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Here’s a work about Crassus from nineteen centuries ago:

http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/crassus.html

The Parthians had a good army and effective tactics against the Romans’, and had a massive numerical advantage, plus better intel. This is not to sell Crassus short, he made some wrong decisions, but as the saying goes, hindsight is 20/20. Instead of working with a local ally, he allowed the Parthians to chop up both piecemeal. Marc Antony was a drunken ass-wrangler who tended to take his eye off the ball a bit much. When he made his half-assed attempt to avenge the death of Crassus, he was also at a disadvantage when a good bit of what Roman population lived in the east turned against him and against Rome. Over a century later, Trajan spent a couple of years smashing the crap out of the Parthians, taking their capital, annexing Mesopotamia, and probably literally washing his sword in the waters of the Persian Gulf. He died there, and his supposedly adopted son, Hadrian, gave up those conquests, and spent most of his reign banging young boys and traveling through the Empire, apparently avoiding Rome.

http://ancienthistory.about.com/cs/people/a/crassus.htm

http://www.historynet.com/mark-antonys-persian-campaign.htm