12/30/2023 0 Comments Who was julius caesar biggest opponentSo, the man whose power rested on his reputation for wealth decided on a last campaign to keep himself up with Caesar and Pompey. Pompey, after a triumph through the streets of Rome parading giant golden statues and his own head in pearls, was probably for a time even richer than Crassus. Caesar, rich from Gaul and protected by loyal legions, did not need Crassus’s money anymore. Gradually Crassus came to see that wealth alone would not be enough to maintain his place at the three-legged top table of Rome. He had created for himself a new kind of power, the permanent kind, the power to use money behind the scenes, pulling the strings of whichever puppet seemed to be in charge. He is best known today as the villain who crucified Kirk Douglas in Stanley Kubrick’s film, Spartacus, but, for all the gruesome theatre of crosses along the Appian Way, winning a slave war was little more than a sideshow for Crassus. He went on to make a genuine massive fortune from mining and banking. Like Trump, Crassus made his first fortune in property, redeveloping land taken from the war’s losers, building flashy mansions for the winners. But throughout the first century BCE Rome’s intermittent civil wars between its ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ left one man eventually as the wealthiest politician of his time, maybe of all time. Early Rome prospered not because it was an egalitarian democracy but because it was generally more equal, open, and democratic than its rivals, For instance, freeing slaves when the Greeks thought that a step too far.
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