Late Roman Republic

Crassus

The richest man of Rome

Lifespan · c. 115 – 53 BCE

Why Plutarch reads him

Plutarch reads Crassus as the study of avarice in a man of real ability — the richest man in Rome, the third member of the First Triumvirate with Pompey and Caesar, whose immense wealth bought him a place at the summit of the Republic but never the military glory he could not stop craving. The platform reads him, with Plutarch, as the case of a man whose governing passion — the accumulation of money — both made him and finally destroyed him.

Character: the appetite for more

Plutarch's portrait centres on Crassus' acquisitiveness, which he treats as the master-passion that organised the man. Crassus made his fortune in the proscriptions and in Rome's fires (buying burning buildings cheap), and his wealth was the instrument of a political power exercised through patronage, loans and obligation rather than through arms or eloquence. The platform reads Plutarch's interest as moral and diagnostic: the same appetite that built the fortune could never be satisfied by it, and it drove Crassus, late in life and against all prudence, to seek the one thing money could not buy — the glory of a great conquest.

The political significance

Crassus' significance is as one of the three men whose rivalry and alliance broke the Republic. The platform reads the Triumvirate as the moment private wealth, private armies and private ambition openly displaced the constitution; Crassus supplied the wealth. His end is one of Plutarch's great cautionary scenes: hungry for the military reputation that Pompey and Caesar had and he lacked, he led an army into Parthia and was annihilated at Carrhae in 53 BCE, his death removing the balance between Pompey and Caesar and clearing the road to civil war. The platform reads the Parthian disaster as the point where Crassus' ambition reached beyond his competence and destroyed him and his legions together.

The lesson Plutarch draws

Plutarch pairs Crassus with the cautious Athenian Nicias — two wealthy men drawn to disastrous foreign expeditions beyond their power to manage. The platform reads the lesson under ambition and downfall: that a ruling appetite, even for something as apparently safe as wealth, distorts judgement, and that the craving to be what one is not — Crassus reaching for the soldier's glory — is among the surest roads to ruin. His death is also part of the platform's reading of how the Republic fell.

Related reading

theme
Ambition and Downfall
The Plutarchan pattern in which the love of honour drives a leader to greatness and then, uncontrolled, to ruin — the tragic arc that structures the Lives of Alcibiades, Coriolanus, Pompey, Caesar and the Republic itself.
theme
Character and Power
Plutarch's governing conviction that the exercise of power reveals and is shaped by character — that what a leader does with authority is finally a question of who he is, tested in the small act as much as the great one.
theme
Virtue in Public Life
Plutarch's central concern with how private character bears on public office — whether a good man makes a good statesman, what the public arena does to virtue, and how the leader's inner life governs his use of power.
philosopher
Plutarch
Greek biographer and essayist of the Roman imperial period — author of the Parallel Lives and the Moralia, and the main classical conduit for the European study of character through history.
philosopher
Pompey
Pompeius Magnus — the Roman general whose vast military reputation gave him a decade of unprecedented Eastern command and whose final political alignment broke the late Republic into open civil war.
philosopher
Julius Caesar
The Roman general, statesman and writer whose decade-long Gallic command, civil war against Pompey, and brief dictatorship effectively ended the Roman Republic — and made him the single most-read figure of European political history.
book
Plutarch's Lives
Plutarch's Parallel Lives — paired Greek and Roman biographies, organised for comparison and for the study of character through what people did. The principal source through which later Europe learned to read the late Roman Republic.
civilization
Roman Republic
The five centuries in which Rome governed itself through a constitution of no single author — magistracies, senate and assemblies in tension — and built the institutional vocabulary of self-government that Europe would read long after the Republic that produced it was gone.
comparison
Crassus vs Nicias
Plutarch's pairing of two wealthy men whose foreign expeditions ended in annihilation — the Roman destroyed by over-reach at Carrhae and the Athenian by over-caution at Syracuse — a study of how riches and bad judgement wreck armies.
essay
Virtue and ambition
An interpretive reading of philotimia — the love of honour — in Plutarch's Lives, and of the fine line between the ambition that drives a leader to serve his city and the ambition that drives him to subvert it.
philosopher
Nicias
The cautious, wealthy and pious Athenian general whose prudence won a peace and whose hesitation lost an army — Plutarch's study of caution turned to weakness in the Sicilian disaster, paired with Crassus.