Crassus: The First Tycoon (Ancient Lives)

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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.

Provided a good understanding of the internal Roman politics leading up to the change from Republic to Empire. An obscenely wealthy oligarch seeks new prestige by invading a neighbouring country whose resilience he doesn't appreciate--and meets with catastrophe. 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. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.The purpose of the silver, the gold (and the lithium if they had recognised it) was to test the national character to leave it alone. 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.

In this short volume of 158 pages, Stothard gives just about enough background for those unversed in Roman history to follow the tale. It moves quickly and feels jumpy at times but it is informative and tries to stick to the source material.Well written and interesting, it's a short book at less than 150 pages (excluding index etc) but there's enough in it to keep the narrative flowing.

If you are looking for a quick read that will teach you something new about a largely forgotten man, then it is worthwhile. Perennials PERENNIALS constant friends A selection of novels, memoirs and more by some of our favourite authors. 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. A perfectly paced biography: one that provides a novel perspective on a period of Roman history that, although often narrated, can always bear another retelling. Inspection copies are books under consideration as required or recommended reading for an upcoming course.But Crassus also liked to believe that Rome’s gods blessed his enterprises, just as they blessed the fertility of his unmined fields. 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. Scriitorul englez, jurnalist și critic, se pare că a scris această operă la "comanda" Universității Yale ca parte dintr-o serie mai largă în care sunt descrise scurt, clar și la obiect, viețile antice ale unor personalități alese mai mult sau mai puțin aleatoriu (Cleopatra, Ramses, Demetrius, Julian Apostatul). The financier of Rome's Late Republic, member of the unofficial Triumvirate with Caesar and Pompey, and suppressor of Spartacus's rebellion, he is perhaps best remembered as the loser at Carrhae when - after watching his son's untimely death - he has his own head removed from his body, later (according to rumour) to be used as a prop in a Greek play. 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.

Without his catastrophic ambition, this trailblazing tycoon might have quietly entered history as Rome’s first modern political financier. 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. His story, skillfully told by Peter Stothard, poses both immediate and lasting questions about the intertwining of money, ambition, and power. Flashbacks paint a good picture about his early career, the internal politics in Rome and his rivalry with Pompey. Here he cleverly explores the life of one of the most puzzling and elusive ‘big men’ in the history of Rome, and why it matters.

The book starts when Crassus is already in his sixties, preparing for his military campaign against the Parthians. The locals of Cesano on the edge of Rome are expecting a 21st century gold rush, their own Texas oil boom, after the announcement last year that the ‘rare earth’, lithium, lies in large extractable seams beneath their soil.