What Happened to the Wealth of Crassus?

YouTube ^ | February 24, 2023 | Garrett Ryan, Ph.D as toldinstone

[SunkenCiv]

What Happened to the Wealth of Crassus? | 0:31 / 11:20
toldinstone | 336K subscribers | 31,781 views | February 24, 2023

Chapters:
0:00 The wealth of the Roman elite
1:51 Investment strategies
2:20 Passing wealth to the next generation
3:23 Masterworks
4:58 It's tough being rich
6:21 Elite infertility
7:50 Infant mortality
8:57 The example of Crassus
9:32 Long-lasting families

[plain talk]

Thanks so much for the transcript!

Your transcript illustrates how much time is wasted getting information from videos when a simple transcript will do.

[SunkenCiv]

My pleasure. YT generates these, and I built a little doodad to format it. The transcript (before or after) is sometimes garbled a bit (it has a problem with to/too/two, for example) and doesn’t seem to use caps much or at all.

[katana]

The scene you're referring to was Crassus (Lawrence Olivier) trying to seduce a slave (Tony Curtis).

The historic Crassus was immensely wealthy and greedy. But except for his defeat of Spartacus' "rabble" army he lacked the military chops to be considered on par with Scipio, Marius, or Caesar. So he set out to conquer the Parthian Empire (The Persians - rich beyond belief) and had his entire army wiped out. Story is for his greed he (or one of his sons) was executed by the Parthians by having molten gold poured down his throat.

[sit-rep]

youre behind the times! lol... the new spartacus was on Starz I believe. 3 or 4 seasons. Season 1 had the best spartacus but for some reason they had a new guy with like half the muscle mass take over from season 2. with the exception of the rawness of the series, it was pretty good(but brutal).

here is the scene I’m referring to. if you dont wanna watch the whole thing, FF to 1:35...

[sit-rep]

youre behind the times! lol... the new spartacus was on Starz I believe. 3 or 4 seasons. Season 1 had the best spartacus but for some reason they had a new guy with like half the muscle mass take over from season 2. with the exception of the rawness of the series, it was pretty good(but brutal).

here is the scene I’m referring to. if you dont wanna watch the whole thing, FF to 1:35...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTGSBPW6BzU

[SunkenCiv]

Same went for the Hessians, which led to younger sons going into mercenary work. Quite a number were shipped to the 13 colonies by George III to kill the American revolution.

The famous battle of Trenton and its follow-up led to hundreds of Hessian POWs, who were marched off into Pennsylvania Dutch (Deutsch) country where they'd be stranded among other German speakers and put to work there.

They looked at their situation, and had a few years to think about it, and a good number of Hessians (both the POWs and others) saw they'd have a much better deal here, and stayed. Rob Lowe's episode of "Who Do You Think You Are?" uncovered his Hessian ancestor.

For that matter, during the medieval warming period the Scandinavian population blew up pretty well and a similar lack of inheritable land led to the Viking expansion into eastern Europe, the British Isles, Normandy, Sicily, Iceland, Greenland, and (for a 100-150 years) North America.

[SunkenCiv]

:^)

[SunkenCiv]

;^)

[nomorelurker]

“For that matter, during the medieval warming period the Scandinavian population blew up pretty well and a similar lack of inheritable land led to the Viking expansion into eastern Europe, the British Isles, Normandy, Sicily, Iceland, Greenland, and (for a 100-150 years) North America.”

“Sicily”

Most don’t have any idea that the Vikings had a presence in Sicily, a little bit of ancestor of Mafia/GodFather.

[SunkenCiv]

Yup. And yup, BS.

[SunkenCiv]

I think their capital is near or under the modern two of Fugettaboutit.

[SunkenCiv]

I think there’s an historical marker in English (and other languages) at the tomb of Hrolf the Ganger (as it appears today, all fancied up) noting a medieval inscription which cites his descendants’ rule over England, Sicily, probably France, other places. This ain’t it, but is interesting anyway.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/8195891/rollo-rognvaldsson

[SunkenCiv]

Well, I’m way off the road now, but here’s a page on the two Rogers.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Roger-I

[Big Red Badger]

Wait
What
Double click
Triple man 💑
.
Yup Not so much love is it.
But somebody was going to Get It !

[Redcitizen]

“What Happened to the Wealth of Crassus?”

Crassus: “ I spent it on wine, women and song. The rest I just wasted.”

[SunkenCiv]

LOL

[gleeaikin]

I first encountered the Crassus story while reading a 19th century world history book reissued as written from a collection of world history books printed in the 18th century.

It had much more detail about the Parthian campaign than this version, but this version had more about the development of Crassus’ family. According to this version, Crassus wanted a success to cap his life and was in his mid 50s. He was captured and killed by having molten gold poured down his throat, and his son was also killed in the fighting. Not killed was young Cassius (he of the lean and hungry look) described as motivating the assassination of Caesar by Shakespere in his play about Caesar. One of Cassius’ complaints was that Caesar was ambitious and such men are dangerous.

I had wondered what motivated Cassius, and the book I read supplied the answer. Young Cassius was a military commander on this expedition and successfully extracted about 10,000 Roman soldiers from the lost battle and led them back to Syria. Subsequently, ambitious Caesar decided it was important to fight Parthia and avenge the ignominy of Crassus’ death. Cassius based on personal experience thought this was a terrible idea, and ultimately persuaded others to stop Caesar. The Parthians were extremely successful horse warriors. THey carried a quiver with about 70 arrows and could shoot them very quickly wiping out a mass of Roman soldiers in mere minutes. Kind of the machine guns of arrow warfare.

Perhaps if we had the good sense of someone around like Cassius we would not have engaged in so many fights in that part of the world. I especially think of Iraq 2003, as a wasteful disaster that prevented our possible success in Afghanistan.

[SunkenCiv]

Sounds like a real peach of a book. BTW, Cassius wasn’t related to Crassus. After his defeat by Antony, he killed himself (ahem) with help from someone who beheaded him, so, probably not actually a suicide. The wikiwacky page states he was buried on Thasos, but that’s a modern myth based on some alleged historian who claimed to see his grave relics in a museum there. Needless to say, they’re not there, and probably neither is his grave.

AFAIK, *none* of the murderers of Julius Caesar have known graves (which isn’t too unusual for the famous of ancient times), whereas the spot in Rome where Caesar was cremated by the grieving Roman public can still be visited, and you’ll find fresh flowers there if you go.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Cassius_Longinus

[gleeaikin]

I never suggested Cassius was any relative of Crassus. He was an officer in Crassus’ army, as was Crassus’ son who also died in the fight.

I don’t remember the authors of this history series, but the book is put away somewhere because I had an idea of creating a play about this. If I ever do it, the plot is modern actors are rehearsing Julius Caesar, and the actor play Cassius decides to research why Cassius was so motivated to kill Caesar. The actors then decide to tell this story written in the styled of Shakespeare, to produce for modern audiences. I also includes a modern warning about the hubris of thinking fighting in that region is such a great idea.