The Death and Desecration of Crassus

Scroll down for a list of recommended reading, useful images, links to primary sources to read for free online, and for a transcript of the episode.

Plutarch's account (skip to section 33 for the Bacchae)

Cassius Dio's account (skip to section 26 for the gold)

Transcript:

Today's episode is all about the humiliating death of one of the key players  in the final years of the Roman Republic, Marcus Licinius Crassus.  In 53 BCE, he was leading an army into Parthia,  which culminated in a mortifying defeat at the Battle of Carrhae.  Crassus never made it home, but his death did become the literal stuff of legends.  Now, hopefully we will be doing a deep dive episode into Crassus' entire biography  and we definitely have an episode on the Battle of Carrhaeitself coming up in series two.  But for this episode, I want to talk about his death specifically.  But before we get into all of the myths surrounding it,  we should probably just quickly run through a little bit about who he was first  and how he got to Carrhae in the first place.  So if you don't know who he is, don't worry at all.  But you may have heard of him.  He led the Roman army against Spartacus and the rebel slaves.  In cinema, he was played by Laurence Olivier.  And he's also quite famous for being the richest man in Rome, prototype billionaire.  He literally owned most of the city and he's almost as famous  for being in the first triumvirate with Julius Caesar and Pompey Magnus.  Although, if you're in a pub quiz,  Crassus is usually the name of the three that people can't remember.  Just like most people know the names of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin,  but they always forget Michael Collins.  Same kind of deal.  

So we're going to start with a bit of a speed run through Crassus' career.  Just a quick recap, because everything about his life influenced the manner of his death.  This is all relevant stuff.  So Crassus was born into an equestrian family, i.e. upper middle class-ish, around 115 BC.  And just because his family was equestrian, not patrician,  that doesn't mean that his family was insignificant.  He could count several consuls amongst his ancestors  and he grew up considerably wealthy already.  His dad was consul when Crassus was about 10,  and after that his dad served as governor of Spain where he fought against the Lusitani  and earned himself a triumph for his efforts.  So Crassus' dad? Big deal.  Crassus also had two brothers.  One was killed in the Social War,  this was the war when several of Rome's allies on the Italian peninsula rose up in rebellion,  and the other brother was killed in the massacres of Marius in 87 BC, along with their father.  Marius had swept into Rome intent on eliminating all of his political opponents,  and that included the Crassus family.  Now the sources don't quite agree on how events unfolded.  Cicero and Livy reckon that Crassus' brother was killed first,  which prompted their father to kill himself in grief.  Appian says the father killed his son to spare his son a worse death  and was then killed by oncoming troops.  And Plutarch and Lucan say that both father and son were beheaded at the same time  and that their corpses were mutilated.  And then Cassius Dio joins the party.  He says that the heads of Marius' most prestigious murdered opponents were mounted on the rostra,  the speaker's platform in the Forum Romanum.  Now we've got no reason to believe that Crassus' brother and father,  particularly the father being an ex-consul,  were not prestigious enough to be included in that,  so I think we can assume that at least Crassus' father's head was up on that speaker's platform.  Either way, in the span of about three years,  the young Marcus Licinius Crassus had lost two brothers and a father, all in violent ways.  He'd lost his family fortune and he was now head of the ruins of his family.  

We can't be surprised after all of those events that Crassus decided to firmly align himself  with Marius' enemy, Sulla.  This allegiance forced Crassus to flee Rome.  He was about 28 at this point and he fled to Spain,  which he knew because he'd lived there as a child,  to save himself from his father's fate and to keep his own head firmly fixed to his shoulders.  And this suggests that his name was probably on one of the other Marian kill lists.  He had to get out of there.  As soon as it was safe to do so, he raised his own army  and marched back into Italy to join up forces with Sulla.  In 82 BC, he was commanding a section of Sulla's army at the Battle of the Colline Gate.  This was on the outskirts of Rome itself, right up against the walls,  and he was fighting against the Marian faction that had killed his family five years before.  Now Crassus's actions in this battle swung the battle into Sulla's favour.  It was Crassus's actions that led them to victory.  Sulla was able to take charge of the city of Rome  and he also took all of the credit for winning.  But it didn't matter because Crassus was on the up and up.  Crassus used his relationship with Sulla to his advantage  because Sulla had a huge kill list of his own  and he was confiscating the property of those he'd murdered.  Crassus was helping with the plundering.  Crassus bought a huge amount of these properties at knockdown prices  and perhaps he thought this was, you know, justice of a kind.  His own family had had their riches confiscated when his father was murdered  so why shouldn't he steal the properties of those he was murdering?  

Fortune more than restored, he now sets about the business of politics,  just as his illustrious ancestors had done.  The problem was that even though he was in a good position for a good political career,  he was always destined to be overshadowed by a man ten years his junior  who had also risen up under Sulla, Pompey Magnus.  Pompey had already proven to be the indispensable one out of all of Sulla's close friends  and Crassus wanted to prove that anything Pompey could do, he could do better.  So he spent three years fighting the rebel armies of Spartacus  with legions that he paid for out of his own pocket  and eventually he won such a decisive battlefield victory  that Spartacus was completely defeated.  Of the 6,000 rebels that survived the battle,  well, Crassus decided to crucify them all on crosses planted along the Appian Way.  So imagine the scene.  You've got the main arterial road into the city of Rome  and for miles and miles you have dying rebels upon crosses.  This is the message that Crassus is sending to Rome.  You were in danger, but look, I've fixed it.  You can be safe.  However, at the same time, Pompey was also waging a war  and this time against a rogue Roman general in Spain.  And this was seen as more important because Pompey was fighting a Roman  and Spartacus, he was a slave.  So despite Spartacus arguably being more of an imminent threat to himself  and definitely more famous now,  because Crassus was fighting a bunch of slaves, it was less prestigious at the time.  And worse, once Pompey had finished in Spain,  he decided to return to Italy, wipe out the few of Spartacus' armies  who'd managed to escape Crassus' final battle and crucifixions.  And Pompey had the audacity to write to the Senate and say,  I finished the war for you.  You're welcome.  Now, Crassus was already annoyed that his battles, big ones,  against the rebellious enslaved armies were seen as less important.  And now he didn't even get credit for the war.  He's not impressed.  So Pompey returns to Rome, gets a second triumph in his short career,  and Crassus gets nothing.  

