In 53 BC, at a royal wedding feast in Armenia, an actor performing the Bacchae carried onto the stage the real severed head of Marcus Licinius Crassus, until recently the richest man in Rome. This episode traces how he got there. As a young noble he saw his father and brother destroyed in the purges of Gaius Marius, fled to Spain, raised a private force of about 2,500 men, and joined Sulla. At the Battle of the Colline Gate he crushed the enemy on the right flank and helped make Sulla dictator. The lesson he took away was that money meant safety.

Crassus bought the estates of the proscribed at auction, then built a fortune estimated at 200 million sesterces through Rome’s burning apartment blocks. He financed and led the army that defeated Spartacus, only to watch Pompey claim the credit. He bankrolled Julius Caesar and became the financial glue of the First Triumvirate. But wealth never brought the military prestige he craved, and that hunger drove him into an unprovoked war with Parthia.

• Crassus kept about 500 enslaved builders and firefighters who put out a blaze only after the panicked owner sold him the property at a fraction of its worth.
• Tried over his attentions to the Vestal Virgin Licinia, he was acquitted because the jury accepted that he was only after her suburban villa.
• To stiffen troops who had fled from Spartacus, he revived decimation: one man in ten, chosen by lot, was beaten to death by his comrades.
• After the final battle he crucified 6,000 captured slaves along the Via Appia, yet received only an ovation on foot while Pompey rode in a triumph.
• At Carrhae the Parthian general Surena resupplied his horse archers from camels loaded with arrows, and Crassus was killed in a scuffle during a forced parley.