Crassus: The First Tycoon (Ancient Lives)

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It moves quickly and feels jumpy at times but it is informative and tries to stick to the source material.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.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. 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. For tin and silver that they could use for weapons and money they had to mine the lands of Spain and the legendary Tin Islands, whose location was somewhere near Britain but kept secret to deter exploiters. Eighteen years after rising to the public’s attention for ending Spartacus’ revolt, Caesar’s one-time banker and Rome’s former head of state departed for the Tigris and Euphrates with mad imperialist designs of annexing Parthia to Rome.

The metallic white powder that powers electric cars may finally bring the homegrown wealth to Rome that the ancient Romans liked to think was always there—but, curiously, never liked to look for.Crassus usually appears in biographies of Caesar or Spartacus, so it was interesting to read a book focusing on the man himself. Stothard’s elegant and penetrating biography could not be more apposite in this age of political turmoil. The writing is very accessible and flows fairly well but definitely is not going to be the definitive crassus by any stretch, for now Allen Ward still holds that title and if it weren't for the fact that it was out of print I'd encourage others to go there first or at the very least give it a read.

See our Remarkables Archive for some that are no longer in print, but which we are happy to try to track down. Great quick read and a wonderfully concise window into the period of ultimate crisis that would break the Roman Republican. 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. Crassus would have been the man of his time much the most likely to take the cash about to fall soon on Cesano when the battery-makers’ high pressure pumps start to squeeze the ‘rare earth’ from the rest. 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.It was a Parthian insult which essentially meant as hair cannot grow on a man's palm it conformed to the Greek word adunaton that something cannot happen until something impossible happens 'deserts freezing over, dogs climbing pear trees. In a manner much befitting a subject whose head ended as a stage prop in a Greek tragedy, this story of Crassus is told as if it were an ancient Greek play. Since the Romans were certain that their country was the greatest country of its time, the underground wealth had surely to be somewhere. An otherwise comfortable life of wealth and privilege ended with Crassus’ head being used as a prop on a Parthian stage. The focus is really on the power politics of the times and much less on the day to day life of this 'first financier'.