One year later, the hero of the hour, Pompey,  is begged to stand for consul,  despite actually not being qualified for the job.  And we're told that Pompey allowed the actually qualified Crassus  to stand as his co-consul.  As Plutarch puts it,  Pompey did this because he wanted Crassus to always feel in debt to him.  For the entire year of their consulship,  the two bickered so much on every topic that they achieved practically nothing.  During the 60s BC, Crassus and Pompey continue to butt heads constantly,  and perhaps keen to create some allies,  Crassus decides to take on a protégé.  He chooses Julius Caesar to take under his political wing,  and Crassus is now bankrolling a lot of Caesar's early election campaigns,  including that of Pontifex Maximus.  So now Crassus has a wingman.  In the year 60, Caesar is able to get these arch rivals,  Crassus and Pompey, to at least tolerate each other  and form with him the First Triumvirate,  an unofficial alliance that allowed them to completely dominate politics.  Personal rivalries could be put aside as long as they worked together  for their mutual gain.  Caesar and Pompey spent most of their time waging war,  but Crassus preferred to stay in Rome.  He's close to the centre of politics there,  but he's soon growing fractious.  He's growing jealous of his colleagues being hailed as conquering heroes.  Crassus had significant political power  because he was just so rich.  Nobody could outbid him on bribery and other rackets,  but the spoils of war were making Caesar,  and particularly Pompey, incredibly rich themselves.  So Crassus, already overshadowed on the battlefield,  was now being overshadowed at the bank as well.  His status as the only man who could buy votes and juries was fading fast,  and in 55, the fragile alliance of the Triumvirate was fraying at the seams.  

Julius Caesar, still the junior man of the three,  convinced Pompey and Crassus to agree on one big last plan.  The Triumvirate wrangled a second co-consulship for Pompey and Crassus,  and afterwards they would each get a nice province for five  instead of the customary one year.  Caesar would go back to Gaul, fighting barbarians,  and if you have listened to our episode on Vercingetorix, you know how that goes.  Pompey would get Spain, but he wasn't actually obliged to leave Rome,  and Crassus, he got the pick of the bunch because his province was Syria.  Syria had only been under Rome for a couple of decades.  It had been annexed by, you guessed it,  Pompey Magnus, and it had moved Rome's borders eastwards.  Syria was fabulously wealthy.  This was Crassus' chance to become dominant again.  He didn't only plan to milk Syria for all that it was worth,  he wanted to match the military brilliance of his colleagues,  and this time, he would be taking the final credit.  He decided that from Syria, he would invade their neighbour, Parthia.  

Parthia had once been a small area in what is now known as Iran and Turkmenistan,  but by 129, it had expanded both east and west through their conquests.  So by this point, Parthia stretched all the way from the Euphrates River to the Indus Valley,  and its trade routes even reached as far as China.  So whilst Rome was working hard to become the premier empire in the west,  Parthia was doing exactly the same thing in the east.  So Crassus' plan is simple.  He'd win a war, take as much loot as he could carry,  he'd come home, finally get his massive triumph,  lord it over Pompey and Caesar for a while,  and remind them that there was life in the Old Dog yet.  Now Caesar had already fought in the east.  Pompey had become hugely respected after waging his wars there,  and having wars in the east was seen as, you know, the dumb thing.  After all, Alexander the Great had gone east,  and any Roman general worth their salt wanted to match or even surpass Alexander.  Like Alexander, Pompey had already earned the nickname Madness, meaning the Great,  but now it was Crassus' turn for some accolades.  The whole region was squabbling amongst themselves,  the Parthian king was sitting on a shaky throne,  he'd had to recently go to war to secure it,  and for all intents and purposes, Parthia was ripe for the picking  if a man was willing to get his hands dirty.  

Now I don't think we should assume that Crassus wanted to conquer Parthia,  but it seems that he definitely wanted some quick victories,  a pile full of gold, and a big parade when he got home.  On the other hand, Parthia at the time was showing signs of becoming dominant  amongst the fractious territories of the east,  and if it was allowed to dominate the east,  it might one day turn its eyes westwards.  So maybe it was best to preemptively bring it down a peg or two,  and let those barbarians know that Rome was boss,  but, to play devil's advocate,  both Sulla and Pompey had already brokered treaties with Parthia.  Invading would break those treaties,  which was not something an honourable Roman should be contemplating.  Parthia was an immense empire at this point.  It's an ambitious target.  Let's not forget though that we consider this invasion of Parthia to be a stupid idea,  because we know that it failed.  Hindsight is 20-20, and plus, as we were told by Vizzini,  never start a land war in Asia.  But Crassus never saw the Princess Bride,  so he may have had every reason to be optimistic.  And we know from his other businesses that he rarely took risks  without making a ton of calculations first.  

Caesar and Pompey signed off on this invasion plan with very little pushback.  One might assume that if there was such glory and wealth to be had from Parthia,  that Caesar and Pompey might be bickering over who got to profit from it,  like they'd bickered over literally everything else.  But luckily for Crassus,  Caesar was far too preoccupied with his Gallic wars and Pompey,  well he knew that Crassus would for a change be out of Rome for a while.  Perhaps Pompey was simply glad to be the sole triumvirate left in the capital for a change.  So the Parthian invasion got the official triumvirate seal of approval.  We're told that this plan didn't generate the excitement in Rome that perhaps Crassus anticipated.  We're told that he struggled to recruit,  he was forced to accept whichever men he could,  and everywhere people were apparently seeing omens and dark portants.  The Tribune of the Plebs apparently cursed Crassus as he departed Rome.  Undeterred, Crassus sailed off anyway.  But were the naysayers right,  he did lose several ships in storms on the way to the east.  Nevertheless, in 54 BC,  Crassus arrived in the east with 35,000 men.  Some of them were veterans, others were rookies.  

Now as I say, we are going to have a Crash Course episode in the battle itself coming up in series two,  so I'm not going to talk about it too much here.  Suffice to say, Crassus quickly won a small victory against the Parthian border force  and several Mesopotamian cities surrendered to him without resistance.  Crassus only had to sack one single city that did attempt to hold out.  And that was an immensely profitable day.  Everything was going swimmingly in the first year of the campaign.  And he was even able to swell his ranks up to about 40,000.  As winter approached, Crassus took his men back to Syria,  where it was safe to wait for the next campaign season.  Even his son Publius, a protégé of his one-time protégé Caesar,  joined him with some cavalry in anticipation for the big push in the summer.  And this was wonderful!  Not only was Crassus' own reputation going to skyrocket,  so would that of his beloved son who was already being seen as the next big thing back in Rome.  The Parthians sent emissaries to ask Crassus  why the hell are you invading us unprovoked?  And Crassus, according to Plutarch, said,  I will tell you my plans when I reach Seleucia.  That's the royal city in what is now Iraq, deep into Parthian territory.  He clearly intended to be in Parthia for a while,  but the emissary laughed and said,  my palm is going to grow hairy before that ever happens.  Crassus is not bothered though, and he keeps planning his assault.  

And finally, the big push comes.  And we have two differing accounts of how Crassus meets the Parthians on the battlefield.  And this is important because we're going to have two very different accounts of what happens afterwards as well.  Plutarch tells us that Crassus had the choice of two routes.  A safe route through Armenia, which is rather hilly, and it's also Rome's recent ally.  Their grateful king had a vested interest in seeing Parthia humbled as well,  because Parthia was breathing down Armenia's neck.  If Rome brought Parthia down to size, well, the Armenian king could breathe easy.  So he offered safe passage, provisions and auxiliaries.  However, Crassus apparently says, no, I'm going to march through Mesopotamia.  I'm going to follow the rivers.  

