Crassus: The First Tycoon (Ancient Lives)

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Like many before and since, he embarked upon an ultimately catastrophic war in the East, against Parthia (roughly modern Iran). He was in his early 60s, and saw himself emulating Pompey and Caesar, and even Alexander the Great. The uniqueness of Stothard’s account of the tumultuous final decades of the Roman Republic is in a new east-west narrative in which we see the inner workings of Rome as well as the vibrancy—however brief in the narrative—of Parthia. Most readers will not find new details about how the last years of the Roman Republic unfolded; but many readers may discover new things about how Parthia was (and about how Parthians were perceived by Romans). Though brief, Stothard’s little biography of Crassus offers glimpses into other great civilizations and peoples during the first century B.C. This Crassus, as likely to greet a potter in the street as have a tenth of his own forces clubbed to death by their comrades as punishment for cowardice, was a puzzle to Plutarch and later writers. The way Crassus operated, behind the scenes in dealings that left few traces, certainly did no service to later historians. This scarcity of sources thus poses special challenges to potential biographers. Fortunately, in this brisk, lively, and accessible volume, Stothard presents a compelling portrait of Crassus in all his seeming contradictions. I'm A Celebrity fans convinced Nella Rose will follow in Grace Dent's footsteps and be the next to QUIT the show

A millennia and half after the life of Crassus, Petrarch remarked that history was but the praise of Rome. While praise of Rome has fallen on hard times as of late, Rome still sells well and is open for business even at the places that also want to extinguish the light and flame of the eternal city perched on those seven Italian hills. There has been no shortage of recent histories of Rome, the end of the republic, and the birth of the empire under Augustus. What has proliferated in the past two decades of these never-ending Roman histories and biographies is the story told from new perspectives. This we can, and should, be thankful for. From luxury skincare to must-have make-up collections - get Christmas all wrapped up with dream gifts they'll love Inside the Queen's last days at Balmoral: How late monarch refused to let Charles take over to make Liz Truss PM, telling aides 'it's MY job' In Rome the wealth of Crassus was legendary. Pliny the Elder estimated the value of his estate to be roughly equal to the entire annual budget of the Roman Republic. Comparisons to the ­present are difficult, but for a sense of scale, the UK’s annual budget last year was more than a thousand billion pounds. Yet the expression today is “as rich as Croesus”, a King of Lydia 500 years earlier (and a c­omparative minnow), not “as rich as Crassus”. The latter’s name has faded.

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Stothard’s biographical history is erudite yet written in an easy-to-read style honed by years as an editor, journalist, and critic. . . . In Crassus, Stothard has produced a finely drawn, insightful portrait of an infamous man.”—Lindsay Powell, Ancient Warfare This unfinished classic novel, published posthumously in 1941, shows a movie man’s deep personal impetus for seeing, concentrating and expanding power, the rare mark of the tycoon. “These lights, this brightness, these clusters of human hope, of wild desire – I shall take these lights in my fingers. I shall make them bright, and whether they shine or not, it is in these fingers that they shall succeed or fail.” Talk about the world's best job! A DOUGHNUT SCIENTIST reveals how she is creating a healthier future for bakery... But like many political leaders, he was burdened by an overreaching ambition, and the sense that some of the glories of ancient Rome were being withheld from him. Above all, he craved a triumphant march through Rome after great military deeds. Helen George dazzles in a ruffled dress for the King And I photocall after spending time withonscreen husband Olly Rix in the wake of splitting from partners

