According to the movie (B.S.), he was executed by being forced to swallow his gold.
Yup. And yup, BS.
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.