Returning he joined up his small army with Sulla, and helped him win the crucial battle for Rome at the Colline Gate. Crassus himself fled to hide out in Spain. His father, a governor of Spain, committed suicide to avoid execution by Marius’s troops his two brothers were killed. So who was Crassus, how did he force his way onto the podium, and why does he matter? His career was forged in the brutal power struggle between Marius and Sulla in the 80s BC. S.’s account is equally unsympathetic but much more readable, using his journalistic eye to frame Crassus in his time and context. Before that we have only really Plutarch who treated his life as a morality tale. 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. But he wasn’t forgotten, or forgiven, by his fellow Romans for his ignominious defeat, indeed wipe-out, by the Parthians at the battle of Carrhae (53 BC). But the third man in the triumvirate that grabbed power from the collapsing Republic is almost forgotten now. Julius Caesar and Mark Antony live on, thanks to their rivalry, their dual infatuation with Cleopatra, and of course Shakespeare.
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