PREVIEW： Epochs #165 ｜ Crassus： Part I
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
173.73674
Summary
In this episode of Epochs, I discuss the rivalry between Julius Caesar and Pompey Crassus, and how their rivalry may have contributed to the fall of the Roman Republic, and the rise of the Praetorian prefect, Cato the Younger.
Transcript
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,
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,
00:08:01.720
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
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,
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