Crassus: The First Tycoon (Ancient Lives)

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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. 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. Drawing mostly on Plutarch, Stothard delivers a detailed (as much as possible) account of Crassus' economic and political rise in the Caesar, Sulla, Pompey environment. An obscenely wealthy oligarch seeks new prestige by invading a neighbouring country whose resilience he doesn't appreciate--and meets with catastrophe.

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. 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. It is a well-known story and therefore a difficult challenge to breathe new life into this long-dead man. 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. Could have done with more investigation into how Crassus and his image have been rendered throughout (Romand and beyond) historiography as well as the impact of Carrhae on the wider development of the Roman Empire (there are only ever subtle hints at it).Stothard is British and some of his idioms and sentence structures can be a bit challenging for the American audience. The writing is very accessible and flows fairly well but definitely is not going to be the definitive crassus by any stretch, for now Allen Ward still holds that title and if it weren't for the fact that it was out of print I'd encourage others to go there first or at the very least give it a read. The focus is really on the power politics of the times and much less on the day to day life of this 'first financier'.

New Paperbacks NEW PAPERBACKS [jsb_filter_by_tags count="15" show_more="10" sort_by="total_products"/] A selection of recent paperbacks. An otherwise comfortable life of wealth and privilege ended with Crassus’ head being used as a prop on a Parthian stage. 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. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

Flashbacks paint a good picture about his early career, the internal politics in Rome and his rivalry with Pompey. Stothard’s elegant and penetrating biography could not be more apposite in this age of political turmoil. 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.

The central message is a topical one - even if someone is good at amassing wealth and political clout, they may be very bad at war.Crassus usually appears in biographies of Caesar or Spartacus, so it was interesting to read a book focusing on the man himself. The story of Crassus is both extraordinary and cautionary, but through his eyes you can get a unique POV into the quickly unraveling world of the Republic. 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. Great quick read and a wonderfully concise window into the period of ultimate crisis that would break the Roman Republican. Without his catastrophic ambition, this trailblazing tycoon might have quietly entered history as Rome’s first modern political financier.

Peter Stothard's sublime account of his life one can sense that Olivier was not far off in his interpretation of the man.There is an enormous amount of information condensed in the few pages and it is certainly not for beginners, but a good way for amateur enthusiasts to refresh their memory and knowledge of this fascinating period in Roman history, covering roughly the period from the end of the Sulla-Marius rivalry to the beginnings of Caesar's reign and the beginning of the end for the Republic. Perennials PERENNIALS constant friends A selection of novels, memoirs and more by some of our favourite authors.