The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to this episode of Epochs, where I shall be returning to the story of

00:00:05.120 the decline and fall of the Roman Republic. Now, I want to tell, it's quite a complicated story,

00:00:11.120 it really is, because there's so many characters. Sometimes Epochs are more or less simple to tell,

00:00:16.380 sometimes it's a straightforward narrative, and sometimes it's a complicated one. Well,

00:00:20.780 the last days of the Republic are quite complicated, and it's really the story of

00:00:24.980 Julius Caesar. So over the next quite a few episodes, I think, of Epochs, I want to tell

00:00:31.020 the story of Crassus and Pompey. Again, I'll be returning to Pompey, there's an older episode,

00:00:36.800 you can see, where I'm in conversation with Carl in the old studio. But I'm going to talk about

00:00:42.100 Pompey again. I want to talk about Cato. I want to talk about Cicero. I've already talked a little

00:00:48.360 bit about Cicero, more the philosophical thought of Cicero, Stelios one time, but I'll talk more

00:00:53.480 about the historical facts of his life. And Mark Antony, and all sorts of other figures,

00:00:59.180 culminating really, in a deep dive into the career of Julius Caesar himself. So a fair few

00:01:05.380 episodes of Epochs, all about the characters surrounding Caesar, and the career of Caesar.

00:01:11.860 There'll be a whole episode just about the Catiline conspiracy, for example. I want to do a bit of a deep

00:01:16.880 dive into the gang or mob wars of Clodius and Milo. But to begin with, I want to do an episode

00:01:24.400 talking all about Crassus. Now, Crassus's story is, of course, inextricably bound up with both Caesar

00:01:31.700 and Pompey. Crassus and Pompey's career, if you remember from the Marius and Sulla episodes,

00:01:37.240 sort of kicked off a little bit before Julius Caesar's. They were on the scene a few years before

00:01:43.280 Caesar himself. And although in later years, the showdown, the final showdown, is between Caesar

00:01:50.120 and Pompey, in the first instance, the big rivalry was between Crassus and Pompey. Caesar himself was

00:01:56.760 a Johnny-come-lately in comparison. The main rivalry, politically, in all sorts of ways, was between

00:02:03.860 Pompey and Crassus. Now, I'll go into the Pompey side of the equation, of course, when I talk all about

00:02:09.220 him, when the dedicated episode of Epoch's all about him. But from Crassus's side, he was completely

00:02:14.760 eclipsed in military terms by Pompey. And so he had to turn much more to politics, to the game of

00:02:21.180 power and influence within Rome, to the money game. So that's the first thing to say about Crassus,

00:02:27.420 is even though he didn't come from fantastic wealth, I mean, his father was a creator, so they

00:02:31.600 weren't, you know, poor or anything. But he went from just sort of normal, a normal amount of wealth

00:02:38.000 to becoming the richest man in Rome. Perhaps one of the richest men ever to have lived. So that's

00:02:46.260 one of the main themes of Crassus's life, is money, is avarice, being avaricious, coveting money and

00:02:54.680 being mean with it once you've got it, although he wasn't always. So, okay, let's start the life of

00:02:59.160 Crassus. But before I begin, I want to read the introduction by Rex Warner from the Penguin paperback,

00:03:06.560 Life of Crassus by Plutarch. And it tells us that we actually don't know a massive amount about

00:03:14.660 Crassus. I mean, it's all relative. We know a lot more about him than some later Roman figures,

00:03:21.160 for example, but compared to his contemporaries, compared to people like Cicero or Caesar or Pompey,

00:03:26.940 we've got relatively little. There is, of course, Plutarch's life, of course. Cassius Dio talks all

00:03:34.020 about him. Appian, a bit, but we would have hoped for more because Plutarch's life, which is the main

00:03:40.780 source, really, misses out massive chunks. Plutarch is interested in certain things and leaves out loads

00:03:47.800 of other things. Like, he's not particularly interested in the minutiae, the detail of political

00:03:52.560 intrigue within Rome. So he just doesn't really tell us about it. Crassus's life is only sort of

00:03:57.900 40, 50 sides long. It's not that long. He goes into quite a lot of detail about Crassus's final

00:04:03.500 campaign in the East. But he doesn't tell us fantastic amounts about earlier portions of his

00:04:09.480 life. And so, anyway, Rex Warner tells us this, quote,

00:04:13.080 The coalition of Pompey, Caesar and Crassus played a major part in Roman politics between 60

00:04:18.360 and Crassus's death in 53 BC, that is. All of this is still BC. About two of its members, Pompey

00:04:25.460 and Caesar, we know a great deal, but Crassus very little. Plutarch does not seem to have been much

00:04:31.280 better off. I.e. Plutarch himself might not have known a great deal because Plutarch's writing a long

00:04:36.780 time after, 100, 150 years later, Plutarch's writing. The life is not a long one, i.e. Plutarch's

00:04:43.060 life. Not Crassus's life. Crassus lived to be into his 60s. It's a fair innings. The life is not a long

00:04:48.520 one, and well over half is devoted to a detailed narrative of the campaign of Cahae. Moreover,

00:04:54.180 Plutarch offers a full account of the rebellion of Spartacus, the relevance of most of which might

00:04:59.880 well be questioned. The reasons for this imbalance are twofold. First, the nature of Crassus's influence.