Plutarch tells us that a local chieftain named Ariamnes earned Crassus's trust,  despite criticizing Crassus's habit of planning and waiting for the perfect moment to strike.  Apparently, he thought that Crassus was too cautious.  And somehow we're told that he persuades Crassus to be more bold,  leave the river valley and march into a desert unplanned, whereupon Ariamnes disappears and Crassus is left as a sitting duck,  because the Parthians, as Ariamnes already knew, were lying in wait in the desert.  Cassius Dio has a slightly different version.  He says that it was King Abgar II of Osroene who diverted Crassus's route away from the river,  not to lead them into a desert, but because he claimed that the Parthians were close by.  Like Ariamnes, it seems like Abgar was also trying to rush Crassus into action  before Crassus perhaps felt ready.  So that is a common theme across the sources.  Abgar had been friendly towards Pompey a few years before,  but for some reason now he decided to turncoat and ally himself with his Parthian larger neighbours.  Another trap.  Cassius Dio doesn't have the battlefield as an endlessly flat desert.  He says the ground was uneven, wooded in places, and that allowed the Parthians to hide.  The blow-by-blow account of the battle will feature in series two, as I say.  For now, all you need to know is that this battle is a disaster for the Romans.  Even though the Romans outnumber the Parthians around four to one,  which should be a good thing, the Parthians are relying heavily on mounted archers  who had powerful composite bows.  Their arrows could easily pierce shields and armour like a knife going through butter.  And moreover, the Parthians seem to have an inexhaustible supply of these arrows  which rained down on hapless Romans for hours and hours.  So even though the Parthians don't seem to have many infantry troops,  they still managed an absolute bloodbath.  They also relied heavily on cataphracts.  These are heavily armoured cavalry troops, think of them as equine tanks,  which also swept in to kill any Roman within a spear tip's reach.  So the Romans are hunkered down under their shields as best they could,  unable to move for pretty much the entire battle.  

Now remember, it has been nearly 20 years since Crassus defeated Spartacus on a battlefield.  And to be honest, even if he'd spent 20 years continuously fighting battle since,  nothing could have prepared him for this one.  He knew how to fight other Romans.  He knew how to defeat slave uprisings.  But Crassus had nothing in his arsenal to compare with Parthian composite bows.  His own soldiers, legionaries, were best equipped to fight at close quarters.  That's where they were at their deadliest.  But the Parthian general Surenus, he knew that.  And that's why he chose to fight the Romans with his agile mounted archers  who could inflict huge amounts of damage from a distance.  It was like shooting fish in a barrel.  Crassus was pinned down.  Panicked, he sends out his son Publius,  who has brought his 1,000-strong unit of Gallic horsemen  in a desperate attempt to gain the upper hand.  It was the last time Crassus saw Publius alive.  

Publius's unit was surrounded and took an absolute thrashing.  Publius himself was struck in the hand with an arrow,  leaving him incapable of wielding his weapon.  The survivors of the unit managed to retreat a little,  and Publius, who didn't want the humiliation of being taken prisoner  and sent to a Parthian court, decided to die an honourable Roman death.  Unable to take his own life with his damaged hand,  he asked the man next to him to drive a sword into his side.  Most of his officers also decided to take their own lives too,  because it would have been cowardly to flee  and unbearable to be humiliated as prisoners of war for the Parthian king.  With this death at least came honour.  Unfortunately for Publius, death still brought humiliation,  and the next time Crassus saw his son,  it was to see his decapitated head held aloft on a Parthian spear.  Plutarch tells us that seeing the head of their golden-boy,  darling hero Publius, who'd shown so much potential,  had a pretty demoralising effect on the Roman soldiers left.  But let's just stop for a moment and consider what it might have done to Crassus.  Because back in his youth, he'd seen his family fortunes turned upside down  when his father and brother's severed heads had been fixed to that rostrum  to be gawked at in the forum,  and back then he'd only narrowly escaped the same fate.  

Everything that he had done from that point to this  was an effort to restore his family's prestige and power.  And I'd argue that by working so tirelessly  to become one of the top men in Rome,  he was aiming to never have his family be so vulnerable ever again.  If only he could be rich enough, clever enough,  strong enough,  then he and his descendants would be untouchable.  And for a long time, it had worked.  Okay, so jostling for power with Pompey had been frustrating,  but his son Publius was the talk of the town for all of the right reasons,  and Crassus had made sure that Publius was set to eclipse himself in every way.  So, back to the battlefield.  It's hot, it's sticky, the metallic stench of blood in his nostrils,  the pitiful cries of the dying ringing in his ears,  and Crassus witnesses his son's head severed from his body,  just as he had watched his father and brother.  Old scars, torn open and salt poured in.  And I'm not sure we should underestimate the trauma,  the psychological impact of seeing his son like this at this specific moment.  

Despite this, Plutarch, who is not Crassus' greatest admirer,  says that he did manage to retain, at least for a little while,  enough self-control to make an inspiring speech  to the remaining troops to try and rally their spirits.  After all, about half to two-thirds of the Romans were still alive,  and perhaps if they could retreat, regroup, and attack again in favorable conditions  that they had chosen, they would be more successful.  And this was standard practice in ancient Roman warfare.  Crassus reminded them of previous generals who had done exactly the same thing.  The speech was a good one, but it didn't work.  His army were already convinced that there was no way any of them were getting out alive.  The Parthians started shooting arrows again,  cutting Romans down left, right, and center.  Now, Crassus survives this onslaught, and as evening drew in,  Parthians retreated to, as Plutarch puts it,  allow Crassus a night to grieve his son and for the Romans to bury their dead.  But Plutarch reports that the surviving Romans are too traumatized to bury their dead.  They're too traumatized to help the wounded.  They can't do anything but sit there, weeping for the entire night.  Now, even if we're led to believe that these troops were as green as we're told that they were,  this is not the kind of battle that they would have been used to.  They weren't expecting to become sitting ducks for archers on horses.  That's not what they'd prepared for. That's not what they'd trained for.  So they were almost too scared to try and escape that night,  in case the cries of the men, who were too wounded to flee,  alerted the Parthians and brought in another attack.  

Crassus, we are told, is by this point pretty much catatonic.  His legates have to go over his head and tell everyone who can walk to lift and shift.  We're getting the hell out of here.  As predicted, the cries of those who realized that they were being abandoned to their fate  because they were too wounded to walk started to rise up in a crescendo,  spooking the Romans who were already managing to flee.  And Crassus wasn't able to keep any of them in any kind of order.  All discipline goes out of the window, and the Parthians do hear the kerfuffle,  but they're not worried. They're in no rush.  In the morning, they can put all of the defenseless wounded men out of their misery,  about 4,000 of them.  And for those fleeing, there would be stragglers that would be easy enough to pick off  as they stumbled around a region that they didn't know, completely lost.  Crassus did manage to make it back to the city of Carrhae that night,  but he had about 15,000 men left with him out of the 40,000 that he went into the battle with.  

