He purchased the election of priests, even investing spectacular sums to make Caesar chief priest, the pontifex maximus, as a counterweight to the power of Pompey. Eighteen years after rising to the public’s attention for ending Spartacus’ revolt, Caesar’s one-time banker and Rome’s former head of state departed for the Tigris and Euphrates with mad imperialist designs of annexing Parthia to Rome.

We publish history, politics, current affairs, art, architecture, biography and pretty much everything else. Well written and interesting, it's a short book at less than 150 pages (excluding index etc) but there's enough in it to keep the narrative flowing.An otherwise comfortable life of wealth and privilege ended with Crassus’ head being used as a prop on a Parthian stage. Peter Stothard's 'Crassus' is a new biography written for Yale University Press's Ancient Lives series, which aims to prove that the lives of ancient thinkers, rulers, warriors, and politicians are still relevant today.

In Stothard’s fine prose we see not only the whole picture of Crassus’s life but also how consequential a figure he truly was.Flashbacks paint a good picture about his early career, the internal politics in Rome and his rivalry with Pompey.

The central message is a topical one - even if someone is good at amassing wealth and political clout, they may be very bad at war. Provided a good understanding of the internal Roman politics leading up to the change from Republic to Empire. Had he taken the advice of one of his officers and a future assassin of Caesar Cassius he might have salvaged something. The uniqueness of Stothard’s account of the tumultuous final decades of the Roman Republic is in a new east-west narrative in which we see the inner workings of Rome as well as the vibrancy—however brief in the narrative—of Parthia.

The locals of Cesano on the edge of Rome are expecting a 21st century gold rush, their own Texas oil boom, after the announcement last year that the ‘rare earth’, lithium, lies in large extractable seams beneath their soil. Crassus's vanity and a desire to achieve something on the battlefield worthy of being welcomed back to Rome with a Triumph -- not accorded to him for the defeat of Spartacus -- drives him to his death and many of his men in faraway Parthia.