Crassus: The First Tycoon (Ancient Lives)

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Doctor Who 60th Anniversary: Fans go WILD for David Tennant and Catherine Tate's long-awaited return: 'I have missed them so much!' But the rise and fall of Crassus ran through the chaos of the final decades of the republic. His father was killed, and Crassus had to flee to Spain during the height of the populist tyranny of Marius and his supporters. By the time he was in his 20s, “he had seen politics at close quarters since he was a boy.” Witnessing brutality, murder, and scheming, Crassus was resolved to build his own fortune in a subtler manner. Acquiring run-down and decaying manors, he rebuilt them and rented them out to curry favors. He built his own private empire on social trust and financial loans to those in need but also to those who would be useful allies in the future. “Crassus took a more businesslike approach” to politics and social scheming than the murder politics with which he had been previously familiar. After all, even the winners in that latter situation did not seem to last long. The Roman whom I’m now calling ‘the first tycoon’, Marcus Licinius Crassus, was the son of a man who may have first written about these Tin Islands. Certainly the son much expanded the father’s metallic interests.Crassus would have been the man of his time much the most likely to take the cash about to fall soon on Caesano when the battery-makers’ high pressure pumps start to squeeze the ‘rare earth’ from the rest. Cornelius Vanderbilt was the manipulator who pioneered American steamships and railways, playing politicians against each other, disrupting monopolies, amassing vast wealth and promoting his own Central American foreign policy. Stiles’s biography from 2009, built like a grand TV saga, begins with a courtroom battle between his children after his death.

He was a hard, tough man, Marcus Licinius Crassus, a proper b*****d even by the standards of ancient Rome. Though you had to be tough to survive in those harsh days. Pictured: Laurence Olivier with fists clenched on table in a scene from the film 'Spartacus', 1960 For all the violence, money, and intrigue that surrounded him, Crassus was generous to the common people and unostentatious in his daily life. According to his biographer Plutarch, he lived simply. While other senators had multiple villas throughout Italy, for Crassus one house was enough. He opened both his house and his loans to all. He entertained non-elites at his home, and meals there were modest and cheerful affairs. When Cicero, Caesar, or Pompey were unwilling to act as an advocate for someone in court, Crassus would step in and meticulously prepare the case. Plutarch also tells us that he always returned a greeting in public, no matter how poor or insignificant the person. It helps you thrive from the inside out!': Meet the women who say this supplement is the secret to feeling fabulous in their 50s and 60s White Lotus stars Meghann Fahy and Leo Woodall kept romance private over fears they would 'disrupt the show' The much-loved labrador that sniffed out her owner's breast cancer, saving her life and inspiring a new charity that's gone on to save countless moreIn Rome the wealth of Crassus was legendary. Pliny the Elder estimated the value of his estate to be roughly equal to the entire annual budget of the Roman Republic. Comparisons to the ­present are difficult, but for a sense of scale, the UK’s annual budget last year was more than a thousand billion pounds. Yet the expression today is “as rich as Croesus”, a King of Lydia 500 years earlier (and a c­omparative minnow), not “as rich as Crassus”. The latter’s name has faded. After Crassus was killed, historians told many stories of his demise. Some said that his open mouth, shriveled by desert air, had been filled with molten gold as testament to his lifetime of greed. His story poses both immediate and lasting questions about the intertwining of money, ambition, and power. Some of the captured slaves were put to work in the filthy silver mines that Crassus owned in Spain where the deadly soil and sulphur-filled air were enough to kill them. It was a very Crassus-type bargain — by the time they died they should have mined enough silver to recompense him for the cost of the army which he had to raise to defeat them.

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President George W Bush is reflected in a mirror, with Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, as he speaks to business, trade and agricultural leaders in the East Room of the White House. Photograph: Shawn Thew/AFP/Getty Images Shia LaBeouf's daughter Isabel, one, flashes a sweet smile as he pushes her in a stroller through Pasadena So that’s a result: Olivier was after all a famously handsome man and if you look at the bust of Crassus in the Glyptotek Museum in the heart of Copenhagen, you see the resemblance. It’s Olivier almost to a T.Peter Stothard, the former Times and TLS editor, has followed his previous reconstructions of the Spartacus revolt (2010) and Caesar’s assassination (2020), with this slim but lively biography of Crassus, the first for fifty years. Before that we have only really Plutarch who treated his life as a morality tale. S.’s account is equally unsympathetic but much more readable, using his journalistic eye to frame Crassus in his time and context. Crassus was a breaker of conventions. He was impatient with the old aristocratic models for running the Roman economy. He became notorious for greed and he liked best the money that came from close to home. While his rivals, Caesar and Pompey, marched around Europe and the Middle East, murdering, looting and, in their own eyes and those of later writers, civilising and bringing peace, Crassus spent most of his life pulling strings in Rome. Pompey brought gold home as booty, massive statues of the kings he had defeated, silver beds and ancient bronze. 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. He owned huge swathes of Italian land but acted as banker to the owners of much more. He bought property cheaply from owners who feared that he might otherwise burn their houses down. He was a builder and a briber, a very modern man in an ancient world.

Crassus too could claim credit for the defeat of Spartacus’s slave uprising. More infamous than this victory was its aftermath. Crassus devised an efficient and terrifying punishment for the prisoners from the campaign against Spartacus. Crassus’s soldiers marched the 6000 prisoners along the Appian Way from Capua to Rome. Every thirty yards the march paused, and the last man in line was crucified. Shoppers' secret to Zen: NEOM's bestselling electric diffuser is on sale with 30% off this Cyber Weekend (it fills your home with fragrance for 7 hours)Here Crassus is a man of the old world—a world where honor, military glory, and family pride were paramount. At the same time, he is creating a new one—a world where a tycoon could exert power through money and human capital. Crassus: The First Tycoon likewise serves both as a look into a violent, honor-bound, and largely alien past and as a strikingly relevant examination of how money, innovation, and power operate in times of rapid change. Strictly star Layton Williams defends his pole dance routine after viewers compared it to a 'strip club' show