Crassus and the Social Wars

Ave and welcome to Emperors of Rome, a Roman history podcast from La Trobe University. I'm your host Matt Smith and with me today is Rhiannon Evans, Associate Professor in Classics and Ancient History at La Trobe University. This is Episode CCXXXIX, Crassus and the Social Wars. Marcus Licinius Crassus was an influential politician in the late Roman Republic. Famous for the wealth he accrued and the power that he held, an ally of Caesar and a rival of Pompey, he rose to prominence during the Social Wars, but would never get the military glory he believed he was owed. Here's Rhiannon Evans. Marcus Licinius Crassus was a Roman politician and also a general during the late Republic when it was all falling apart and he's sort of at the center of a lot of political dealings and also warfare, although he won't be around by the time of the Civil War, so he's not involved in the big Civil War of the 40s. He's known mostly for being obscenely rich. He makes a lot of money. He doesn't inherit it all. He's actually in some ways, as much as you can be in Rome at that time, a self-made man. He's known as being very greedy. The word "Averus" comes up a lot in the sources on him. Even though we have a biography of him by Plutarch, a lot of what we know about him is because he's interacting with people like Caesar and Pompey and Cicero and the other big hitters of the time. Yes. Yes, but he's a good way to look at those people as well. While we see him as a bit of a peripheral player to these events, would he have seen himself as a peripheral player to these events? Absolutely not. I think that if he had lived longer and been involved in that Civil War, he might have been able to help to write those histories. Even if he's not writing it down in something that survives himself like Caesar did, then he would have been involved in the kind of policies that follow. He might have been more famous to us. I think if people have heard of Crassus outside of Roman historians, it's usually because they watch Spartacus and see Lawrence Olivier play him as this very decadent and cruel character. Great performance though. Fantastic. If we could just begin this off as well by saying the greed, the money, the avarice, where we get that from and I'm not saying that it's not true, but that was the entire basis more or less of Plutarch's biography of Crassus, isn't it? It is partly because Plutarch is really interested in character. So it's been interesting preparing for this because when you read historians, especially I think slightly older ones, they're very annoyed at what you don't get out of Plutarch all the time. Yeah. So they want to know which people was he involved in? How did he make his money? Which people was he charging for what? They want the receipts. Rather than all of this kind of moralizing stuff about his character, which just kind of tells us something about the time Plutarch's living and maybe the sources that he's got. But it does come up elsewhere particularly in who Crassus can fund, who he can pay to succeed or to have an army or whatever it is by land for. So he is important and that's another reason he kind of becomes this slightly background figure because he's a supporting actor to figures who become much more kind of historically significant I suppose. But yes, so his money features elsewhere as well, but it is largely out of Plutarch that we get this character study. As we'll see, it's not that he's very greedy and shows off his luxury, there's a bit of a paradox going on there in his character. I see the main drawback of his character, but this again could be through the lens of Plutarch and we'll get to later on, is the way that he makes his money. Yes, that also is he doesn't make it in honourable ways. No, he's not really bothered where it comes from. Okay. All right. So we've said, you've said self-made man, what was his origin story? What do we know about where he came from and his family? Well he was born in 115 BC, his family is the Lacanian family. They are a plebeian family, so like most families, only people like Caesar and Sulla are the exceptions to this, but very old, very respected. He's the middle son, there are three sons. Three surviving sons in any family is considered quite an achievement at this point. And it's pretty humble for Roman elite. So Plutarch tells us in the very first chapter, he was reared in a small house, I'm sure that's relative as well, small house with two brothers. His brothers were married while their parents were still alive, this is also considered an achievement because they might be grandchildren, and all shared the same table. Now that's part of the humble origins, which seems to have been the chief reason why Crassus was temperate and moderate in his manner of life. When I first read that, I thought Plutarch was just, I think I wrote in the margin contradictions because he's already, you know, he talks about the avarice and then he talks about temperate life. But it's also frugal. Yes, he's kind of frugal with self, but also very acquisitive, and I think it's meant to imply that he, maybe there's