when the word, the curious one, when it came into English from Japan, well, in exactly the same way. When the Americans turned up in Japan in the 1860s, when Japan was a totally closed society, and they wanted to use it to trade and to refuel their ships, they sort of turned up and said, well, who's in charge here? I want to speak to the emperor. And they said, oh, no, no, there's no point in speaking to the emperor. He

only speaks to God. They said, okay, the person who runs everything here is the shogun. So the Americans say, well, who's the shogun? And that means just a general. And the representative of the United States president wasn't going to put up with talking just to a mere general. So the Japanese had to persuade him that the man that they wanted him to talk to was a tycoon. And a tycoon was someone who was extremely powerful around the whole show, but didn't appear to. And that's exactly what Crassus was. Absolutely. And I love going on that tangent straight away, Peter, because I did a bit of ancient Greek back in school. And I always think if tycoon, okay, sure, maybe comes from 2K, I mean, luck or fortune, but evidently not. No, no. Obviously, the ancient Greeks had rich

people who involved themselves in politics. I mean, he wasn't like the first rich guy to have political power. But he was the first person for whom soft power has been might now solid, i.e. not having a load of soldiers was his main source of his power. So people were very suspicious of him. He had a bad press most of his time when he was alive, mainly to do with Spartacus, which you might want to talk about. He got a very bad press later on in the 20th century because he wasn't very nice to the people he defeated. But he was, in some ways, what he did, the way he exercised power was more influential in years to come and is still influential today than the kind of political power that Julius Caesar and Pompey had. Because those tentacles of power, we now recognise, they're actually many ways, where the real power is. Those tentacles of power, indeed. Well, let's now delve into the story of Crassus. And I'd love to focus first on, I've got to go to the background,

and maybe first of all, his rise. Because what do we know about Crassus's background, his family? He came from an aristocratic family, not a hugely rich, but a moderately powerful one. It was a long time in Rome before you could come from nowhere to get to the top, but he didn't come from the absolute heights. But he was there or thereabouts, so he didn't have a bad start in life in one way, except that he did because his family were caught up in some very vicious civil wars that took place for most of his childhood and most of his life, more or less a struggle in one way or another between the haves and the have-nots. His father was a moderately successful politician who was a moderate, which is often a very dangerous place to be when you've got extremes of have-nots

saying, I want it all, and have saying, no, you can't have anything. And so in a time of polarised extremes, his father ended up with his head on a spike. His brother got killed. He himself had to flee to Spain. You might say he had a privileged start, but it was a privileged start which came with quite a few snags. How do we know all of this stuff? Because there are so many figures who seem to be these titanic figures, but we don't actually know much about their early life. I mean, what sources did you have to look through to be able to look at this earliest part of Crassus' story? The earliest part comes mainly from Plutarch, who was the great biographer of Greeks and Romans.

He was a Greek, and his aim was to encourage his fellow Greeks, who by then were not very powerful, they were just sort of like a university for the Roman Empire. So he had to encourage them. Actually, once upon a time, Greeks had been a really big deal. So he wrote these paired biographies called Parallel Lives, which are still very big sellers. Crassus was paired with another very rich guy called Nysias, who led a very unsuccessful part of the Periphanesian War in the 5th century Greece. That's what he liked to do, bounce people out in order to make moral points. Crassus' problem was

that because at the end of his life, despite all the success in the beginning and in the middle, he had a catastrophic disaster. And because he was very rich and could be portrayed as extremely greedy, Plutarch, his biographer, decided that the best way to tell his biography was like a kind of morality tale, on the basis more or less that if you're rich and greedy, you come to a bad end. I mean, there are other sources, but Plutarch is a key source for these sort of incidents in his childhood that you're asking about. It's so interesting. And of course, having to take from a pinch of salt, of course,

with how he is structuring his narrative. Yeah, yeah. Plutarch was a great artist and he did indeed structure his narrative in order to make points, some more than others. So when he does Julius Caesar, it's a pretty big, solid, almost recognisably modern biography of Julius Caesar compared with Alexander the Great, and then Pompey similarly. By the time he got around to doing Crassus, they lived at the same time and did a lot of the same things. So he was just a writer, Plutarch, and he got a bit bored of saying the same things. So he had to find new things to say about Crassus. And most of them were sort of hostile to Crassus simply because he was spectacularly rich.

