Crassus

When the man said this and the people urged a reconciliation, Pompey, for his part, stood motionless, but Crassus took the initiative, clasped him by the hand, and said: Fellow-citizens, I think there is nothing humiliating or unworthy in my taking the first step towards good-will and friendship with Pompey, to whom you gave the title of Great before he had grown a beard, and voted him a triumph before he was a senator.

Such, then, were the memorable things in the consulship of Crassus, but his censorship[*](65 B.C.) passed without any results or achievements whatever. He neither made a revision of the senate, nor a scrutiny of the knights, nor a census of the people, although he had Lutatius Catulus, the gentlest of the Romans, for his colleague. But they say that when Crassus embarked upon the dangerous and violent policy of making Egypt tributary to Rome, Catulus opposed him vigorously, whereupon, being at variance, both voluntarily laid down their office.

In the affair of Catiline,[*](63-62 B.C.) which was very serious, and almost subversive of Rome, some suspicion attached itself to Crassus, and a man publicly named him as one of the conspirators, but nobody believed him.

Nevertheless, Cicero, in one of his orations,[*](Not extant.) plainly inculpated Crassus and Caesar. This oration, it is true, was not published until after both were dead; but in the treatise upon his consulship,[*](Not extant.) Cicero says that Crassus came to him by night with a letter which gave details of the affair of Catiline,[*](Cf. Plutarch’s Cicero, xv. ) and felt that he was at last establishing the fact of a conspiracy.

And Crassus, accordingly, always hated Cicero for this, but was kept from doing him any open injury by his son. For Publius Crassus, being given to literature and learning, was attached to Cicero, so much so that he put on mourning when Cicero did at the time of his trial, and prevailed upon the other young men to do the same. And finally he persuaded his father to become Cicero’s friend.

Now when Caesar came back from his province and prepared to seek the consulship, he saw that Pompey and Crassus were once more at odds with each other. He therefore did not wish to make one of them an enemy by asking the aid of the other, nor did he have any hope of success if neither of them helped him.

Accordingly, he tried to reconcile them by persistently showing them that their mutual ruin would only increase the power of such men as Cicero, Catulus, and Cato, men whose influence would be nothing if Crassus and Pompey would only unite their friends and adherents, and with one might and one purpose direct the affairs of the city. He persuaded them, reconciled them, and won them both to his support, and constituted with that triumvirate an irresistible power, with which he overthrew the senate and the people, not by making his partners greater, the one through the other, but by making himself greatest of all through them.

For owing to the support of both he was at once triumphantly elected consul.[*](59 B.C.) And during his consulship they voted him armies to command, and put Gaul into his hands, and so, as it were, established him in an acropolis, thinking to share the rest with one another at their leisure if they secured to him his allotted province.

Now Pompey did all this from an unbounded love of power; but to that ancient infirmity of Crassus, his avarice, there was now added a fresh and ardent passion, in view of the glorious exploits of Caesar, for trophies and triumphs. In these alone he thought himself inferior to Caesar, but superior in everything else. And his passion gave him no rest nor peace until it ended in an inglorious death and public calamities.