some kind of mania going on with being acquisitive, but he wants the power that comes from it. He doesn't care about display, elsewhere Plutarch says that he's not a snob, he will just deal with ordinary people, which suggests to me that he has something of the, as we'll see, not particularly this, but something of the populist, popularist touch that Caesar had that he could get on with ordinary people, which is important as a politician of this era. But also, even though he will get all of this money, there is something at his core that Plutarch admires and is kind of the important thing for a Roman to be, which is going all the way back to Romulus and Remus, they have a humble upbringing, and that's an important part of their character. So it's part of that Roman character to not need the luxury, it's the money he wants, not the luxury. Okay. Now I get you, I get you. A humble upbringing, but his father still had power and was able to open the doors for him. Absolutely, yes. We shouldn't stress that he hasn't come from nowhere. His father is a general and a magistrate. And I'm going to start calling our Crassus, at least in these early parts, Marcus, because we're going to be talking a lot about Publius Crassus, which could be his father and also his elder brother. And if we introduce another Crassus, I think that's just too many Crassi. Yeah. They said a plural for the Crassus is Crassi. His father, Publius Crassus, is pro-consul in the Spanish province when he's 18, so he gets to go with him. And this is going to be important because he makes contacts in Spain that will serve him well throughout. Apparently, his father, according to Strabo, the ... Geographer. Augustan, Tiberian, Geographer, yeah. His father seems to be the Publius Crassus who wrote a book on the Tin Islands, which is sort of existing in the mists of legend islands, which is probably written around this time. So geographically, and Strabo would have been way up on this, Tin Islands, somewhere off the coast of Spain over in that vague ... Are you from the Tin Islands, Rihanna? Well, maybe, because as we've noted elsewhere before, the Roman view of Europe and Britannia was it sort of skewed off to the west rather than the north of Europe, and also what we think of as France and Spain were skewed even more westerly than they are now, so everything's a bit sort of more into the Atlantic than up into the North Sea when you think about Britain. Yeah. So he may be thinking that that's local because people often associate this with Cornwall, the very southwest of England, which is known for having lots of tin, also Devon, I think, next door. I think there are theories that it could be some part of Spain, or islands off Spain as well. Okay. Anyway, it does suggest a kind of scientific literary interest in the family. Sure. Sure. It also reminds me of Claudius, who will just write a tangential book on the Etruscans, and off he goes. Indeed. Yes. If only we had all these works. So I guess we should go back to his family, and we do know a little bit about his mother. His mother is called Venulea, which is an Etruscan name. Oh, well on the topic, yeah. Yeah. Seems to be some suggestion that she has a business-y background in her family, but also being from an Etruscan family has its own sort of... Prestige. Yeah. Static prestige, it's kind of often associated with monarchy. For example, later, not that much later, Mycenas, that kind of right-hand man of Augustus, he's apparently descended from Etruscan kings, and I think there's always that sort of... Even though we got rid of the kings, there's something a bit special about that Etruscan family link. So that might give him a little bit of, not exactly authority, a little bit of allure about his family. Yeah. And in the US, having like pioneer heritage, you're here for some reason convict heritage in Australia. Yeah, but only fairly recently. Yeah. Well, yeah. He didn't talk about it, I don't know, up until about 1970, I believe. Yeah. Indeed. So he's kind of reasonably well set up. His two brothers, even though they live to get married while their parents are still alive, he will be the one who survives all three of them because his elder brother, so we're getting rid of him straight away. We've only got one Publius Lachinius, Crassus now. He dies in the social war, '90s. As a result of the social war, or just, you know... Fighting in the social war. His father gets to be consul in '97 CE, and as a result of his time in Spain, in '93, he's granted a triumph for victory in Lusitania, so that's one of the Spanish provinces. This is big news. He's reached the height of Roman magistracies, and he's been granted a triumph. And I guess later on, there are lots of triumphs, but I think probably in this period, they're still relatively rare. Yes. They become a bit normalised, well, into the imperial period, certainly. Now, he's around, of course, at a time when there's already conflict in the Republic. There has been since the middle of the second century, but this is going to come to a head between Marius and Sola, so people are having to pick sides. So can you tell