Minor Works

Journalist to classicist

Thirty Days and Crassus by Peter Stothard

Peter Stothard, once editor of The Times, later editor of the Times Literary Supplement, is better known for other books, which have classical themes. These two works, one of them recent, one of them his first, are a little different.

The earlier one documents some time spent in Downing Street, post-9/11, pre-Iraq. It covers a brief period which saw the prime minister, Tony Blair’s, fiftieth birthday. It was something of an important time.

And the latter describes what we know – in quite a brief and elegant form – of Crassus: general, consul, triumvir. Associate of Caesar and Pompey. Participant in the fall of the republic. One of the few classical figures so well known they have given birth to expressions and idioms in multiple eras. Some romance languages even have a phrase which translates as ‘Crassus’s error,’ implying that there are certain categories of hubristic, unforced mistakes which arrive in a new category: a category populated most notably by the former consul of the republic who led his army into Parthia and never did return.

I don’t, because it would be cheap beyond words, mean to draw comparison directly between those two events. Crassus started a war simply because he wanted one. Blair had more than one war because, at least in part, he believed he had no choice. We forget, a quarter of a century on, what September 11 was for people in power or part of government bureaucracies. National security officials worldwide did not sleep all that well for months. A new attack was imminent, no, inevitable. Would it be an anthrax attack? The Americans thought they intercepted one. Would it be a ‘suitcase bomb’ or a dirty bomb – enough nuclear material acquired by terror networks and arms dealers, and deployed in a place filled with civilians to send a message – a Tokyo sarin attack for the new century?

Airliners brought down worldwide – flown into landmarks, detonated over oceans. This is what seemed, to very many, inevitable. And you would do anything to stop something like that, wouldn’t you? You’d torture, you’d fight, you’d kill. This, all of this, they did.

The life of Crassus is as opaque as the sources dictate. We know he was a very rich man. The letters of his contemporaries hint at ways he might have made his money: in agricultural land, as so many Romans did, in property acquisitions of the ill-built tenements in which poor Romans suffered and perished. In sending caravans of slaves around the city as a kind of private fire brigade, running to conflagrations in progress, but only putting out threats to life and limb if the man who owned it was prepared to sell his holdings to Crassus at a knock-down price.

This is what the Romans wrote to each other about the man.

But the Romans wrote their letters with irony. They were satiric. We do not know really what it was they meant to say. We do not know all that well what was true.

We know for sure what Crassus most desired, however: and that was a war. Other generals had won glory, had cemented their greatness. Caesar had conquered Gaul. Pompey had secured for the Republic much of the east, was called the second Alexander. Crassus was sixty or older. Still strong and vigorous. But knowing well that his legacy was not yet ensured.

He equipped a Roman army from his own deep pockets and set off into Parthia. Parthia the enemy of many centuries. Rome’s Eurasia. It was well known, long in advance, that the rich man was going to have his war. The enemy caught up with him at Carrhae. Crassus outnumbered the Parthians but he permitted himself to be surrounded. The Roman force was held at bay with missiles, pelted with arrows for hours.

The arrows did not cease. Crassus knew that something had to be done, so he sent his own son to ride off at the head of the cavalry and to drive away the Parthian archers. This did not succeed. Crassus’s son was killed; his head was paraded before the Roman square; the general became incapable with grief. And the army fell to pieces and stumbled back – taking losses, suffering alarums – until it was surrendered and Crassus was first captured, then humiliated, and finally killed in cold blood. There are many legends, none well-enough substantiated, about how he met his death.

Either way, he choked on what gold life had given him.