If you only know Marcus Crassus as the man who killed Spartacus, then there's plenty
more to learn about him, like the crooked ways he made his money and his comically tragic
end.
Here are some of the strangest details about "the richest man in Rome."
In the Roman naming system of the late Republic, male citizens typically had three names.
The first was a personal name, largely meant to distinguish men from their brothers.
The second was the name of their larger clan, while the third indicated the branch of that
clan they were from.
Thus, Marcus Licinius Crassus was from the Crassus branch of the Licinian clan.
Many of these third names originated as nicknames, often based around a notable physical trait.
Crassus, in this case, means "fat," "stupid," or "gross," the source of the English word
"crass."
That doesn't mean that Marcus Crassus himself was fat and gross, just that one of his ancestors
was.
One branch of Crassus' family got a nicer nicknamed tacked on.
They were known as the Crassi Divites or the "rich Crassuses."
Despite his renown for great wealth, Marcus Crassus wasn't actually part of this branch.
His much-lauded riches were acquired, not inherited.
The first century BCE was full of civil wars between various strong men competing for control.
One of the most notable of these conflicts was between the aristocratic general Sulla
and the populist general Gaius Marius.
According to the historian Plutarch, the patrician Crassus family had supported Sulla in his
march on Rome in 88 BCE.
So the whole family found themselves at the receiving end of death warrants when Marius
and his allies held power.
Notably, Crassus' father and brother died at the hands of Marius' allies.
Since he didn't want to wind up murdered himself, the young Marcus Crassus fled to Spain, where
he lived in a cave for eight months.
But being a fancy lad, he lived in possibly the most luxurious cave of all time.
Plutarch describes it as being by the sea, enormous in size, and full of light and fresh
water.
Plus, Crassus took three friends and ten servants with him.
A slave belonging to the man who owned the cave brought fancy meals to Crassus every
day, and his...other needs were catered to as well.
"Nudge, nudge.
Nudge, nudge."
After Gaius Marius and his main ally Cinna had died, Crassus came out of his cave and
recruited 2,500 men from his father's clients in the area.
He eventually joined forces with Sulla and fought in Sulla's second civil war.
According to Plutarch, it was through this close relationship with Sulla that Crassus
began accumulating his vast wealth.
Some of his riches came from silver mines, selling slaves, and money-lending.
But much of his holdings came through a house-flipping practice that was shadier than anything you'll
ever see on HGTV.
Following his victory, Sulla put many supporters of Gaius Marius to death, after which he seized
their property as spoils of war and auctioned it all off at rock-bottom prices.
The person who most benefited from this was Crassus, who snatched up all of this bloodstained
real estate.
He was also renowned for his horde of well-educated slaves, which included architects and builders
who could restore his newly acquired properties to lead to a large return on his investment.
He thereby came to own most of the buildings in Rome, and he accumulated a wealth of 7,100
talents.
Historians say that could be worth anywhere from $200 million to $20 billion in today's
money.
If there was one thing Marcus Crassus loved, it was money, and he had plenty of it.
But if there was one thing that he wanted that he couldn't get, it was military glory.
His father, Publius, had served as commander in the Roman province of Iberia from 97 to
93 BCE.
During that time, he won a military victory that earned him the honor of a triumph, which
was basically an enormous parade in celebration of a victorious commander.
Since his father had gotten one, Marcus wanted one, too.
To that end, he assembled his own private army, over which he placed himself as general.
In fact, he was known to say that no man could count himself rich until he could afford his
own army.
His forces were made up of thousands of men and even included a sailing fleet.
Even with the goal of winning honor for himself, though, Crassus couldn't keep his money lust
at bay.
With his assembled forces, he would travel from city to city and extort money from them
in order to fund his military campaigns.
He was even accused of sacking a city, though he denied this charge.
And in case you were wondering, he never got his triumph, much to his chagrin.
You probably wouldn't expect a money-hungry real estate mogul and wannabe war hero to
support the selfless sacrifices of firefighters.
But by most accounts, the first ever urban fire department was in fact developed by Marcus
Crassus.
Unsurprisingly, this wasn't an entirely noble pursuit.
According to Plutarch, Crassus' private fire brigade was as much a money-making scheme
as anything else he was involved in.
Roman buildings were densely populated and very close together, so the risk of fire was
always extremely high.
Whenever a building caught fire, Crassus would arrive with his fire brigade, but they would
do nothing to put out the flame at first.
Insteady, they would stand by while Crassus negotiated the purchase price of both the
burning building and any adjoining buildings at criminally low prices from terrified property
owners.
If the owner agreed to Crassus' price, his men would put out the fire and then rebuild
the properties nicer than before so that Crassus could lease them back to their original owners
at inflated prices.
But if there was no sale, he would let the building burn.
It was for this reason that he was said to have made his fortune from "fire and war."
It was during his early days serving under Sulla that Crassus first met and worked together
with another promising young man named Gnaeus Pompeius.
He's known to modern audiences as Pompey the Great, and he was known to his adversaries
as "the teenage butcher."