me about the situation between Marius and Sola, Cliffnote's version, in the context of what we need to know for young Marcus here? Okay. So, Marius and Sola represent the two very broad sides we often talk about in the factions of the late Roman Republic, which is Sola is from the optomatis side, the elites that kind of wanting to maintain the authority of the Senate, and Marius is on the... He wouldn't self-designate this, but the popularist side, the populists, this was used as an insult against the people seen as populists, so they say he wouldn't self-designate. But people who are looking broadly for reform, so that land is more fairly distributed, citizenship might be offered to more people, things like the extortion courts, which magistrates have to go through after their term if they're charged with extortion. This has a fairer distribution of non-senatorial judges, because if you're only being judged by your peers as Sola wants and does bring in, then you ain't going to get convicted. So, things like that, kind of evening up society in some ways. I mean, you wouldn't call it, they're not really Democrats, but they want some change. And at different times, different people appeal to the people more, so you can't really say these are strict political parties, they're definitely not that. But broadly speaking, Sola wants to maintain the old ways. Marius, who actually has come from no way, certainly not from a senatorial background, he gets there because he's an excellent general, and he gets to be consul many times because of that. He wants land for his troops, things like that, and this will become kind of endemic. Warlords who have the backing of their troops behind them, who need fairer distribution of land, so they've got place to put their own troops. So it's not just, "Oh, look, society's very unfair, I want to make it more fair. It is something I can offer my troops because they back me." So that's what's going on, and it's been bubbling up for a while. It will come to a head in civil war between these two figures. Okay, and Publius Crassus, former consul, I guess at this point, does get caught up in this, although from what I gather, he tries not to take sides. Yeah, initially he seems to back Marius, then seems to want to not take sides, his son will end up on Sulla's side, but maybe not taking Sulla's side in the first place was a mistake because Sulla will win, spoiler. In '87, doing the winter over into '86, this is amongst, in the midst of this civil war going on, Crassus the father and the younger brother who's still alive both die, and apparently by their own hand, which maybe because they were ordered to by the supporters of Marius. A fragment of Livy says outright, Crassus, so that he suffered nothing unworthy of his bravery, pierced himself with his sword. So he says that very directly, I think some people suggest that they were actually killed by supporters of Marius. And apparently Crassus, so Marcus' last sight of his father is of his severed head displayed on the rostra in the forum, so the speaker's platform, we seem to get that by implication from Cicero a bit later on. I mean, if that's right, then that would have had a major psychological effect on Marcus Crassus. Yeah. And to somebody who comes from a relatively large Roman family who seemed to have been very close to lose all the men in his life like that. And even though they took their own lives, the implication is that they've been pushed to do this. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is the option you give to an elite Roman, but it is the same as execution. If they're not going to do it themselves, then you will do it for them, but it is a privilege to be able to take your own death into your own hands for the Romans. Yes. Yes. And I mean, we see this before, we've seen it afterwards, but that doesn't stop young Marcus here from taking it very personally, I guess, he's got a personal stake against Marius now. Yes, exactly. And he will certainly, for the moment, go very much for the elite side, the optimates side and fight with Sola. He also gets married during this period, which is kind of pertinent here because he marries a woman called Totola, who's the widow of one of his brothers, both of his brothers are dead now. We're not sure which brother she had been married to, which is kind of an old-fashionedy way of reading the responsibilities of a Roman man. Would he have seen it as an obligation? Maybe so. Yes. Okay. And you know, marriage is, it's done in a very transactional way for Roman elites. So it may be that he is doing this as a service to his brother, or maybe she came from an important enough family for it to be a good marriage for him. Maybe she had lots of money, given what Plutarch has to say about everything else that Crassus does. I mean, look, we completely don't know. He could have been in love. Always possible. Okay. All right. Just over the body of his brother. So what is, can we now call him Crassus? We can now dispense. I will allow that. Okay. So it's now that all the other Crassuses have been dispensed with the Crassae. What does he do now? We've