The ancients were very peculiar about wealth. Bankers and rich people, everybody knew you needed them, but they weren't really what you wanted to be. You got a bad reputation if you were just known for being rich. If we therefore go back to young Crassus, how does he emerge onto the Roman political scene? The best thing to look at it is like the sort of oligarchs at the end of the Soviet Union. After he was in Spain, he was hiding in a cave. But then when the leader of the have-nots died, he thought, well, he'd better get

back to Rome and see if he could remake his fortune. So he joined the conservative right-wing side of the Havs. He was very lucky. I don't think he was ever a great commander, but he was in the right place at the right time when Sulla, who was the leader of the Havs, really needed him. And he won a big battle. Actually, it was quite a small battle, but it was a very important battle at the gates of Rome called the Colline Gate. After Sulla took over Rome, when that battle had been won, Crassus was in a really good position to get favours from Sulla. And Sulla essentially allowed him to buy up a lot of the land, the houses and the goods of the other side. Now, you might say that sounds fairly obvious, but actually most of the people at the end of every bout of civil Now, you might say that sounds fairly obvious, but actually most of the people

at the end of every bout of civil war, their main aim is to take revenge and, you know, to kill the other side and to torture them and make up for all the terrible things that have been done to them. Krasav seemed quite unusually, not someone who wanted to get even, but he did want to get rich. And so he started buying all this stuff at auction, buying and selling and trading. And again, the parallel with the oligarchs is the strong one, because he took the risk that his side would stay in control. Everybody always says, well, it must be so easy just to take the money and take the aluminium factories and take the steel workers, take the oil companies. But if you ever talk to one of those oligarchs, they would tell you it wasn't actually that easy,

because they had to take a punt. A, that the people who'd owned it before wouldn't go and steal it back. And also, perhaps even more importantly, that the guy who was in charge, the Bois Yeltsin or the Sulla, wouldn't get very angry and very antsy if his lieutenants were getting spectacularly rich. The same with dissolution of the monasteries. There's a lot of risk involved in what seemed to be taking advantage of violent and unstable times. And so Crassus clearly was a risk taker in the modern sense, and a wheeler dealer in the modern sense. Not completely, It seems he's a calculated risk taker in becoming rich so that he some reward for the hard work he put in. Well, Sulla was the same. Sulla's main interest was in retirement, women, wine, and writing his memoirs. Crassus knew that and was able to take a punt that actually, even though he was taking a lot of money, which previously might have gone to Sulla himself, Sulla wouldn't really mind. And he was more or less right about that. They fell out, but Sulla never came down against Crassus. I think we'll get back to the rivalry with Pompey very, very quickly as we go

on to our next topic. So Sulla, he's gone. But there's another S, another figure, you've mentioned him already, Spartacus. So fill us in, Peter. What's been happening between Sulla and then the rise of Spartacus? Then how does Crassus basically go into the military field? Well, Spartacus was a very quick rise and fall. I mean, Spartacus wasn't like an ambitious politician. He was a gladiator and a slave who escaped from a camp. And the Romans never took that seriously. It never really been a big deal for them. It was a slave society, brutal slave society. And occasionally, slaves did escape, and they were brutally cracked down. And so the first time when Spartacus escaped, they sent a sort of dad's army, a kind

