![]() ![]() Every schoolchild knows the name Julius Caesar and many that of Pompey that of Crassus, the third member of the triumvirate that held sway at Rome in the 50s BC, has lapsed into obscurity. “Let me not perish without a struggle nor without fame, but doing some great deed for men that are yet to be to hear of.” Marcus Licinius Crassus, one of the most prominent political figures of the late Roman Republic, did not secure the place in history he’d hoped for, or that his career seemed to promise. “Now again fate overtakes me,” says Hector in the Iliad. When life was often short and death sudden, one reason to strive for distinction was to live on in the memory of future generations and thus escape oblivion. The ancients placed great weight on the verdict of posterity. 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”. ![]() ![]() 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. Pliny the Elder estimated the value of his estate to be roughly equal to the entire annual budget of the Roman Republic. In Rome the wealth of Crassus was legendary. ![]()
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