said that he's going to fall on the side of Sulla. What steps does he take? Well, he's kind of pushed into what he does during this civil war because Marius dies during this period and his close supporter and indeed fellow consul, Sinna, he begins this awful kind of process of what we call proscriptions, which means you have a list of those who are proscribed and they are declared enemies of the state. Anybody can kill them. So it's kind of extra judicial murder and they will get a portion of that person's land. So this is kind of open for corruption. Not only will he get rid of all his enemies, but also names will get added to that list because of greed. Sulla does this as well on the other side, but from Sinna's point of view, Sinna, the supporter of Marius, this is to get rid of Sulla's supporters. So Crassus is apparently on that list and he has to flee Rome in order to survive. So it's very clear now that he's associated with the optimates, with the elites. And he goes to Spain where he's got a lot of support because his father had an important pro-consulship there? Yes. He's absolutely got support there and he's got a network. I mean, he was there with his father. And when he gets there, he has to hide out and according to Plutarch, he spends eight months hiding in a cave. Wow. Plutarch talks a lot. Plutarch talks as if he's visited it actually because he talks about the size of it. Oh, okay. It's a very big cave. He actually gives a description of it and it's right on the sea edge and hidden away. And he talks in the present tense, which makes me think, maybe he went and had a look. Or maybe this becomes part of Crassus' myth-making and it's an important thing of every speech that he gave from here on out. I stayed in a cave on the cliff side. I did this for eight months to prove how much I love our empire, you know? Yeah. Maybe. So, I mean, I think what he loves is survival and who can blame him during this very turbulent period. He gets maintained, though, fed by one of his father's allies, a man called Vibius Paciarchus, who sends an enslaved person along with food for him. And Plutarch's very clear about this, says to him, "You just leave it, you don't look in the cave. All right? You don't go anywhere near it. If you do, I'm going to kill you. If you do it all correctly, then I will set you free at the end of this." Wow. Big carrot and stick going on there. Yeah. So, you drop the food off. You never go in. And this, of course, is to protect Crassus' anonymity. But then he also apparently sends Crassus a couple of sex slaves. So, you know, this is in Plutarch too. He's, "I'm not making this up. You're a young man. You have needs. What kind of woman do you want?" And he sends him to, and then Plutarch kind of just leaves the rest veiled in silence, but says that they do go there and spend their time with him. Sure. Living it rough as a hermit. Oh, he also says, by the way, that one of these, presumably young women in old age later on still talks about this and kind of dines out on it, basically. I guess you would. I don't know. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. I mean, Crassus' big name in the ancient world. Yeah. So, he ends up spending three years there, 87 to 84 BCE. And he's not idle during this time. When he gets out of the cave, he starts recruiting troops. Yeah. He would have been planning, but things would have been moving while he's in this cave for three years. And, you know, times change very quickly. Spain is very strategically important though in any war. Yeah. Yeah. Three years feels a long time to be idle in a cave when there's so much going on in Rome at this time. Well, he's only eight months in the cave. Oh, God knows. I don't think I spend one night in a cave. But he is recruiting, we're told, 2,500 men to form an army to go back to Rome. So these are his father's allies. So, again, they're going to be loyal to him. And, of course, this is part of the problem of the late Republic, that people are loyal to an individual commander. Crassus is as much guilty of this as, but already, Solar and Marius have this. So this is how things are going. They're not loyal to Rome or their province or whatever, they're Crassus's men. Another little tidbit, one of the supposed sayings of Crassus is that you weren't rich if you couldn't pay for your own army, which excluded almost everybody. Yeah, yeah. It probably isn't true. But it's the kind of thing that accrues around somebody who's known for their wealth, like the idea that Nero says, "Now I'm beginning to live like a human," when he builds himself a massive country villa in the middle of Rome. Yes, yes. But this is where he gets his power from, I guess, especially at this point. I'm not just Crassus, I'm not just a person coming to fight on your side. I'm also bringing 2,500 men who are loyal to me. If you want them in your army, I need an important position. Yeah. And that's what he gets, I suppose, when he finally goes and joins Sulla. He brings this army and suddenly he turns up at Sulla's side. Yeah, exactly. So Plutarch says of this period, "As soon as he heard of Sinner's