of home guard, to sort of give him a good whopping, and that would be normally would be okay. Unfortunately, the home guard got heavily whopped by Spartacus. After that happened, Pompey wasn't around. He wouldn't have done anything as demeaning as fight slaves anyway. But a couple of his lieutenants were sent out to do what the Home Guard had failed to do. And they too were destroyed by Spartacus, who was by this stage proving himself to be a pretty astute general, at least a very, very powerful guerrilla leader. So at this point, the Roman Senate started getting pretty anxious, because they now had this quite big slave army. It had already defeated two Roman forces. The treasury was a bit light at the moment for various reasons,

a bit empty. And Pompey was a long way away. Who was going to deal with this? Caesar hadn't really quite got going at this stage. Who was going to sort out the Spartacus? And so Crassus, who normally stayed at home, agreed that he would found his own army. He would build his own military system, really, his own personal thing, which he'd learned to do in his property business. Having bought all his property in Rome, he'd trained slaves in a way that people hadn't done before. So he had specialist builders, specialist architects, specialist writers and scribes. He had a system. He was like a management man. And he was really brilliantly good at that. And so he transferred those skills, created a new army, which did manage to destroy Spartacus, mainly by building and by bribing the ship owners and the pilots, as they were called,

who Spartacus had fixed up to take them to safety. He basically used his skills as a banker, briber, money man, and builder to defeat Spartacus. But of course, he knew he'd never get any thanks for that because the Romans didn't treat seriously any war against slaves. There was no glory to be won. So he wasn't going to get a triumph like Pompey, where you sort of prance through the streets of Rome with everybody saying how marvelous you are. That was never going to happen. And of course, at the end, he had to decide what to do with the slaves who were left. And this, of course, produced a sort of eternal damnation for him.

None of the Romans really cared about crucifying people on the Appian Way. It was just designed to intimidate and stop future slave rebellions. And then as soon as it was over, it was forgotten. But of course, come the late 19th, early 20th century, once you get Marxist historians looking at Roman history and looking essentially for kind of rebel heroes and slave heroes, Spartacus was actually in the right place at the right time. Spartacus then became the hero and Crassus, by extension, becomes the ultimate villain, as shown in the Kirk Douglas, Laurence Olivier, Stanley Kubrick movie. So that's the version of Spartacus, Crassus, and Rome that has come down most vividly to most people today.

You're quite right. It's such a well-known now part of his story, isn't it, Peter? As you say, with Kirk Douglas' Spartacus and so on and so forth. What I thought was really also interesting there, please correct me if I'm wrong on this. I'm Hellenistic, so you'll have to forgive me if I'm wrong. But was there also a case where there used to be this idea that actually Pompey took the glory for ultimately ending the revolt because he defeated the last Romans in the north, having returned from Spain? That's absolutely right. That was an added irritation to Crassus. He saved Rome, in his view, but about 5,000 or so of Spartacus's army managed to avoid the crucifixions and were trying to escape north, go wherever they could get away. And they ran into Pompey, who was coming back from Spain,

and Pompey soon cut them down. So Pompey was able to come back to the Senate and say, well, Spartacus won the battle, but I finished the war. Crassus, even when he was working for Sulla at the beginning, was a rival of Pompey. But Pompey's rivalry with Crassus was such that Crassus had to counter Pompey without doing all that tramping over countries, raping and pillaging, which obviously wasn't his thing. Though one of the things he did was to build up Caesar, the young Caesar, the counterweight Pompey,

hoping that he could control Pompey by having another guy who was quite like Pompey and allowing him still to be the first man of Rome, what he wanted to be. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and on my podcast, Not Just the Tudors, from History Hit, we talk about everything, from what Queen Consort Camilla could learn from the Renaissance.