Meanwhile, the Parthian general Surenus is in hot pursuit.  Crassus cannot catch a break at this point.  He decides that overnight the Romans shouldn't stay at Carrhae, they should keep going.  A second retreat.  They're going to attempt to get back into Syrian territory,  and this time they're going to split up.  Surenus can only chase one group at a time,  so half of them will survive if they split into two groups.  Unfortunately, Surenus chooses to chase the group that Crassus is in.  We're told that eventually Crassus was cornered,  and Surenus could have wiped out every single Roman there,  but strangely, he doesn't.  He doesn't even raise his sword.  He offers a truce.  Now remember, Crassus is a savvy man, always had been.  If this was a trick, he should have been able to spot it a mile away,  and Plutarch does say that he didn't want to give an answer straight away,  probably because he needed time to plot his next move.  Remember, he was a cautious man.  So we're told that Crassus suggests to his soldiers  that they should continue to retreat until they're on to safe territory.  Stick to the plan.  They are so close now to mountainous areas,  and the Parthian horsemen cannot follow them into the mountains.  But his remaining troops are stressed.  Tired, they're panicking.  So, no.  The answer is no.  They mutiny.  They demand that he stay,  work out a peace deal right there and then,  and save them all.  So Crassus, stuck between a rock and a hard place,  knows that the parlay could be a trick,  but that if he doesn't go through with it,  he faces a mutiny.  

Now he's been in sticky situations before.  He's always managed to bring it back.  And here's where his decision to stay in Rome for all of those years  possibly comes back to bite him on the arse.  Pompey and Caesar, they both have troops that they've led for years.  They know them personally.  They know their names and their faces.  They've developed loyal bonds with their men.  They had devoted veterans who would follow them into the underworld if they asked.  And no doubt Crassus couldn't imagine Pompey's men  having the audacity to speak to their commander in this way  and refuse to obey orders.  But Crassus didn't have those troops.  He didn't have hardened veterans.  They weren't disciplined enough,  and they haven't had years on the extended campaigns  to develop that bond with him.  And from their point of view,  Crassus hasn't exactly showered them in glory thus far.  They'd had a small skirmish that went quite well,  and now he'd led them into an absolute massacre.  They hadn't had time to grow to trust him.  He couldn't trust them.  And this is what did it for Crassus.  So he had to choose between a definite mutiny  and a parlay that might have been a trick.  So he chooses the least bad option,  and he agrees to speak to Surenus.  And I wonder what was going through his mind at this point.  Was he worrying that he would be taken prisoner  and then taken to the court of the Parthian king?  He can hardly have expected to be shown mercy  given that he'd invaded Parthia unprovoked,  so was he going to be executed?  Or perhaps he thought that he might be able to bribe the Parthian king  as he had done with so many of his rivals before.  Or perhaps, with the traumatic images of his son's severed head  still fresh in his mind and his troops clearly fractious,  he simply realised that his time had come.  

So Crassus set out on foot with only a few close bodyguards  and he approached Surenus,  who was in a similarly small party away from his troops.  But the Parthians were mounted,  and Surenus had actually brought Crassus a horse as a courtesy,  which Crassus, with no other option, mounted.  Ostensibly, this was so that the men could discuss terms at the same level.  However, a Parthian groom goaded the horse in some way or spooked it  into galloping towards the Parthian cataphracts.  And this launches a lot of confusion.  Perhaps this was a peace talk  and the Parthians saw this spooked horse as Crassus trying to attack them.  Or perhaps it was a trick.  The horse was spooked on purpose  and the Parthians always meant to kill him.  Realising that either way this wasn't a peace talk anymore,  Crassus' escorts desperately tried to grab the reins  and get Crassus off that horse.  But in the ensuing struggle between his bodyguards and the Parthian escorts,  Crassus was fatally wounded.  From a distance, the Roman soldiers who had unwittingly sent their commander into a trap  watched it snap shut.  Their general was dead and it was no thanks to them.  It was all just a mere kerfuffle over a horse,  hardly a dignified heroic death for a great Roman general.  But what came after, much like his father, brother and son before him,  was greater humiliation and this time on an unprecedented scale.  Surenus had no doubt wanted to take Crassus back to the Parthian king Orodes alive  so that the Parthians could humiliate him in the customary manner.  It's nothing that the Romans didn't do to their captured enemies.  But left now with only a cadaver,  the next best thing was to cut off Crassus's head and hands  and send them back to Orodes in lieu of a breathing prisoner.  As for Crassus's torso, that was left in a heap with some other corpses.  And so the man who'd laughed at the idea of Crassus reaching Seleucia was wrong.  That is, parts of Crassus made it to Seleucia, just not the whole body.  

The Roman survivors, they were at least taken prisoner alive,  but they were to be sent east and enslaved.  Crassus never got his much coveted triumph.  His father had had a triumph.  Julius Caesar, Pompey, they'd had triumphs.  Crassus never got one.  But Surenus did hold a crude facsimile to celebrate Crassus's defeat.  One of the Roman prisoners, Paccienus, was a family friend of Crassus.  They'd grown up together in Spain.  They even looked alike.  Enough so that Surenus thought that it was really funny to stick Paccienus in a royal lady's dress  and make him ride in the parade, forcing him to answer to Crassus's name.  In a triumph, a general would always be accompanied by lictors,  so Surenus made sure that his fake Crassus was also accompanied by lictors,  the Roman special bodyguards.  Except, now the facsimiles that they held,  the ceremonial bundles of rods wrapped around an axe,  had the heads of their dead Roman comrades stuck on them.  The Parthians had great fun looting the Roman prisoners' belongings,  and they particularly made fun of their stashes of Greek pornography,  which were now displayed to the laughing crowds.  Musicians sang songs about the weak and effeminate Crassus  and his weak and effeminate troops.  

Next in the parade came the legionary eagles,  hugely symbolic to the Romans.  It would have been mortifying to see these symbols confiscated by barbarians,  and they were taken and placed in Parthian temples as trophies.  As for the Armenians,  since they'd already given up hope of Rome saving them from becoming Parthian vassals,  even before Crassus met Surenus at Carrhae,  the Parthian king Orodes had, as they'd feared,  brought the bulk of his army to Armenia's borders,  and the Armenians surrendered almost immediately.  They brokered a peace treaty that saw them cede much power to Parthia,  and they sealed it with a royal marriage.  And it was at this wedding celebration  that we're told the most legendary anecdote regarding Crassus.  A Parthian satrap, Silaces,  a general who'd been at Carrhae,  interrupted proceedings of the wedding  to deliver Crassus's head to the Parthian king.  Now this is where we get the very different stories.  