death," so the popularist side are dropping like flies, "he disclosed himself," so it comes out of the cave, I guess, "many flocked to his standard, out of whom he selected 2,500 men and went about visiting the cities. One of these Malacca, he plundered as many writers testify, but they say that he himself denied the charge and quarrelled with those who affirmed it." So fake news. Yeah, I guess so. I mean, he doesn't want to be known as somebody who's rampaging around Spain. I mean, the idea of plunder is that he gets more finance, he gets more money, he gets spoils from this, but it doesn't seem like a great thing to be doing to an ally. Yeah, yeah. Firstly, he goes to Africa because one of Sulla's allies is Metellus Pius is there, but then after that, he apparently not getting on with Metellus, takes his troops up and goes off to Sulla, who's actually in Greece at the time. And Plutarch says that very quickly he stood in a place of special honor, so he's kind of Sulla's special pat on the head, good boy. One of the guys in the tent, talking strategy. Yeah, exactly. That's kind of important because it doesn't stop, but somebody else is maybe going to take his top place at the table. And Sulla can see though, the crass is good at getting troops, so he sends him to raise more troops. However, I don't know, there's something about the stories with the crass, it seems to rub people up the wrong way. He says, look, this is dangerous territory, give me an escort to go through these places. And Sulla says, no, you're a big boy, you're a Roman, go and do it yourself. So Sulla's very angry with him and he says, I give you as an escort your father, your brother, your friends and your relations who have been put to death without law and justice and who's murderer as I am going to punish. So it's like, this will be your reward, having revenge, which I think tells us something about the characterization of Sulla. He wants this, I mean, it's a civil war, I guess, but this polarization, he wants people to be angry on his behalf or certainly crass is to be angry. It also makes no sense. I mean, he's only asking for someone to keep him safe while he's going to get troops for Sulla. Anyway, it works, stung by this Rebid Krasus set out at once and forced his way resolutely through the enemy. So this is all in Plutarch, Life of Krasus chapter six. So after he's raised troops, obviously this puts him in very high esteem with Sulla even more so, but he's not the very top man because, at least according to our sources, which love a bit of a cat fight, because there's this rivalry going on with Pompey, who's young but brilliant. And Sulla sees this brilliant and prefers Pompey, Pompey is at this point continues to model himself on Alexander and very quickly, we'll get the title Pompey the Great, Pompeus Magnus. So whether Krasus was jealous of him or not, our sources like to feed into that later on, he will have to make a pact with Pompey, but does he always see himself as a bit of the third wheel? I think this could be part of the historiography and the kind of in retrospect knowing that Krasus has to fall out of it sooner than the other players. So it's possible that there was rivalry, but also there are good reasons for thinking why this might make a good story for someone like Plutarch and others to write down. So the war very quickly unfolds here at this point, I find, but Plutarch at least emphasises that Krasus is quite important or at least successful in the proceedings. He's very brave. He has lots of victories, but even here Plutarch saying he's also greedy. He points out his avarice. For instance, when he captured the Umbrian city of Tudar, it was believed that he appropriated to himself most of the spoil and charges to this effect were laid before Sulla. So if you're a good general, you do sharing out of the stuff you're nicking from other people amongst your troops to keep some loyal. Clearly he doesn't do that because they go tell on him to the big general that he's taking it all for himself. So this is an early example of this acquisitiveness. But he does prove himself to be absolutely vital in this Civil War for Sulla, because at the final battle, the Battle of the Colline Gate, just outside Rome, Krasus is in command of the right flank of Sulla's army. And it doesn't go very well for Sulla, but Krasus does well and crushes all before him. And when Krasus says, you know, should we all retire because Sulla in the centre is being defeated, Sulla pushes them towards the centre where they managed to rally and have a victory. So it's kind of Krasus sort of saves the day there by holding his side together and meaning that the whole army hasn't been quashed as one. So you can see that Krasus is going to come out of this with high military honours. Also of course, now that Sulla has won, what are we going to get? Well, we've already seen that Sulla's a vengeful figure, we're going to get prescriptions on his side. His own side of prescriptions. Yeah, I mean, he's just going to go wild with this now as revenge for what Marius did to his side, Marius and Sinner. And Krasus makes a lot