Really, when we begin to look at Queen Consorts, we notice that there's a lot of ways that women could have authority through their relationship with the Renaissance. Really, when we begin to look at queen consorts, we notice that there's a lot of ways that women could have authority through their relationship with the king. To how you should never upstage Henry VIII. You'd have been a very unwise individual turning up to court, probably with a larger codpiece than the king, I suspect. From the real Matawaka, better known as Pocahontas. She's brought and presented to the king and queen

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No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. Over the next 15 years, Crassus, he's back in Rome. He's already got all of this property and he's got quite a lot of wealth. 60s BC, that decade seems quite a tumultuous time in the late Roman Republic with conspiracies and so on and so forth. How does Crassus fit into all of that? Well, he fits into it by trying to control it

from behind the scenes. And as I say, he had this problem. He had Pompey running rampant and getting very rich and he created Caesar and he basically financed all Caesar's political campaigns, paying astonishing amounts of money for Caesar to be elected high priest. Enorm enormous amounts of money for him to become consul. So Caesar was sort of Crassus' creature for a long, long time. And Crassus was sitting there in the middle,

trying to sort of survive and to balance. There were lots of radical leaders. There was a big so-called Catiline conspiracy, where there was a guy who wanted to cut all the debts because he was bankrupt. Obviously, Crassus didn't want all the debts because he was bankrupt. Obviously, Crassus didn't want all the debts cut because a lot of the debts were to him. But equally well, he didn't want to be seen as the guy who was opposing Catiline. So there was a very sort of murky business of supporting Catiline a bit, but not so much that he would actually win. And that was classic Crassus behavior, not just with Catiline, but with a good many others. So the hardest parts of this book, we're trying to work out what sort of thing was actually going on. But the general

idea of it is pretty clear. He was attempting to be as powerful in Rome as Pompey and Caesar were making themselves out of Rome. And you mentioned Caesar there. So during the 60s, say before he's outing Gaul, is this also a time alongside the Catiline conspiracy and all of those events going on? Do you start to see Crassus and Caesar starting to become closer? I think it depends what day of the week it was. Eventually, they produce a deal between them, which a rather brave guy called Varro called the Three-Headed Monster, where essentially, they agreed that nothing would happen in Rome that wasn't agreed by all three of them. You can imagine what the rest of the sort of Roman

Senate and the powerful men who thought they were powerful in Rome thought about this. And they all sort of went into mourning and wore black clothes and tried to protest in one way or another. But there's not much they could do about it. They were so much less powerful, all in financial hock to Crassus, you know, and they all were terrified of what Pompey or Caesar would do if they came back. So you had this triumvirate, which was quite stable. There was lots of murky stuff going on, but as a three-legged stool, it stood up. What that meant in practice was that Caesar was free to continue his conquest of Gaul. Pompey was free to do a lot of stuff in Spain and in the east, places where he'd been before.

And Crassus made himself governor of Syria, which was a base from which he could attack a country which basically most Romans barely knew existed called Parthia. Because he'd realized by then that his sort of soft power ambitions had run out of road. He created two monsters. So he decided in order to keep the balance of power, he sort of realized that actually there's only so much glory and grandeur that you could get by being a banker and a wheeler dealer. He wanted to lead an army in Tupatia in the same way that Pompey had and Caesar had. And so without really any of the skills that Pompey and Caesar had in leading armies, he obviously thought that he'd been very successful in the Colline Gate. He'd been very successful against Spartacus. But it was a long time, actually, since he'd really done any hard soldiering.

But he was a great organizer, and he set off from Syria into Parthia, thinking he was going to become the equal of Caesar and Pompey finally. And of course, going into the footsteps of Alexander the Great, he's being where all the money is and everything. Exactly. He had this idea. Well, Pompey claimed, of course, to be the new Alexander, and he was already the great, so they were irritating the Crassus. But Crassus certainly thought that he could win victories in the further east, because Parthia was a sprawling empire of nomadic place with lots of different capital cities. Very hard for any Roman to get any grip of. I don't think Crassus really knew much about the place. There were no Parthians in Rome, like there were Gauls and Greeks and Germans. Probably difficult to meet any Parthians.

