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Crassus

Latin nameMarcus Licinius Crassus

Richest man in Rome who crushed Spartacus, one of the First Triumvirate

The Voice of the Senate · Statesmen & Reformers

First TriumvirateRichest man in RomeThe disaster at Carrhae

Who they are

Crassus’s fortune began with Sulla’s proscription auctions — buying up dead men’s estates cheap; his signature method was Rome’s first private fire brigade: when a house was on fire, he first negotiated the price, and if you would not sell he let it burn. He gained his military credit by crushing the revolt of Spartacus, formed the First Triumvirate with Caesar and Pompey, and put up the money to balance the other two’s troops and fame. But in a Rome where "martial glory is the highest honor," the richest man was always cast as the supporting player to the two war-gods. In 53 BC, at sixty, he insisted on a campaign against Parthia to win back face: in the desert at Carrhae, forty thousand legionaries were slaughtered by Parthian cataphracts and horse-archers, all the eagles lost, and he himself died during negotiations — legend says the Parthians poured molten gold down his throat: "You thirsted all your life; drink your fill."

Key stories

The fire business

Fires in Rome’s timber tenements were routine. Crassus formed a slave fire brigade of five hundred men who moved at the alarm — but first, instead of putting out the fire, they stood at the edge and haggled with the owner to buy the property, and if the price could not be agreed they let it burn to the ground and then bought the scorched earth. He also kept teams of building slaves to go with it: buy low, rebuild, rent high. Plutarch records that "most" of Rome’s districts were once in his name. His famous line was just as blunt: no man who cannot afford a legion deserves to be called rich — in the late Republic that was less a boast of wealth than a lesson in political science.

The gold of Carrhae

The Parthian campaign had no just cause, the Senate opposed it, and a tribune publicly cursed the departing army at the city gate. In the desert the Parthians resupplied their arrows by camel train, cataphracts repeatedly punched through the legion’s squares, and they first killed his son Publius and paraded the head on a spear. Crassus was forced to a parley and killed in the confusion. Legend says that when his head was sent to the Parthian court, Euripides’ Bacchae was being staged, and an actor used the real head as a prop; the tale of the molten gold is also widely current (both counted as legend). With one of the three gone, there was no longer any buffer between Caesar and Pompey.