Ancient Rome’s Richest Man
In ancient Greece and Rome, when people wanted to say that somebody was loaded, they said that he was “as rich as Croesus“, after a sixth century BC Lydian king who had been the first to mint coins. In the late Roman Republic, one man, Marcus Licinius Crassus (115 – 53 BC) grew so wealthy that people changed the phrase, and punned that somebody was “as rich as Crassus“. Whether or not he was as rich as Croesus, Crassus was Rome’s wealthiest man and one of its key figures. He used his deep pockets to amass power, and was lavish in his sponsorship of politicians. Their numbers included Julius Caesar, whose political rise Crassus financed.
With Caesar and Pompey the Great, Crassus entered into a power sharing agreement known as “The First Triumvirate”, which effectively made the trio the masters of the Roman Republic. Crassus became fabulously rich because he was a shrewd businessman, and a notoriously avaricious one. He started on the road to fabulous wealth through an alliance with the dictator Sulla. Crassus bought the confiscated properties of executed enemies of the state in rigged auctions for a fraction of their value. He even had the names of those whose properties he coveted added to the lists of the proscribed, slated for execution and confiscation of property. He made even more money through other unscrupulous methods.