He didn't really know much about the place. And as much as he knew about it, it sort of stretched from the Euphrates to China. He was run by kind of ancient, very old kings who probably would be not very effective, mainly interested in killing their brothers and sisters, which is what they sort of mostly did in the Roman eyes, probably true. Probably, once he'd given them a bit of a walloping, would probably do a deal. And he could then come back and say, you know, I've defeated the Parthians, bring back a few prisoners, bring back some Parthian treasure, and claim a great glorious thing. I think that's what Crassus wanted to do.

I don't think he wanted to conquer the whole of Parthia. He knew that that wasn't what he could do. But he wanted to have an impression of a big victory. And he thought he could get that, I'm sure, by a mixture of fighting, but a great deal of bribing and diplomacy and the kind of stuff that he was good at. So that was his plan. And it's a little bit like if Putin had invaded Ukraine, when Ukraine was ruled by one of those ex-Soviet commissar-type bureaucrats who ran all those places just after the end of the Soviet Union. Yeah, Tchaikovsky likes, yeah. He would have been able to go in there, you know, take territory, do a deal with the old bureaucrat, threaten him,

and Ukraine would have become a kind of satellite. And that, I'm sure,, what Crassus was expecting. But unfortunately, he met what you might call a sort of Zelensky of the desert. You know, a kind of young, charismatic guy who he'd never heard of called Serena. Serena. Who commanded a completely different kind of army, a kind of army that Crassus had never seen. And funnily, Crassus was looking at a very different game. And that was where he started to come unstuck.

I do want to go into that, coming unstuck. But I do also want to go on a quick tangent, because we've already gone straight to the Parthian campaign. This time in Cressus's life, when he's away in the East, and obviously he's got these relations already with Pompey and Caesar elsewhere. I'd also like to ask quickly about his relations with Cicero. What do we know about that? Because Cicero seems to be this other gigantic figure that must fit into the puzzle somewhere. Yes, he does. Cicero was the kind of

person from Crassus' point of view who bought his houses. Cicero was an even softer power, if you like, than Crassus was. All his power was political speeches, doing favours of one sort or another, but without the money. But Cicero had a very low view of Crassus. And so Cicero was dependent on Crassus, like quite a lot of other people, for money and for his house. One of the things about Crassus was that he had a very modest house himself, only one, and he lived very modestly with his wife and two sons that he liked. In that respect, very unlike the picture portrayed by Laurence Olivier in the movie. So Cicero was much more showy, but also had what you might call a high moral tone. Cicero wanted to be a Roman aristocrat,

he wanted to be a big senator. And the way those senators thought was basically look down on the moneylenders and bankers. And there's huge restrictions on how you could even make money as a businessman, if you're going to be respectable in Rome, and Cicero wanted to be respectable. So yes, those two had quite a tricky relationship. Cicero had dinner with Crassus literally on the night before the Parthian campaign began, because Crassus was trying to get his backing and support. Because once Crassus had left Rome, he knew that he would then need someone like Crassus in Rome, looking after his corner. And he had other hope that Cicero would be that person who would not make up nasty stories about him. Protect Crassus' reputation.

Yes, exactly. And Cicero, I don't think, was really interested in doing that. And the whole story about Crassus' leaving Rome was all about how he was too grand and he was too greedy, and he ignored the prophecies of the gods, and he ignored the advice of Cicero and everybody who said this campaign wasn't a good idea, but he was going to go and do it anyway because his deal with Pompey and Caesar was that each of them could do what they wanted in the areas that they divided. So Cicero did play a part. He just disapproved of Crassus and was vindicated when Crassus came to help with Cropper. Well, thank you for that tangent.

Let's therefore go back to the Parthian campaign, as you say. And I think he's got a son, Publius Cr Crassus who also goes with his father to the east. Crassus had sent off his son who was say the glamorous heroic cavalry officer type and Caesar who gave a lot of authority if he spotted someone he thought was a rising star gave him a lot of authority and so the young Crassus had won some pretty formidable victories in Aquitania, in the west of Gaul. And it really was becoming quite a bit of a hero. Caesar himself had written about him and said what a hero he was.

