In the spring of 54 BC Crassus arrived in his new province and advanced to its eastern frontier. Beyond the River Euphrates a great trunk road stretched across flat desert until it passed into the glare of the horizon and could be seen no more. But Crassus knew where it led. Peering into the rising sun, he could glimpse, in his imagination, the haze of spices, the glint of onyx, cornelian and pearls. There were many fabulous reports of the riches of the East. It was said that in Persia there was a mountain formed entirely of gold; that in India the whole country was defended by ‘a wall built of ivory’;7 and that in China, the land of the Seres, silk was woven by creatures twice the size of beetles. No man of intelligence could believe such ludicrous stories, of course, but the fact that they were told served to illustrate an indubitable and glittering truth: the proconsul who made himself master of the Orient would have wealth beyond compare. No wonder that Crassus gazed east and dreamed.
Of course, if he were to plant the standards of the Roman people upon the shores of the Outer Ocean, then he would first have to deal with the barbarians at his door. Immediately beyond the Euphrates stood the kingdom of Parthia. Not much was known about it, except that the natives – like all Orientals – were effeminate and deceitful. Lucullus and Pompey had both signed peace treaties with them – an inconvenient detail that Crassus had not the slightest intention of respecting. Accordingly, in the summer of 54 he crossed the Euphrates and seized a number of frontier towns. The Parthians indignantly demanded his withdrawal. Crassus refused. Having procured his war, however, he was content to bide his time. The first year of his governorship he spent in profitable looting. The Temple in Jerusalem, and many others, were stripped bare. ‘Days were spent hunched over the measuring scales.’8Thanks to his careful accounting, Crassus was able to recruit an army truly worthy of his ambitions: seven legions, four thousand light infantry, as many horsemen again. Among the cavalry – an exotic touch – were a thousand Gauls. Their commander was Crassus’ youngest son, Publius, who had served with such success under Caesar and now looked to repeat his dashing exploits for his father. All was ready. In the spring of 53 Crassus and his army crossed the Euphrates again. The great adventure had begun.
At first the emptiness appeared to mock the scale of Crassus’ preparations. Ahead of his army, to the east, nothing could be seen save the haze of the heat. Then, at length, the advance guard came across hoofprints, the tracks of what appeared to be a large cavalry division. These turned aside from the road and vanished into the desert. Crassus decided to follow them. Soon the legions found themselves marching across a desolate plain with not a stream, nor even a blade of grass, in sight, only scorching dunes of sand. The Romans began to wilt. Crassus’ ablest lieutenant, a quaestor by the name of Cassius Longinus, urged his general to turn round, but Crassus, so skilled at making strategic retreats in the political arena, would not hear of it now. On the legions advanced. Then came the news for which their general had been hoping. The Parthians were near, and not just a cavalry division, but a large army. Eager to ensure that the enemy did not escape him, Crassus ordered on his legions. They were now in the heart of the baking, sandy plain. They could make out horsemen ahead of them, shabby and dusty. The legionaries locked shields. As they did so, the Parthians dropped aside their robes to reveal that both they and their horses were clad in glittering mail. At the same moment, from all around the plain, came the eerie sound of drums and clanging bells, a din ‘like the roaring of wild predators, but intermingled with the sharpness of a thunderclap’.9 To the Romans, it seemed barely human, a hallucination bred from the shimmering heat. Hearing it, they shuddered.
And all that long day was to have the pattern of a bad dream. The Parthians fled every effort to engage them, fading like mirages across the dunes, but armed, as they wheeled and galloped away, with steel-tipped arrows, which they fired into the sweating, parched, immobile ranks of legionaries. When Publius led his Gauls in pursuit, they were surrounded by the enemy’s heavy cavalry and wiped out. Publius himself was decapitated, and a Parthian horseman, brandishing the head on a spear, galloped along the ranks of Romans, jeering them and screaming insults at Publius’ father. By now the legions were surrounded. All day long the Parthians’ deadly arrows rained down upon them, and all day long, doggedly, heroically, the legions held out. With the blessed coming of dusk the shattered remnants of Crassus’ great expedition began to withdraw, retracing their steps to Carrhae, the nearest city of any size. From there, under the resourceful leadership of Cassius, a few straggling survivors made their way back across the Roman frontier. They left behind them twenty thousand of their compatriots dead on the battlefield, and ten thousand more as prisoners. Seven eagles had been lost. Not since Cannae had a Roman army suffered such a catastrophic defeat.
Crassus himself, stupefied by the utter ruin of all his hopes, was lured by the Parthians into a parley. Having tricked so many, he now found himself tricked in his turn. Caught up in a scuffle, he was struck down. Death spared Crassus a humiliating ordeal. Baulked of their prey, the Parthians inflicted it instead on an impersonator drawn from the ranks of their prisoners. Dressed as a woman, escorted by lictors whose rods were adorned by moneybags, and axes by legionaries’ heads, followed by jeering prostitutes, the captive was led in a savage parody of a triumph. Clearly, the Parthians knew more of Roman military traditions then the Romans had known of theirs.
Meanwhile, the head of the real Crassus had been dispatched to the court of the Parthian king. It arrived just as a celebrated actor, Jason of Tralles, was singing a scene from Euripides’ great tragedy, The Bacchae. By a gruesome coincidence, this was a play that featured a severed head. Jason, with the quick thinking of a true professional, seized the gory trophy and cradled it in his arms, then improvised an apt soliloquy. Unsurprisingly, the spectacle of Crassus as a prop in his own tragedy brought the house down.
For a man who had aimed so high and been brought so low, no more fitting end could have been devised.
The sky, after all, had not proved the limit.
Ad Astra
It was an article of faith to the Romans that they were the most morally upright people in the world. How else was the size of their empire to be explained? Yet they also knew that the Republic’s greatness carried its own risks. To abuse it would be to court divine anger. Hence the Romans’ concern to refute all charges of bullying, and to insist that they had won their empire purely in self-defence. To people who had been flattened by the legions, this argument may have appeared laughable, but the Romans believed it all the same, and often with a deadly seriousness. Opposition to Crassus’ war against Parthia, for instance, had been bitter. Everyone knew that there had been no excuse for it save greed. The blood-soaked sands of Carrhae showed that the gods had known this too.
All the same, Crassus was not the only man to have dreamed of pushing Rome’s supremacy to the limits of the world. Something was changing in the mood of the Republic. Globalising fantasies were much in the air. The globe itself could be found on coins as well as triumphal floats. The old suspicion of empire was fading fast. Overseas commitments, it appeared, could be made to work. Even the most conservative elements in the Senate were coming to accept this. In 58 Cato had left Rome for the island of Cyprus. His mission was to annexe it. Originally, he had been violently opposed to such a policy, not least because it had been proposed by Clodius, who planned to use revenues from Cyprus to fund his extravagant corn dole. But when the tribune, with typically malevolent cunning, had proposed that his most upright opponent be sent to administer Rome’s new possession, and the Senate had enthusiastically agreed, Cato had felt duty bound to go. Arriving in Cyprus, he had exercised his duties with his customary scrupulousness. The Cypriots had been given peace and good government, and the Roman people the old ruler’s treasure. Cato had returned home loaded with silver and a library of account books. So delighted had the Senate been by the honest dealings it found transcribed within them that it had awarded Cato the privilege of wearing a toga edged with purple – an extravagance that Cato had sternly turned down.