Now Plutarch tells us that at this very moment during the wedding,  the court had been enjoying a performance of a Greek play,  the Bacchae by Euripides.  And if you're interested in this play,  we're going to have a full episode on it in series two.  But for those not familiar with the play right now,  all you need to know is that it's a tragedy about some women in Thebes  that the god Dionysus has driven insane  because he's angry that the people of Thebes  didn't believe his late mother's claim that his father is Zeus.  Not even her own family members believe it.  So he leads these crazed women up into the mountains to take part in his rites.  The king of Thebes, Pentheus, who is his cousin,  hates the worship of Dionysus.  He bans it in the city and refuses to acknowledge that Dionysus is a god.  Pentheus and Dionysus argue,  and Pentheus orders that the women should all be stoned to death.  To cut a long story short, Dionysus sets the women on Pentheus,  including Pentheus' own mother Agave,  who is the sister of Dionysus' mother, Semele.  And they tear Pentheus limb from limb.  Agave, not realizing what she's doing,  holds her son's head, torn from his neck, in the air like a trophy,  and marches it home to nail above her doorway  as she tells everyone about how the women have collectively  killed this lion.  And at this point, her father has to tell her,  no, that's no lion.  You've killed your own son,  because your nephew Dionysus wants to punish us all,  as she breaks down in tears.  Now, I know that that all sounds weird,  but the moral of the story is to give the gods their due respect  and don't argue the toss with them.  Well, wouldn't you know?  Plutarch says that Silaces entered  just as the tearing Pentheus apart with their bare hands scene,  which, like most plays, the violence always happens offstage.  He enters just at the point where the actor, playing Agave,  is supposed to lift up the head.  So apparently, the lead actor in this production is Jason of Tralles,  which is now in Turkey,  because all parts were always played by male actors.  And Jason sees an opportunity,  so he snatches up Crassus' head  and speaks Agave's lines,  where she should be holding up the prop head.  So he says the line:  We bring down from the mountain this branch to the palace,  a wonderful prey.  

Now, the Parthians absolutely lapped this up,  and the king richly rewarded both the actor and the soldier,  who claimed to be the one to behead Crassus' corpse.  Now, having your severed head being used as a prop in a play  is humiliating,  and you can almost sense how much fun Plutarch is having telling the story.  It's the biggest piece of gossip imaginable,  which makes it strange that Cassius Dio doesn't mention it.  

Dio says that the Parthians poured molten gold into Crassus' severed head  to make fun of the man who'd always relied on his wealth to save himself,  but who couldn't use money to defeat the mighty Parthians.  Crassus had attacked Parthia purely to satiate his own enormous greed,  but his money wouldn't help him now.  And you might recognise this narrative plot point  if you've watched the first series of Game of Thrones,  where, spoiler alert,  Khal Drogo has molten gold poured onto Viserys Targaryen's head  when Viserys demanded a crown.  Wanting too much wealth and power is an act of hubris  and should be dealt with accordingly.  

So we've got two bombastic stories,  but they don't match at all.  So what's happening?  The stories of Crassus getting to Carrhae don't match.  The stories of what happened to his head don't match.  So let's go to the aftermath of the battle  and see if the sources agree on what happened there.  

It's safe to say that few back in Rome expected the campaign to go quite this badly.  Only a quarter of the army managed to escape.  20,000 were killed, 10,000 prisoners of war enslaved.  Rome hadn't been so humiliated on a battlefield for a long time.  And more than that, a famed Roman general had not only led his army into a bloodbath,  but he'd retreated, twice,  and was arguing for a third retreat at the time of his death.  Never mind ruining his own reputation,  people were furious with Crassus for damaging Rome's reputation  as the unstoppable military machine.  And the whole of the eastern region, so hard won by Pompey,  was no longer quite as docile and controllable as they had been  now that they knew that Rome wasn't always going to win.  Crassus had left a complete mess behind him in the east,  and in the west, the politics that he'd controlled  via the loans that he made and the debts that he held over people,  that delicate balance that he'd struck  fell into anarchy now that he wasn't around to open his wallet.  And so Rome was too preoccupied in sorting out Crassus' mess in the west  than they were his mess in the east.  The invasion was over. No one wanted to carry it on.  

Crassus' second-in-command had been a man named Gaius Cassius,  and he escaped back to Syria,  where he spent a couple of years defending Syria from minor Parthian incursions,  and then he had to go back to Rome at some point.  The defeat at Carrhae was so absolutely humiliating for all involved  that Gaius Cassius wanted to completely distance himself,  as much as he could, from his former boss,  and he decided to spin it, that Crassus was incompetent.  Gaius Cassius wrote a memoir of his time on the Parthian campaign,  and he makes a point of making sure everyone reading  got the impression that Crassus was always incompetent and wrong.  Every time he was faced with a decision, he chose the wrong option,  and Gaius Cassius painted himself as a Cassandra-type figure  who had pleaded with Crassus to see sense at every turn,  but Crassus ignored his sage wisdom,  and that's why he was dead, along with tens of thousands of Romans,  because Crassus should have listened to him.  Those memoirs took every chance to stab Crassus in the back,  and ironically, a few years after this on the Ides of March,  Gaius Cassius would be one of the men  stabbing Crassus' protege Caesar in the front.  

Elsewhere, Crassus' widowed daughter-in-law, Publius' wife Cornelia,  was quickly married off again to none other than Pompey Magnus,  who was also recently widowed because his wife Julia,  Caesar's daughter, had recently died in childbirth.  Cornelia would be present with Pompey when he, too,  had his head separated from his body on an Egyptian beach.  One wife, two beheaded husbands.  

And what of the other triumvir?  Well, where once perhaps Caesar had been in the middle,  mediating between Pompey and Crassus,  by 53, Crassus had been the one keeping Caesar and Pompey from tearing each other apart,  and now with Crassus gone, each man was now out for himself.  Within four years of Carrhae,  Caesar and Pompey would be dragging Rome back into civil war,  and as I've hinted, we know how they both ended up.  So, whilst it's bad historical practice,  if we did want to play a game of what if,  we can wonder about how history would have turned out if Crassus had survived.  Would he have got his triumph?  Would he have managed to balance Caesar and Pompey out?  Would his survival have been enough to save the dying Republic,  or would they all still have turned on each other eventually?  

What is clear is that for different reasons,  Pompey and Caesar were not exactly unhappy that Crassus was gone.  Pompey wanted to be the top man,  and he didn't want to worry about having a rival.  And Caesar, even though he's still the junior,  was keen to step out of his mentor's shadow,  which is easier to do when your mentor is dead.  So neither man was in a hurry to eulogise their colleague,  nor salvage his reputation post-mortem,  because his snafu made them look better in comparison.  So Crassus's long career,  the one that we barely skimmed over in this episode,  it didn't mean anything now.  He wouldn't be remembered for any of that.  He wouldn't be remembered for his military campaigns or his political acumen.  He would be remembered for being a sageprop.  It has taken far too long for historians to rectify that injustice,  although it is starting to happen now.  