Despite Crassus' special position of honor among Sulla's allies, the dictator showed
even more respect toward Pompey, and thus a lifelong rivalry was born.
The two generals were basically the textbook definition of frenemies.
Though they clearly loathed each other, they worked together as allies for almost their
entire lives.
They twice served together as consuls.
The first time, Crassus had to humble himself and ask Pompey to endorse his candidacy, which
he did because he wanted Crassus indebted to him.
Once in office, the two argued about everything and basically achieved nothing.
One time, when Pompey received a triumph that Crassus felt he deserved, Crassus brought
attention back to himself by bankrolling enormous parties.
And when he overheard someone refer to Pompey by his nickname of "the Great," he burst out
laughing and said,
"Why, how big is he?"
If you get most of your ancient history knowledge from premium cable TV, then you might only
know Marcus Crassus as the guy who killed Spartacus.
"Why did you call me here, Crassus?"
"The same reason you came.
Curiosity."
Considering that his successful quelling of the slave rebellion led by that famous gladiator
was the closest he ever got to the military triumph he so desperately desired, he might
be happy about that.
The slave army led by Spartacus was made up of as many as 120,000 men who were laying
waste to southern Italy.
They'd already defeated two Roman armies when Crassus was sent to put the rebellion down.
His first attempt was unsuccessful due to a lieutenant disobeying Crassus' orders.
In response, Crassus reinstituted the ancient punishment of decimation, in which one-tenth
of that lieutenant's unit was randomly chosen to be executed in front of the entire army.
Once Crassus had killed a bunch of his own men, the eight legions under his command successfully
brought down Spartacus' army.
They then lined the Appian Way, arguably the most important road in Rome, with 6,000 crucified
slaves.
However, Spartacus himself wasn't there.
Unlike what the 1960 Stanley Kubrick movie shows, he likely died in battle.
Despite Crassus' success, it was his rival Pompey who got all the credit, as he had caught
some of the escaped slave forces on his way back from Spain.
Remember that episode of Seinfeld in which Elaine goes to see one of the Three Tenors
but can't remember his name?
It was the one who wasn't Pavarotti or Domingo.
"You know the Three Tenors?"
"Yeah, Pavarotti, Domingo, and, uh, the other guy."
"The other guy."
Crassus probably knows how that guy feels, as he was the other guy from one of the most
famous and powerful gangs of three in history.
It was an uneasy alliance of powerful rivals known as the First Triumvirate, which consisted
of Crassus, Pompey the Great, and Julius Caesar.
They put aside their personal animosity so as to attempt to bring political order to
the chaos of the late Roman Republic.
By 62 BCE, Crassus had become something of a patron of Caesar, whose considerable political
debts Crassus paid off.
And Caesar knew that pooling Crassus' wealth, Pompey's military might, and his own political
ambition would allow them to accomplish great things.
He managed to reconcile Pompey and Crassus and sealed his alliance with Pompey by giving
him his daughter Julia in marriage.
After the death of Crassus, however, the alliance crumbled and ended with Pompey's head in a
box and Caesar as the last man standing.
"What's in the boooox?!"
Marcus Crassus's death happened when he led a campaign that was considered so reckless,
stupid, and greedy that after his passing, he became known as "the Fool of Carrhae."
He died a failure, which further led to the death of his son and most of his army, as
well as to the collapse of the First Triumvirate.
This ruined any hope of diplomatic relations between Rome and Parthia.
By 53 BCE, Crassus had accumulated even greater wealth as the governor of Syria.
He thought he could expand that wealth and maybe gain a little military triumph by invading
Parthia, an empire that covered much of the Mideast, including Iran and parts of Turkey.
The Roman Senate strongly urged the 60-year-old Crassus against doing this.
He hadn't fought a battle in 20 years, and he would be leading an expedition against
a mighty empire he knew nothing about.
Roman officials tried to show how bad an idea this was by having public fortune-tellers
reveal bad omens.
They also tried unsuccessfully to arrest him.
One official even performed a ritual curse on Crassus at the city gates.
It didn't stop him, though the curse might've worked.
While no one really knows what happened to Marcus Crassus following his death, Roman
sources reported all sorts of rumors and legends.
One story claims that the Parthians poured molten gold into his mouth as a symbol of
his thirst for wealth.
Some say that his body was dumped unceremoniously among the corpses of less famous people, left
unburied to be eaten by animals.
Somewhat stranger, however, is the story from Plutarch that the Parthian general sent Crassus'
head to the king of Parthia as a wedding gift for the king's son.
At the wedding, Crassus' head was placed on a stick and used as a prop for a performance
of the play The Bacchae.
For anyone who doesn't know, The Bacchae does in fact end with a man's head on a stick.
Plutarch also tells of one final indignity for Crassus.
The Parthians took prisoner a different Roman who bore some resemblance to Crassus and dressed
him in women's clothing.
They then led him in a farcical procession of camels dragging severed Roman heads that
they mockingly called a triumph.
After his whole life of trying to get one so bad, this was probably not the triumph
Crassus had been hoping for.
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