And so the Crassus family was beginning to be known, ah, he's sort of that nasty old banker who everybody hates. We've got this glamorous new one. And Caesar lent Publius the son and a thousand cavalry to the Parthian campaign. And that was very, very important to Crassus, a, psychologically, emotionally, to have his son there, but also to have the cavalry, which he knew would be important. Unfortunately, they weren't important enough.

Well, therefore, let's get into it. How does Crassus come a cropper in his Parthian campaign? Depends a little bit who you believe, because once it had been one of the greatest military defeats in Roman history. And this is where, you know, the problem with the historian comes in, because the people who escaped, probably the most famous, was Gaius Cassius, the guy who eventually was one of the assassins of Julius Caesar. When Cassius got back to Rome, he had a pretty free range to explain, well, yes, it was a total disaster, Crassus'

campaign, but it was only a real disaster because he didn't take any notice of my advice. So the story, as far as we can see, is that Crassus sort of surged off into the desert. Cassius said, no, you should have stepped by the river and protected your back all the time, protected your supply routes, get an idea what was going on. But no, Crassus went straight out there looking for this battle that he thought he would win quickly so that he could do his deals. And found instead of a traditional army of legionaries or infantry of foot soldiers, which Roman legionaries were always more or less able, pretty much without fail, to stamp

over and crush, he found himself in the middle of the desert, surrounded by sort of whirling crowds of little soldiers on little ponies with bows and arrows. Romans had a very dim view of archers, didn't really take much interest in cavalry. They were infantry soldiers. And the cavalry and the archers could never do very much against the Roman force. That was Crassus' view. Because they always ran out of arrows and they ran out of horses.

They were just like a starter, starter fight. They were never the real thing. Unfortunately, this guy, Serenus, had worked out quite a revolutionary plan for rearming his bow and arrow men from the back of camels. So they had a constant supply of arrows. And also they had very, very powerful bows. And suddenly, the Romans, who were used to be able to bash off arrows and just wait for them to stop before the crushing took place, and be able to bash off arrows and just wait for them to stop before the crushing took place. They found themselves under a constant threat, like a sort of missile attack.

Their armour couldn't deal with the arrows, and the arrows never stopped coming. So fairly quickly, once this had happened, Crassus found himself in real problem. The other thing that the Parthians had with the Romans had really never seen before was something called cataphracts, which were what we would now see as medieval knights in armor, you know, with huge horses, long spears, dressed completely in armor. And again, the Romans would have thought that was

like elephants. It was just totally useless. It looked rather splendid, but it was hopeless. But in fact, once the cavalry had done their work and the Roman army was struck by all these arrows, these cataphracts would just come through and just spear people on the ground. So Crassus suffered this big, big military technical defeat in which his son, who he sent out with the cavalry, didn't know better than his legion. So the son was killed in this cavalry battle. Crassus sees his son's head on a pike, just as he'd seen his last sight of his father with his head on a pike. At that point, Crassus had no really option but to try and escape. But even that, sadly, didn't go well for Crassus. No, so how does it end, therefore,

for Crassus during his escape? His attempted getting back to Roman territory from Cari? Well, they had the right idea. They split up into about five or six different groups, because they thought they had a better chance of escaping them. They also knew this would make life difficult for Serenus because his old king back in the capital wanted Crassus' head because he knew this was Crassus' war. He knew that as long as they killed Crassus, the chances are the Romans weren't going to come again. So Serenus, having done very well, suddenly had a bit of a problem because if he didn't have Crassus' head, his old king back home might not be very pleased, and who knows what might have happened to him. So he's looking desperately for Crassus. And this is where I can know exactly what the motivation