The Parthians continued to dominate the east,  becoming bold and attacking Armenia and Syria on occasion.  But the brilliant young general Surenus,  the mastermind of the Carrhae victory, was not amongst them.  It seems like Orodes, the Parthian king,  had as little reason to expect a Parthian victory as Crassus had had, actually.  He had probably sent Surenus out to meet him with such a small force,  probably just to slow Crassus down.  So Surenus was sent out as cannon fodder,  allowing Orodes to come back from Armenia,  march upon a weakened Roman army,  and claim a great victory all for himself.  But all of a sudden the king finds himself upstaged.  Jealous of Surenus' glory and threatened by his popularity,  King Orodes thanked him for his service by having him quietly assassinated.  Orodes did not possess Surenus' military genius,  and he also failed to capitalise on Surenus' success  because he never did invade Rome.  

Caesar started to think about invading Parthia,  out of revenge perhaps, or more likely,  just wanting to show up his old mentor by doing a better job of it,  but he was assassinated on the eve of his expedition.  Funnily enough, it was his own plans to outdo Crassus and Pompey  and become the next Alexander  that was actually the catalyst for turning an assassination plot into a plan.  And a few years later, Mark Antony chose to go out east instead of Caesar,  but he also failed to win any great victories in Parthia.  Augustus gave up on the invasion idea altogether  and brokered a peace between Parthia and Rome,  which never proved to be particularly permanent.  The border in the east didn't really move much after this point.  

So how do we know all of this?  And how do we know what we know?  Is any of it plausible?  Let's take these points one at a time.  Plutarch is not only really critical of Crassus,  really critical,  he's also suspiciously admiring of his second-in-command, Gaius Cassius,  the one who wrote the memoir to save his own reputation.  I'm going to wager that Plutarch used those memoirs as his source  and took them at face value,  because if Plutarch was anything, he was sucker for a good story.  He wasn't writing a history, he was writing biographies.  So when he was using that as his main source,  it was because it provided a good story about character  rather than accurate history.  So it doesn't matter if Gaius Cassius was writing a slightly fictionalised account.  It was a compelling account and that's what mattered.  The problem is we don't have those memoirs, so we can't really tell.  On the other hand, Gaius Cassius did witness that battle  and his memoirs may have been the only written first-hand account.  And maybe Gaius Cassius was being truthful.  We simply don't know.  We don't have the memoirs, so we can't tell.  So Plutarch is justified in using his testimony  regarding the battle itself.  After all, it seems like there were fewer sources available to Plutarch on Crassus  than there were, say, for his biographies of Caesar or Cicero.  And to be fair to Plutarch, he does later say in a different chapter  that Crassus was embarking on a risky campaign,  but so were men like Caesar and Pompey and Marcantony.  He points out that Alexander the Great's campaign  might once have seemed like an insane plan in its early stages  and that we shouldn't judge ambition by its outcome.  So Plutarch does at least attempt to appear as fair as possible,  even with those inconsistencies.  

We don't know if Cassius Dio used Gaius Cassius's memoirs.  He probably relied heavily on Livy's sprawling history of Rome.  And annoyingly for us, the relevant chunk of Livy's history is lost.  We have some of it, we just don't have this bit.  We can't read it.  We have no way of comparing it to Plutarch's or Cassius's accounts.  Now Livy was a toddler at the time of the Battle of Carrhae,  but we can assume that when he was writing some 30 years later,  he was maybe able to speak with people who had personally known Crassus  or maybe even some of the survivors of the battle.  But without his account, we simply can't tell.  We've got no idea what he wrote.  What I will say is that where Dio and Livy's accounts on other events both do survive,  what we can say is that Dio does tend to follow Livy quite closely,  so it's usually not far off a copy paste.  So we can't tell for sure, but we can assume.  What we do know is that both Dio and Plutarch are writing much, much later than Livy.  So with this in mind, can we work out what really happened?  First off, was Crassus betrayed?  This is a tricky question to answer because we don't have any sources from Parthia, Armenia, or Osroene. 

 The sources that we do have, both Roman, suggest that Crassus was betrayed by an Eastern local,  although they can't agree on which Eastern local.  It does seem out of character for Crassus to abandon his carefully laid plans that he'd made so diligently,  all because a stranger urges him to act more spontaneously.  It's clear that Crassus doesn't trust the generous offer of the Armenians,  so why should we accept that he's suddenly trusting other local leaders  who had as much reason to fear the Parthians as Armenia did?  If we take a look at the route Crassus planned to follow,  it definitely does actually seem like a logical one.  He did indeed have two options, follow the Euphrates south and continue taking more cities,  or cross the Euphrates and head east.  Now he chose east, which both Plutarch and Dio criticise him for,  but to be honest, it's not a terrible plan when you look at it.  He was following rivers and well-known caravan routes that had cities along the way,  cities that he had either garrisoned the year before,  or that were culturally Greek enough that he could count on at least a lukewarm reception,  the logic behind that being that Greeks were closer to Westerners than they were to Easterners.  

Now Crassus, as we know from his war against Spartacus,  he heavily relied on military intelligence.  He would have had scouts in the region for months all over the winter.  He likely knew that the Parthians were in the east and not to the south.  And remember, he was expecting a standard battle,  like the ones that Romans were used to winning all the time,  legionaries against legionaries.  And if he took out the Parthian army in one fell swoop,  cities would start falling to him like dominoes.  So did he need to be led astray by treacherous barbarians?  Crassus was trying to find the Parthian army.  He doesn't need to be tricked into finding them.  He's actively searching for them and he found them.  So why do we need a story that he's tricked into walking to a trap when he was looking for them?  Is this a case where the sources are retroactively painting a narrative onto him to make him look worse?  

We also know from his prior career that he was not a gullible man.  He wasn't exactly known for trusting people close to him,  let alone strangers with clear ulterior motives.  So from where I'm sitting, this looks like a typically Roman case of xenophobia towards eastern barbarians,  perpetuating the idea that you can't trust any of them as far as you can throw them.  So I'm talking this idea of him being betrayed, up to character assassination and to prejudice.  

Was Parthia a desert?  The way Plutarch tells it, Crassus was marching over an almost endless sea of sand.  And neither of our sources, Plutarch or Dio, neither of them have ever been to this area.  So do they have their geographical information correct?  Well no, not really.  This is an area that is incredibly fertile, and it's so fertile that we call it the Fertile Crescent.  Now I'm not suggesting that Carrhae sits in a rainforest, but it's definitely not sitting in a desert.  We've already seen how Crassus was sticking to the well-trodden trade routes and rivers to stay well-provisioned.  And the caravan routes don't tend to wander into deserts much anyway.  As for the battlefield, it's difficult to say, because archaeologists haven't identified the exact site,  although can you imagine the finds that they will start digging out if they do?  The area around the modern town of Carrhae, which is now called Harran, is largely flat, it's grassy,  and that kind of terrain is in fact pretty perfect for seven legions of infantry to fight on.  Regardless of if Crassus chose it or not, it was a pretty ideal location for a standard-pitched infantry battle.  Unfortunately, it's also pretty perfect for enemy-mounted archers.  

