Plutarch wrote Parallel Lives, paired biographies of Greeks and Romans. This life is Crassus, set in the late Roman Republic — Rome run by a senate and elected officials, not a king — in the first century BC. He pairs Crassus with Nicias of Athens: two cautious rich men who died far from home.

Marcus Licinius Crassus grew rich buying houses as they burned, buying people from the dictator Sulla’s lists of the condemned, and crushing Spartacus and his slave army. He was the richest man in the city and could not bear to be only that. He wanted a triumph that was not a slave war. Parthia, the empire east of the Euphrates in lands we now call Iran and Iraq, looked like the shortcut. At Carrhae the arrows did not stop. His son Publius charged and died. The eagles, the army’s standards, went into the sand. Crassus was killed in a talk under truce. They say molten gold was poured down the throat of the man who never had enough. His three-man pact with Pompey and Caesar ended there.