Crassus: The First Tycoon (Ancient Lives)

Product Information

He purchased the election of priests, even investing spectacular sums to make Caesar chief priest, the pontifex maximus, as a counterweight to the power of Pompey. 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. We publish history, politics, current affairs, art, architecture, biography and pretty much everything else. But when it comes to the mysterious third man who pulled the strings and turned the gears of politics in first-century BC Rome, Marcus Licinius Crassus has only himself to blame for historical obscurity. It moves quickly and feels jumpy at times but it is informative and tries to stick to the source material.

If historical writing has shifted attention from the privileged and powerful in recent years, hovering over the lives of outsiders and the disenfranchised, Crassus yanks that pendulum right from its socket. However, he ignored it and worse he also dismissed a warning from an emissary of his Parthian opponent when Crassus turned down an offer of being free to leave and said he would give his answer once he was embedded in the royal city of Seleuceia. For a book titled “The First Tycoon” I know little of his financial innovations, and one would be already familiar with the stories told in this book if they had prior knowledge of Caesar, Pompey and Cicero. An otherwise comfortable life of wealth and privilege ended with Crassus’ head being used as a prop on a Parthian stage.

Crassus, by contrast, owned shares in Spanish mines and lent the proceeds to politicians whom he kept as clients, playing one against the other in the hope that none would ever exceed his own influence on events. Rome’s richest man, memorably played by Laurence Olivier in the film of Spartacus, owned most of the city and its surroundings in the first half of the first century BCE. For the many fans of this period of Roman history, Stothard offers a fascinating story, both well told and well worth the telling. New Paperbacks NEW PAPERBACKS [jsb_filter_by_tags count="15" show_more="10" sort_by="total_products"/] A selection of recent paperbacks. Crassus is the least known of the Triumvirate of the Late Republic so this book likely fills th gap between all that is written about Pompey and Caesar.

This book aside from Allen Wards earlier work is the only one in English and while it is fairly good it is not nearly as thorough in its examination but it also assumes prior knowledge of the reader.The Financial Times and its journalism are subject to a self-regulation regime under the FT Editorial Code of Practice. It was a Parthian insult which essentially meant as hair cannot grow on a man's palm it conformed to the Greek word adunaton that something cannot happen until something impossible happens 'deserts freezing over, dogs climbing pear trees. The book starts when Crassus is already in his sixties, preparing for his military campaign against the Parthians.

In this short volume of 158 pages, Stothard gives just about enough background for those unversed in Roman history to follow the tale.Peter Stothard's sublime account of his life one can sense that Olivier was not far off in his interpretation of the man. It is not narrative history of the likes of Tom Holland and is not, therefore, such an easy read, while the arrangement and focus of the chapters can lead to some glaring examples of repetition. I wanted to learn more about Crassus after enjoying Robert Harris's Cicero Trilogy, in which the First Tycoon features as one of the main villains.