00:05:07.040 Plutarch gives an admirable, brief, general statement of the sources of Crassus's wealth,

00:05:11.600 and the ways in which he used it to win power. We should, of course, like to know more, but with

00:05:17.200 material of this kind, there can be no happy medium. The only real alternative to Plutarch's kind of

00:05:22.600 treatment would be a full list of those whom Crassus aided, with copious extracts from his account

00:05:28.120 books. And for such an approach, Plutarch would have had no inclination, even if the solstice had

00:05:33.820 existed. Secondly, Plutarch had no taste for the complex details of political intrigue, as is painfully

00:05:40.000 revealed, not only by his Crassus, but equally by the Pompey and the Caesar. Hence, he gives no

00:05:45.600 information on what Crassus's interests were in 59, and skips from Caesar's consulship to the

00:05:51.780 Conference of Luca, without any attempt to untangle the intricacies of the shifting relations between

00:05:57.600 the three dynasts and the efforts of their opponents to detach them from one another. So, in general, the

00:06:03.600 life leaps from one landmark to the next. Spartacus, the consulship, the coalition, the second consulship,

00:06:09.660 and finally Carhe. To understand Crassus's place in the history of Rome, we should have to know what

00:06:15.060 he was doing in between, end quote. Which we don't, really. Not properly, anyway. So, first of all, we're

00:06:21.120 told in the case of women, he wasn't too debauched. He wasn't a womaniser, a Lothario. He got married

00:06:29.460 and stayed more or less faithful to his wife. He was accused of, apparently, of seducing a vestal

00:06:36.820 virgin later in life. But Plutarch suggests or tells us, really, that that was probably just a

00:06:41.960 slur from his political enemies and there was no real evidence of it. Anyway, not that he was

00:06:46.460 absolutely perfect when it came to sexual indulgences, but he certainly wasn't a lech, particularly, 0.99

00:06:54.380 for ancient Roman standards, anyway. And we're told that, in general, he had relatively few vices.

00:06:59.260 He wasn't a massive drinker. He wasn't a massive eater. He wasn't gluttonous. All sorts of things.

00:07:04.580 He wasn't particularly cruel. You know, he didn't like to torture people or anything like that.

00:07:09.420 Really, his only big vice was avarice, was being a money grabber, was being more or less sort of

00:07:16.760 being obsessed with money, collecting money. Plutarch tells us this, quote,

00:07:22.260 certainly the Romans say that in the case of Crassus, many virtues were obscured by one vice,

00:07:28.680 namely avarice. And it did seem that he only had one vice, since it was such a predominant one

00:07:34.500 that other evil propensities which he may have had were scarcely noticeable. How avaricious he was

00:07:40.840 can be best proved by considering the vastness of his fortune and the ways in which he acquired it.

00:07:47.020 He started with not more than 300 talents, which is still a giant amount of money. 300 talents means

00:07:52.900 you're still rich. You're still definitely a wealthy man. But still, considering how much he ends up accruing,

00:07:59.540 it's a drop in the ocean. Plutarch goes in.

00:08:01.720 He started with more than 300 talents. Then, during his consulship, he dedicated a tenth of his property

00:08:07.400 to Hercules, i.e. giving it away to the state and the people as a gift. He provided a banquet for the

00:08:15.520 people, and he gave out his own funds to every Roman citizen, enough to live on for three months.

00:08:21.540 Yet after all this, when he made up his accounts before setting out on the expedition to Parthia,

00:08:26.800 spoiler alert, to which he never returns, he found out that his worth was 7,100 talents.

00:08:33.780 And since one must tell the truth, however damaging, he amassed most of his property by means of fire and

00:08:39.800 war. Public calamities were his principal source of revenue. Now, if you ever just give away lots of

00:08:46.460 your money to the urban masses of Rome, the urban plebs of Rome, obviously you're going to become 0.97

00:08:53.680 very, very popular. It's the easiest way to do it. It would probably be the same today,

00:08:58.940 I would have thought, if a senior politician decided to give some sort of tax rebate to everybody.