of money out of this, because of course, property is being sold off from the proscribed. Plutarch says he made his money from fire and war, and that's the war side of it, the proscriptions. He buys up the property of the proscribed, he never refused to accept or buy a property when Sulla was selling the goods of those who'd been put to death. So it's Plutarch. It makes me think of, I know this is a bit trivial, but when you're playing Monopoly and the person who buys just anything they land on, just get it all, get it all, acquire it all. For Krasus, this is a winning strategy. The really nasty thing is that he takes advantage of people whose property has been damaged or destroyed by fire, and fire is just endemic in Rao, it's happening all the time, especially in this period. Plutarch says the owners of these properties, in terror and uncertainty of the moment, really sounds like Plutarch's been there and knows what it's like for these people, would let them go for next to nothing. In this way, most of Rome came into his possession in chapter two in Plutarch, which I mean, it can't have been most of Rome, but he just acquired a lot of property. And he's already, it's hard not to admire this though, he's very canny because he's already bought up a lot of enslaved people who have careers as builders or architects. So he can get in there quickly, it makes me think of modular housing or something, he can just get in there and do his cookie cutter thing, the architect will say, "Yeah, this will fit here," and then he can put the builders straight in, and then of course he can sell or rent that property, more money coming in, more money coming in. So this is what I mean about him being in a way self-made. This is also where he gets the reputation of being a tycoon, that's another word that's applied to him because people try and put a modern guise over how he's operating. Yeah, exactly. One thing that Plutarch, as we've said, his concentration on character though, is that he states again that he might be building lots of housing, but he doesn't build an extravagant house for himself. He's interested in owning stuff, he's not interested in living at that extreme luxury level. I do think Plutarch might be a bit skewed by living after the period of Nero because, I mean even before this, but especially after Nero, everything becomes kind of judged by what are your personal living standards? Do you have to live extravagantly? That turns you into a tyrant. So I think Plutarch's own context might be relevant here. He's sort of a bit of a moralist, a bit in the guise of a republican moralist. And I don't know if everybody was making these comments about Crassus at the time necessarily. Well, a lot of this feels like retribution and in some ways sacking the city, which is what you do after the war. Yeah, you shouldn't be sacking your own city though. That's what I say. Does this give him a bad reputation amongst the Sullens? He seems to abuse the system for himself. So a bit like, and maybe this is why there is that rumor that he sacked Malaga when he was gathering men together in Spain. I mean, the prescriptions are evil enough, but there is a story that he kind of extorts even beyond the prescriptions. And Plutarch tells us this story. He says that in Brutium, which is the toe of Italy, he actually prescribed a man without Sulla's orders merely to get his property. Now I think this might have been happening a lot. Yes. Someone's got a nice house. You think, well, they weren't avertly a Sulla, I'm just going to claim that they're the enemy. Anyway, Plutarch continues, and for this reason, Sulla, who disapproved of his conduct, never employed him again on public business. So, you know, Sulla might have been nasty, but at least he was fair within the confines of what the prescriptions were doing. Yeah. And Crassus stepping outside of that. The personal gain is maybe damaging his reputation amongst his allies. But again, though, it might be circular. Crassus is known for being very wealthy and canny in how he got that wealth. Therefore, these kind of stories accrue about him because there must have been. If it wasn't Crassus, then I would bet my bottom dollar that somebody was doing that. It's not a time of rules. The prescriptions really lay themselves open to this kind of abuse, and it may have been that Crassus did abuse that. That was Rhiannon Evans, Associate Professor in Classics and Ancient History at La Trobe University, and you have been listening to Emperors of Rome. If you like this podcast, please subscribe, leave a review, and tell your friends about it. You can like the Emperors of Rome on Facebook, and you can follow us both on Blue Sky. Rhiannon is @DrRiannon, I am @NightlightGuy, and the podcast is @RomePodcast. That's it today for Emperors of Rome. In the next episode, we continue the story of Crassus by exploring his war against Spartacus. This podcast was recorded at La Trobe University's Bundura campus in Melbourne, Australia on the traditional lands of the Wurundjeri people. So until the next episode, I'm Matt Smith, you've been fantastic, and thanks for listening.