He was a hard, tough man, Marcus Licinius Crassus, a proper b*****d even by the standards of ancient Rome. Though you had to be tough to survive in those harsh days. Pictured: Laurence Olivier with fists clenched on table in a scene from the film 'Spartacus', 1960 T.J. Holmes and Amy Robach are still going strong as they are seen canoodling on NYC street and sharing boozy lunch Crassus’s political career did not get off to an easy start. He was born into a patrician family: his father, like his father before him, was consul, the head of Rome’s government (although, idiosyncratically, the Romans elected two consuls at once, to stop one getting overmighty). But Crassus’s father took his own life as an opponent of the populist general Gaius Marius; Marius’s supporters placed his decapitated head on a spike in the forum. Crassus fled into exile in Spain, where he hid in a cave for eight months, surviving on supplies delivered by a friend. (It was a nice dry cave according to Plutarch, so Crassus is not quite The Revenant – but a hardy effort.) Scarcely 30 years old, he raised an army in Spain and went to join Sulla, the leading opponent of Marius, in Greece. The first flavour of his character begins to emerge: resilient, bold, ambitious and enterprising.Stothard’s book is part of Yale University Press’s Ancient Lives series. Alongside Crassus in the series so far are lives of Cleopatra VII, Ramses II, and Demetrius I Poliorcetes (“The Besieger”). Crassus is the non-royal in the group; there was no throne that he aimed to obtain or keep. His ambitions remain obscured, and while his ancient biographer Plutarch paints avarice as Crassus’ main driver, his career and actions suggest more varied motives. Kanye West sings anti-Semitic song Vultures with the lyrics 'I just f***ed a Jewish b****' on stage with Lil Durk and Ty Dolla Sign in Dubai Maya Jama gives fans a glimpse inside her sprawling new home as she moves into a 'posh' area after rekindling Stormzy romance After he was killed, humiliations rained down on him. His open mouth, shrivelled by desert air, was stuffed with molten gold as a symbol of his lifetime of greed, and his head was used as a prop in a production of Euripides’s Bacchae for the watching King of Parthia. Peter Stothard's 'Crassus' is a new biography written for Yale University Press's Ancient Lives series, which aims to prove that the lives of ancient thinkers, rulers, warriors, and politicians are still relevant today. Given the turmoil in the world economy, there might perhaps be no more fitting subject for such a series than Crassus.

Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? Stothard sees Crassus as the first tycoon, a modern man in an ancient world, willing to use money, power, property and influence rather than brute military might to get his way. When he arrived in Parthia shortly before he died, says Plutarch, there was ‘not a single growing thing in sight, not a stream, not a sign of any rising ground, not a blade of grass. There was a sea of sand and nothing else’, a bleak end for a life-long narcissist whose greed wrought his own destruction. Some of the captured slaves were put to work in the filthy silver mines that Crassus owned in Spain where the deadly soil and sulphur-filled air were enough to kill them. It was a very Crassus-type bargain — by the time they died they should have mined enough silver to recompense him for the cost of the army which he had to raise to defeat them. The years that followed Sulla’s victory over the Marians and his establishment as dictator were the making of Crassus as a political force. In the chaotic and bloody purge that ensued, “proscription” lists of Sulla’s opponents were drawn up, condemning them to death and rendering their property forfeit to the state. Crassus bought enormous quantities of this property for low prices at public auctions. Wealth in ancient Rome came primarily from land ownership because agriculture dominated the economy. As Cicero put it: “Of all the occupations by which gain is secured… none is more becoming to a free man.” Crassus understood this, and set about becoming Rome’s largest landowner.For the proud Crassus it was hard to bear, despite all he had. He had bankrolled Caesar’s early career, at that time regarding the future dictator as a counterweight to Pompey. And he felt his own military accomplishments had been overlooked. Quite apart from the significant part he had played at Colline Gate, Rome seemed to have forgotten that he had crushed the Spartacus revolt with an army he had raised himself, and orchestrated a mass crucifixion of the survivors that had served its grim purpose in deterring future uprisings. The Roman whom I’m now calling ‘the first tycoon’, Marcus Licinius Crassus, was the son of a man who may have first written about these Tin Islands. Certainly the son much expanded the father’s metallic interests.Crassus would have been the man of his time much the most likely to take the cash about to fall soon on Caesano when the battery-makers’ high pressure pumps start to squeeze the ‘rare earth’ from the rest. He had no desire for palatial dwellings, though many upwardly mobile Romans did: Crassus was able to satisfy their needs, but at a price, and of course he could lend them the money.

King Charles and Prince William are 'allowing selfish agendas and family discord to take over the House of Windsor' He was a hard, tough man, Marcus Licinius Crassus, a proper b*****d even by the standards of ancient Rome. Though you had to be tough to survive in those harsh days.

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Olivia Colman cuts a chic figure in a dark green jumpsuit as she joins Timothee Chalamet and Hugh Grant for the Wonka photocall The life of Marcus Licinius Crassus, the statesman, general and financier, who with Pompey and Caesar formed the Triumvirate that ruled Rome during the last days of the Republic, long ago passed into myth, the quintessential tale of power undone by hubris. So that’s a result: Olivier was after all a famously handsome man and if you look at the bust of Crassus in the Glyptotek Museum in the heart of Copenhagen, you see the resemblance. It’s Olivier almost to a T.