Crassus

The Romans, it is true, say that the many virtues of Crassus were obscured by his sole vice of avarice; and it is likely that the one vice which became stronger than all the others in him, weakened the rest. The chief proofs of his avarice are found in the way he got his property and in the amount of it.

For at the outset he was possessed of not more than three hundred talents;[*](Plutarch gives Greek values. The talent was a sum of money nearly equivalent to £240, or $1200, with many times the purchasing power of money to-day.) then during his consulship he sacrificed the tenth of his goods to Hercules, feasted the people, gave every Roman out of his own means enough to live on for three months, and still, when he made a private inventory of his property before his Parthian expedition, he found that it had a value of seventy-one hundred talents.