So why am I mentioning this when this episode is about death and desecration of a corpse?  Well, I'm trying to demonstrate that these sources aren't always reliable and we can't take them at face value.  And that's doubly true when they don't even agree with each other.  Which brings us to the big questions.  What happened to Crassus' head? Because both stories sound too good to be true.  It's just such a perfect story, either one.  

Let's take it being used as a prop in a play.  Now that story sounds amazing.  But we are being asked to believe that just as the moment the head was brought into the room that the wedding was taking place,  the King of Parthia is watching the only Greek play that we know of where a head was used as a prop.  So that just does sound to me too good to be true. It's too convenient.  What we do know is that the Parthians were huge fans of Hellenistic culture and they absolutely loved Greek tragedies.  They would have been watching them frequently in elite circles.  They would have been familiar with the texts.  And they would have known some of the most famous quotes.  So it's not unlikely that at this kind of event they may have had a play to be performed for entertaining wedding guests.  So let's think of it this way.  To be honest, even if it was a completely different play being performed,  or even if there was no play at all, if an actor was present,  in this case Jason of Tralles,  if he'd have been present and picked up the head and quoted that line,  everyone present would have still got the joke.  They still would have found it hilarious.  Even without the rest of that specific play,  if Jason had quoted that line,  everyone at that wedding would be familiar enough with the Bacchae,  would have known enough of the Greek myth context to find it hilarious.  Jason would have got what every actor craves, attention and applause,  and it would have gone down a storm because we can imagine the line to have been as recognisable to them as  to be or not to be is to us.  You don't need the whole play to be quoted to get that pop culture connection.  You just need the most recognisable line.  And this one just happened to be a really relevant one.  We also know from the pictures on ancient vases that yes,  actors absolutely used props on stage regularly in Greek theatre,  so that's plausible.  So yes, it is likely that there might have been a play being performed,  and even if there wasn't,  as long as you've got an actor saying that one quote,  everyone would have got the joke.  

So yes, it's entirely plausible that someone did use his head as a prop,  even if it was only to make a pun rather than perform a whole play.  What about the other story?  Was Crassus's head filled with gold?  Now it's interesting that Dio and Plutarch, neither of them mentioned both stories.  So does this mean that one story happened and the other didn't?  In which case, which is the correct story?  Did both stories happen? Did neither of them happen?  Is one more plausible than the other?  And when we talk about the story of his head being filled with gold,  that's a doozy because it sounds even less believable than the play.  However, for this one, there is a documented precedent  that makes this story more plausible than you might imagine.  35 years before the Battle of Carrhae,  another Eastern king, Mithridates VI of Pontus,  murdered a Roman general and politician and another formal consul, no less.  So same rank as Crassus.  His name was Manius Aquilius,  and this was as a punishment for Manius' fomenting war  between Bithynia and Pontus and Rome.  So how did Mithridates do it?  Whilst Manius was still alive,  we're told that molten gold was poured down his throat,  which ensured that Manius was not alive for long.  And I think we can all agree that that sounds much worse  than having molten gold poured into an already severed head.  Did Crassus have gold poured into his throat even though he was already dead?  I'd say, yeah, quite possibly actually.  Because when we hear the story of Manius Aquilius, that's once.  But to hear it again in relation to Crassus, that's a possible pattern.  Dio is too good of a historian to get Manius Aquilius mixed up with Crassus.  But maybe this is just something that Eastern kings did to defeated enemies.  Without any Eastern sources, we just can't tell for sure.  

What we can say, because all of our available sources tell us the same thing,  is that Crassus did not die from having gold poured into his throat.  He was already dead.  He sustained a fatal injury in the horse-related fight  before he could be taken prisoner and tortured.  Everything else, the gold, the play, all of it is post-mortem,  despite what various documentaries might have you believe.  And I get it.  Both stories are so unbelievable that they become irresistible.  And it's almost like we want to believe it happened,  even if the evidence is saying that we might not have the whole story right.  

So did one story happen or the other?  Did neither happen? Did both?  I don't know. No one knows.  Because of the disparity in the accounts, we simply, without further evidence,  popping up from somewhere, we just can't tell.  He died on a horse.  We can safely say that his corpse was desecrated.  We just can't tell how it was desecrated or how many times.  Was Crassus incompetent?  Crassus might not have been a guy that you would have liked.  I still want to present him fairly.  Now look, I know that at this point in time,  none of us are particularly sympathetic to billionaires,  or at least we shouldn't be,  particularly if they keep making stupid comments and big mistakes.  Lord knows we have enough of those right now.  And Crassus does make it hard to be sympathetic to him.  He did some horrible, horrible things.  But when it comes to Parthia, we need to look at it again.  Dio and Plutarch are both so critical of Crassus at this point.  

But let's look at the facts, let's ignore what they've said,  and just look at what we know.  Crassus was a tactician. He was patient.  He didn't make a single move without weighing up every option  he would have been a chess master.  He was completely risk-averse.  He absolutely wasn't the type of man who would go  gallivanting off to the east spontaneously  without thinking about every possible outcome first.  He was in the ideal terrain for a picked battle.  He had seven legions who he'd spent a year with,  which, although it's not enough time to form unbreakable bonds  like other generals were enjoying at the time,  is not insignificant, and he was the type of person  that would have ensured that in that short time available  that they had together, his army will have been training constantly.  He was admittedly light on cavalry,  but he had every reason to expect another infantry army  who would also have had a minor cavalry contingent.  That's the kind of battle that those after him would face.  After Surenus's execution, there would not be another  foreign general to present this kind of enemy to him again.  After Carrhae, it would be more the same legions against legions,  foot soldiers against foot soldiers,  and if he'd fought that kind of battle,  I have every reason to believe that Crassus would have been successful at Carrhae.  He may have even trounced the Parthians at Carrhae.  He possibly even would have defeated the Parthians many more times after Carrhae,  definitely enough for a triumph,  and probably enough to eliminate their threat for a while,  and maybe even enough to bring under Roman domination  and turn it into a province. Who knows?  He just didn't have the intel to prepare for an army  made entirely of mounted bowmen and cataphracts,  and that's not a usual Parthian tactic, by the way.  No one would have been expecting that.  And he didn't have intel about composite bows and armour-piercing arrows.  

So Crassus simply didn't know how to fight this battle,  but to be fair, perhaps no Roman at the time would have known either.  None of them had faced this before.  The fact is, Rome simply did not want to admit  that the Parthians had thoroughly humiliated them.  Even though they had sent out one of their best generals  with seven entire legions,  to admit defeat would be bad PR.  And every time the Romans felt humiliated,  they start looking for scapegoats.  We learned that in our episode about the bestal virgins.  And Crassus, he's conveniently too dead to protest about his reputation,  so he makes the perfect scapegoat.  And whilst the Romans are at it,  let's make some barbarians look bad at the same time  by saying it was barbarians betraying the Romans  that led to the defeat.  And that's another reason that they lost.  Rome never wasted an opportunity for a little casual racism.  It makes Crassus look even worse for trusting barbarians.  So two birds, one stone.  

