Crassus: The First Tycoon (Ancient Lives)

Product Information

Stothard’s elegant and penetrating biography could not be more apposite in this age of political turmoil.

The financier of Rome's Late Republic, member of the unofficial Triumvirate with Caesar and Pompey, and suppressor of Spartacus's rebellion, he is perhaps best remembered as the loser at Carrhae when - after watching his son's untimely death - he has his own head removed from his body, later (according to rumour) to be used as a prop in a Greek play. Previous knowledge of the characters and the time period is definitely helpful as it is not a thorough biography (probably for the better). No amount of money could make his unprovoked attack on Parthia in 53 BCE seem a good thing except to the soldiers and officers who wanted to make money out of it. Stothard’s little biography of Crassus offers glimpses into other great civilizations and peoples during the first century B. It has all the necessary elements: the harmatia of the protagonist - that fatal flaw in someone otherwise favoured by fortune; the hubris and nemesis; that peripeteia when realization dawns that retreat and defeat are the only option; and heaps of dramatic irony as the audience watches how each chapter or 'scene', each stage in Crassus's life leads to this one conclusion.One of the strengths of Stothard's writing is that he shows rather than tells: anecdote is preferred to adjectives.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.First, the Crassus whom most of us know best as the crucifier of Spartacus’s slave army, would probably have owned the lithium fields himself. Romans saw the value of precious metals but also the danger of mining them—for pollution of mind and the land. Crassus would have been the man of his time much the most likely to take the cash about to fall soon on Cesano when the battery-makers’ high pressure pumps start to squeeze the ‘rare earth’ from the rest. The locals of Cesano on the edge of Rome are expecting a 21st century gold rush, their own Texas oil boom, after the announcement last year that the ‘rare earth’, lithium, lies in large extractable seams beneath their soil. Since the days of Plutarch, if not before, Marcus Licinius Crassus has been viewed as the ultimate exemplar of folly and dishonesty in the super-rich.

Marcus Licinius Crassus (115–53 BCE) was a modern man in an ancient world, a pioneer disrupter of finance and politics, and the richest man of the last years of the Roman republic. For tin and silver that they could use for weapons and money they had to mine the lands of Spain and the legendary Tin Islands, whose location was somewhere near Britain but kept secret to deter exploiters. Only when Crassus changed the home-loving habits of a lifetime and set off on an old-fashioned eastern invasion of his own, did he find that the prophets were suddenly against him. See our Remarkables Archive for some that are no longer in print, but which we are happy to try to track down.Great quick read and a wonderfully concise window into the period of ultimate crisis that would break the Roman Republican. The Financial Times and its journalism are subject to a self-regulation regime under the FT Editorial Code of Practice.

Nonetheless, this is a well-written biography of one of Ancient Rome's most fascinating bad guys with an absolutely gorgeous cover to boot. Stothard’s biographical history is erudite yet written in an easy-to-read style honed by years as an editor, journalist, and critic.

Given the turmoil in the world economy, there might perhaps be no more fitting subject for such a series than Crassus. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data.