is. But he turns outside the walls, the city walls of a town where some of them were hiding. And he says, where's Crassus? And Cassius, the not necessarily very reliable number two, should have said, if he wanted to protect Crassus, I've no idea where he is, mate. Try over there. Or he might be over there. But unfortunately, he said, no, no, he'll be down immediately. Massa's thought, because he always had been able to do this in the past, that he would be able to bribe, pay, and generally use threats and diplomacy to get his way out of it. I'm sure he didn't think that himself was necessarily doomed at this point. He was a bit disgraced and hadn't gone very well. But you know, he'd be able to make a good fist of it back at Rome and have another go. But unfortunately, there's a sort of argument between him and a party in that who should have which horse and who should be traveling, how they should be traveling. And he sort of made a bit of argument between him and a Parthian of who should have which horse and who should be

traveling, how they should be traveling. And he sort of made a bit of a fuss and was a bit pompous, I suspect. And the guards panicked and just cut his head off. So that was the end. He died. It was a brawl over a horse. And of course, his head ended up in an unfortunate ending too. Well, come on then. The unfortunate ending of the head. Well, one of the best known things about Crassus, other than the fact that he defeated Spartacus, was the fact that his head ended up stuffed with molten gold, symbolizing this idea of both Parthians and indeed of Romans too, that you shouldn't want gold too much. And so his shrunken head was filled in molten gold. But before that, it was taken back to the capital so that the king could see that Crassus was dead. And the story goes is that they were, at that time, putting on a performance of a very,

very sophisticated Greek play called the Bacchae by Euripides. Now, anybody who knows the story of the Bacchae, the last scene of the Bacchae is that a maddened group of women think they're cutting off the head of a lion in order to present it to Dionysus, but in fact, cut off the head of Pentheus, the proud overmighty king, like Crassus. So this head is needed as a prop in the play before being filled with molten gold. And there would lie the end of Crassus. Quite a theatrical ending. Is that in Plutarch, I'm presuming? Yes, it is. You could say Plutarch was quite keen on this kind of, particularly when he was telling

a moral story. He did quite like the use of Greek tragedy to sort of give a bit of moral oomph, a bit of heft. Now, some people could say, well, is that really likely to have happened and whatever? I don't know. I think it is quite likely that the Parthians would have produced a kind of museum to celebrate their victory. And I'm sure that stuff would have been put in some kind of temple and maybe the head of Crasus would have been put there. With or not with gold. I think it's all quite plausible, though possibly arriving just in time for the performance of Euripides' back

is just a little bit too pat. But something like that. It is an absolutely brilliant story. I wish we had more time to talk more about the aftermath and significance of this. But anyways, people can learn all about that in your book, can't they? One last quick thing from me before we completely wrap up and talk about the book is a quick true or false, because there's one other story that I remember hearing and thinking is fascinating.

Is it true that Crassus raised his own fire brigade company and then would extinguish flames from a burning house, but then demand payment once the building had been extinguished? Yes, that is something that was said about him. He invented all sorts of fire brigades, insurance. And that's why he's a kind of modern figure, because people were doing that right through medieval Europe, long after there was no longer any Julius Caesars. And that particular kind of financial political skullduggery was far more part of European life than, I mean, of course, there were generals and there were people plundering around. But that kind of Crassus kind of power, that insurance banker

power is still with us, isn't it? Well, Peter, this has been absolutely brilliant. And last, but certainly not least, you are here because you have written a book all about Crassus, and it is called? It's called The First Tycoon, Crassus, The First Tycoon, because he was the first of this particular kind of power. And although Pompey and Caesar are more famous, Crassus the first tycoon in some ways was just as influential, maybe more so, on more politicians for the future. Him and Cassius and Brutus, those names, maybe not as big as Caesar and Pompey, but are still absolutely extraordinary figures. So great that you've done this book. And it just

goes for me to say, Peter, an honour. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast. Well, great to be here. Thank you very much. Well, there you go. There was Peter Stoddard talking you through the rise and fall of Crassus. And I hope you enjoyed the episode. Now, last thing from me, you know what I'm going to say. If you want to help out the ancients, if you've been enjoying our recent string of episodes,

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