00:09:04.920 It would probably make them very, very popular, wouldn't it? At least in the short term.

00:09:09.480 The government just said, oh, we're giving all adult taxpayers, we're just giving you a thousand

00:09:14.580 pounds back or a thousand or two thousand dollars back. Everyone gets that as of next week.

00:09:19.700 That politician would probably, their approval ratings would probably go through the roof, 0.97

00:09:24.340 wouldn't they? At least in the short term. Clutarch goes on. He was conspicuous for the way in which

00:09:29.240 he never once refused to accept or to buy up property at the time when Sulla, after his occupation of Rome,

00:09:36.060 was selling the goods of those whom he had put to death. Sulla considered and indeed called this

00:09:40.700 property the spoils of war. So if you remember the Sulla episodes I did, he'd taken the property

00:09:47.380 of the people he'd prescribed illegally, essentially, and was auctioning it off in order to raise money

00:09:54.920 so he could pay his troops and be rich himself. And so Crassus was in the business of buying up that

00:10:01.680 sort of ill-gotten property. So it's pretty low, pretty out of order, the way he amassed so much money

00:10:08.760 and property. And it's not, it's certainly not clean. Clutarch goes on. Crassus also observed

00:10:13.780 that frequent and everyday occurrences in Rome were fire and the collapse of buildings owing to

00:10:19.660 their size and their close proximity to each other. He therefore bought slaves who were architects and

00:10:26.260 builders. And then when he had more than 500 of them, he would buy up houses that were either on fire

00:10:32.380 themselves or near the scene of the fire. The owners of these properties, in the terror and uncertainty

00:10:38.520 of the moment, would let them go for next to nothing. In this way, most of Rome came into

00:10:44.100 his possession." End quote. So again, that's really bad. You know, there's a, imagine that because

00:10:49.380 there's, oh, to make clear, there's no fire brigade. There's no fire service in ancient Rome. If a fire

00:10:55.440 broke out, which we told it often did, it was just up to the local communities to try and put it out as best

00:11:00.600 possible. So Crassus put together his, basically his own private fire brigade. And then if the fire

00:11:09.020 breaks out, the houses that are about to get burnt down, he says to those people, the people that own

00:11:14.740 them, look, your house is about to get burnt down. It's about to be destroyed and you'll lose it and

00:11:19.520 you'll get nothing. Again, there's no sort of insurance services in first century BC Rome. You're about to lose

00:11:26.200 everything. However, if you sell it to me for a fraction of what it's actually worth, at least

00:11:31.220 you'll get something. And so most people say yes to that, you know, and they're cutting their losses.

00:11:36.060 Most people will take something for what is about to be nothing. And then as soon as he's done that

00:11:42.320 deal, he sends in his private fire brigade, basically, to put the fire out. And then he's got

00:11:48.360 that property for a fraction of the cost. So that's very, that's very underhanded, isn't it? That's very,

00:11:53.380 very cynical. That's really low. It's kind of immoral, isn't it? It's not, it's not ethical.

00:11:59.000 But there you go. And, you know, if you believe Plutarch, he acquired most of Rome in that way.

00:12:05.200 I mean, it's surprising that he wasn't absolutely hated by most of the people in a general sense, but

00:12:11.460 he wasn't loathed. And yet, you know, certainly playing fast and loose with ways of making money

00:12:19.660 and gaining property. And you know what it's like. Once someone has got a certain amount of wealth,

00:12:25.860 money breeds money, doesn't it? So once you've got a certain amount of wealth, you can start

00:12:30.820 investing it in other things. And if you're sort of careful enough, savvy enough, your fortune can

00:12:37.660 just keep multiplying. And that's what Crassus did. Plutarch says, he owned countless silver mines,

00:12:44.560 large areas of valuable land, and labourers to work it for him. Yet all this, one may say,

00:12:51.300 was nothing compared to the value of his slaves. There were great numbers of them,

00:12:56.240 and they were of the highest quality, readers, secretaries, silversmiths, stewards, writers.

00:13:02.620 End quote. That's another thing about slaves in the ancient world, or in the ancient Roman world.

00:13:06.740 Some people might think of slaves in the sort of American 18th, 19th century era, where they're

00:13:14.600 purely labourers, purely unskilled labourers. But no, in ancient Roman times, you can have slaves

00:13:21.300 that are extremely skilled, or extremely educated, or well-read, and so thus are of much more value

00:13:29.560 than simply the amount of work they can do in a given day, physical work. It seems that Crassus had

00:13:36.440 a giant number of slaves in his employer. To watch the full video, please become a premium member

00:13:42.400 at lotusedus.com.

PREVIEW： Epochs #165 ｜ Crassus： Part I

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