No amount of money could make his unprovoked attack on Parthia in 53 BCE seem a good thing except to the soldiers and officers who wanted to make money out of it. Peter Stothard's 'Crassus' is a new biography written for Yale University Press's Ancient Lives series, which aims to prove that the lives of ancient thinkers, rulers, warriors, and politicians are still relevant today. See our Remarkables Archive for some that are no longer in print, but which we are happy to try to track down. A fost considerat, de asemenea, cel mai bogat om din Roma și a rămas celebru pentru felul tragic în care s-a sfârșit viața sa, undeva în deșerturile Parției, ca recuzită într-o piesă de teatru. But Crassus also liked to believe that Rome’s gods blessed his enterprises, just as they blessed the fertility of his unmined fields.

Author seems more concerned with using the most grandiose of vocabulary than to tell the story of Crassus. Had he taken the advice of one of his officers and a future assassin of Caesar Cassius he might have salvaged something. Previous knowledge of the characters and the time period is definitely helpful as it is not a thorough biography (probably for the better). 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.

First, the Crassus whom most of us know best as the crucifier of Spartacus’s slave army, would probably have owned the lithium fields himself. An otherwise comfortable life of wealth and privilege ended with Crassus’ head being used as a prop on a Parthian stage. Marcus Licinius Crassus (115–53 BCE) was a modern man in an ancient world, a pioneer disrupter of finance and politics, and the richest man of the last years of the Roman republic.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Stothard’s biographical history is erudite yet written in an easy-to-read style honed by years as an editor, journalist, and critic. 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.New Paperbacks NEW PAPERBACKS [jsb_filter_by_tags count="15" show_more="10" sort_by="total_products"/] A selection of recent paperbacks. Crassus is best known as the richest man of Rome and member of the First Triumvirate together with Caesar and Pompey. Douglas Boin is Professor of History at Saint Louis University and the author of Alaric the Goth (W. His story poses both immediate and lasting questions about the intertwining of money, ambition, and power.

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. The central message is a topical one - even if someone is good at amassing wealth and political clout, they may be very bad at war. 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. Provided a good understanding of the internal Roman politics leading up to the change from Republic to Empire. One of the strengths of Stothard's writing is that he shows rather than tells: anecdote is preferred to adjectives.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. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. If you are looking for a quick read that will teach you something new about a largely forgotten man, then it is worthwhile. Since the Romans were certain that their country was the greatest country of its time, the underground wealth had surely to be somewhere. Romans saw the value of precious metals but also the danger of mining them—for pollution of mind and the land.

Lesser known probably because he was not so much renowned for his battlefield exploits than the other two, he preferred the shadows and finance was his strength. Stothard is British and some of his idioms and sentence structures can be a bit challenging for the American audience. The story of Crassus is both extraordinary and cautionary, but through his eyes you can get a unique POV into the quickly unraveling world of the Republic. 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).In Stothard’s fine prose we see not only the whole picture of Crassus’s life but also how consequential a figure he truly was. Pompey brought gold home as booty, massive statues of the kings he had defeated, silver beds and ancient bronze. It was only on the second reading that I noticed all the similarities between the structure and style of this book and of an Aristotelian tragedy and began really to appreciate it as such.