Pompey, now the de facto top man,  had no reason to defend his old frenemy.  And let's not forget, this was the man who took credit  for Crassus' victory over Spartacus.  He would never have openly admitted  that Crassus was actually a good politician and a good general.  Why would he start saying it now Crassus is dead?  And to be honest, it made Pompey look all the better  if he alone could be trusted to command the armies  and win victories in the East.  Rather than admit that an Eastern barbarian general  had outmaneuvered them,  it was easier for Rome to blame a dead man.  Posthumously accusing him of incompetence and hubris,  it was easier to invent omens  that had supposedly happened before the invasion  so that Romans could pat themselves on the back and say  that they had been warned after all,  as if they'd always suspected  that the invasion was doomed to fail  and that it wasn't a surprise.  It was a deflection started by Crassus' own officer  and repeated, ad infinitum,  by Romans and historians alike.  Until recently.  The Romans were as xenophobic towards the East  as Greece had been towards the East,  but this disaster and the way that Romans decided to frame it  exacerbated this xenophobia greatly  and it's a prejudice that we have still inherited today.  Crassus has got a really bum deal in the history books,  of which there are far fewer than there are for Caesar and Pompey,  although we do have some that I can recommend to you.  The lack of attention that Crassus has got in the public sphere  is in no small part because of this, how he met his end.  

But if I leave you with one thought,  it's that I hope you question why Crassus has had  such rough posthumous treatment  at the hands of his peers and subsequent historians.  Yes, he was loaded.  We get it.  But it doesn't seem like he was the decadent type.  He wasn't buying golden toilets.  Instead, he was using his enormous wealth to control politics.  Which isn't great.  But can you really blame him for that  after witnessing what politics did to his father and brother?  And yes, his dealings were dodgy.  He could be a bit of a thug.  He wasn't a nice man.  But were any of the politicians of the late republic nice men?  I certainly can't think of any.  That's just how politics worked in the turmoil of the late republic.  He wasn't unique in being a shady thug.  He was just better at it than most of the others.  Crassus's defeat at Carrhae,  and the shameful way that his body was treated,  whichever version you choose to believe,  has forever tarnished his other achievements.  But I want to ask you a couple of questions.  Would Pompey or Caesar have fared any better against Surenus?  Because neither Pompey nor Caesar would have fared any better  against an entirely unknown quantity of Parthian tactics either.  Also, I want you to bear in mind that other brilliant generals,  Marc Antony, Trajan, they all largely failed in Parthia too,  so Crassus isn't unique.  If Caesar or Pompey had been the ones to launch that invasion  and they had been killed at Carrhae and their bodies had been desecrated,  perhaps their reputations would be the ones irreparably damaged  and Crassus would be the one with dozens of books about him  and the others would be largely forgotten.  

So is Crassus as incompetent as Plutarch and Dio want you to think?  Or did he merely just come up against a better general on the day?  Think of it this way. Surenus played that battle astonishingly well.  He won a decisive victory, had very few casualties on his side,  left barely any survivors,  and he took a quarter of the army prisoner and enslaved them.  He halted seven legions in a single day.  He was so good, his own boss murdered him  just in case Surenus ever realised how good he was.  Before he could think, I'm good at this,  I'm going to start a civil war and become King of Parthia myself.  So maybe Crassus wasn't incompetent.  Maybe Crassus just couldn't match Surenus  because Surenus was a genius.  And we shouldn't let that make us forget  the rest of Crassus' 30-year career that was pretty glittering.  

Despite his less than savoury methods,  Crassus did have a lot of control over Roman politics  and was perhaps second only to Pompey in that sense  for a considerable period of time.  This episode may not be the Roman triumph  that Crassus would have so dearly liked to see for himself in his own lifetime,  but it's going to have to do for now,  because even though I think the guy's an arsehole,  justice for Crassus.  The historians did him wrong.  And out of interest, if you want to see Crassus portrayed  as the vaguely terrifying battlefield whiz  that he absolutely could be,  watch the Starz Spartacus series with the final battle.  This series finally gives Crassus the credit he is due,  because even if events are slightly fictionalised,  it's a Starz series for God's sake,  he is finally shown as a formidable general  that we know that he was in his prime  and not the loser that Gaius Cassius wants us to believe that he was.  

Why is the death of Crassus just so flipping fascinating?  It has everything you want from a great story.  Political rivalries, axes to grind,  weird erotica,  three generations of beheadings,  betrayals, despair, witty thespians.  This is one death which we can truly say  changed the course of Rome's history.  Its aftermath sparked a civil war,  pretty much cemented a border  that would remain fairly static for centuries.  That's all pretty damn significant.  Before we wrap things up,  I want to ask one final question.  We have talked about how none of our sources can agree with each other.  We've talked about why Rome wasn't keen  to rehabilitate Crassus's reputation  in the aftermath of this massive massacre,  this humiliating defeat.  We've discussed how even his friends aren't interested  in admitting that Crassus just got unlucky.  So what if I ask you this?  Crassus died in a kerfuffle about a horse.  The sources agree on that,  and I think we can trust it,  because at that point there were still survivors  with Crassus who would have made it home,  just like Gaius Cassius did.  

But when it comes to the story about desecration of the corpse,  Gaius Cassius and the survivors,  they've fled.  They're not with Crassus's body after that.  We don't know of any sources from Parthia.  If Plutarch and Dio had them,  they don't mention them.  So maybe, just maybe,  the body wasn't desecrated at all.  What if all of what happened after his death  was a game of telephone?  Rumours that gradually swept from east to west back to Rome,  from unknown sources that couldn't be fact-checked.  And each time they get retold,  they get a little bit bigger.  The gossip snowballs.  So instead of a general having his head cut off  so that it could be taken back as proof of his death,  maybe it wasn't used as a prop in a play.  Maybe gold wasn't poured into the severed head.  So I've told you why both of those stories might be plausible,  how one or both of them could have happened.  But I'm also suggesting that neither one happened  and that something that was already a tragedy,  a disaster for Rome,  as more Romans started talking about it,  the tale just got taller.  With all disasters with few survivors,  we get stories that seem just too crazy to be believable.  And sometimes they turn out to be true,  and sometimes they turn out to be exaggerations  or even complete fiction.  And the thing is, I can't tell you what's true here.  What I'm telling you is that we have two different stories  that are very different, that don't cite their sources.  One might be right.  Both might be right.  Neither might be right.  We just don't know.  And if anyone tries to tell you this is how it happened,  it's BS.  They either haven't looked at the sources critically  or carefully enough,  or they're falling into the same trap I've just mentioned.  Every time we tell a story, the tale gets taller.  Because sometimes if a tale sounds too good to be true,  I'm not saying that it always is,  but I'm saying you have to check.  

AS A BONUS:

Here is a video about Crassus from British kid's entertainment programme Horrible Histories, which slaps, but does unfortunately repeat the Bacchae narrative uncritically...