Marcus Licinius Crassus is well known for being in the First Triumvirate with Julius Caesar and Pompey Magnus, and for being the richest man in late Republican Rome. He’s less well known for quashing the Spartacus rebellion (despite Pompey trying to take the credit) and for being Sulla’s protege, both of which gave him genuine military credibility. However, it was his notoriously ignominous death on campaign in Parthia for which he is most famous, with the claim that the victorious Parthians executed him after the Battle of Carrhae by pouring molten gold down his throat to mock him for his love of money.

Carrhae, 53 BCE

At the Luca Conference, the triumvirate hashed out their plans for the following years in an attempt to consolidate and increase their power. Caesar would continue his campaigns in Gaul. Pompey and Crassus would be co-consuls for a second time, after which Pompey would govern Spain, and Crassus Syria (which Pompey had recently annexed.) Crassus, perhaps jealous of his colleague’s recent military glory, decided that he would once again don his armour and go on his own grand campaign to remind everyone of his own military prowess. Syria provided an excellent springboard into Parthia, which was an ambitious but tempting target. The campaign was brought to a premature and abrupt end at the Battle of Carrhae, a mere year after Crassus ventured past the Parthian border.

The Parthian general Surena made a pivot from the tactics Romans had come to expect, and fielded an army almost entirely made up of cataphracts (heavily armoured cavalry) and thousands of mounted archers wielding armour-piercing composite bows. The battle was a bloodbath.

Crassus made a couple of attempts to retreat from the disaster, but the Parthians were determined to capture him. Surena and his cavalry caught up with Crassus and offered a parley. Despite being close to some mountains (where the Parthian cavalry would not have been able to follow them,) the weary, shocked survivors urged their commander to negotiate with Surena. What all of our sources agree on is that before any negotiation could begin, Crassus was killed. The narrative that the Parthians humiliated Crassus in his moment of defeat is a great story, full of melodrama. The richest man in Rome, hubristic enough to take on the mighty Parthian empire, is killed by the very thing he loves most in the world. It’s a tale that’s often repeated (even in documentaries) and has inspired fictional deaths such as that of Viserys Targaryen in Game of Thrones. But do our sources support it?

Sources

We have two main sources for Carrhae and its aftermath: Plutarch’s biography of Crassus and Cassius Dio’s History of Rome. Both accounts differ in their version of the run-up to the battle, but both say exactly the same thing about Crassus’ death: when Crassus went on foot to negotiate with Surena, who was mounted, he was offered a horse so that the two generals may speak eye to eye. There was confusion as Crassus mounted, and his bodyguards seemed convinced that the parley was a trap and that the Parthians planned to capture him and parade him in a mock triumph. The confusion caused a scuffle and Crassus was stabbed whilst trying to get on the horse. (Plutarch Life of Crassus 31, Cassius Dio 40.26)

Each of our sources then gives a differing account of what happened to the corpse. Dio is the one who tells the story that molten gold was poured down his throat, but specifies that it happened post mortem (Cassius Dio 40.27):

And the Parthians, as some say, poured molten gold into his mouth in mockery; for though a man of vast wealth, he had set so great store by money as to pity those who could not support an enrolled legion from their own means, regarding them as poor men.

Plutarch tells a different tale, one where Crassus’ corpse was beheaded post mortem so that the head could be sent to the Parthian king. The head was presented to him at a wedding and thrown into the centre of the banqueting room. A famous actor named Jason of Tralles just happened to be reciting a scene from Euripides’ Bacchae, in which a crazed Theban princess named Agave tears the head from her son Pentheus and parades it around. Jason, thinking quickly, grabbed the head of Crassus and used it as a prop as he recited the line “We bring down from the mountain this branch to the palace: a wonderful prey!”

So if we have two sources agreeing on the cause of death, but not agreeing on what happened to the corpse, which is plausible? And where did the story of molten gold as a form of execution come from?

Conflicting Accounts

Short of being able to bring Crassus back as a high profile prisoner of war, taking his head as a trophy would be a logical consolation prize for the victorious Parthians. You may think that the coincidence of an actor reciting the exact scene of the one play to use a head as a prop at the precise moment someone throws a severed head into the room is just too convenient to hold a grain of truth. However, even if the actor had not been performing at the time but saw the opportunity to grab some attention, lifting the head and reciting that single line would have been all the audience needed to get his joke. The Parthians were very fond of Greek plays and we can assume that almost everybody in the room would have recognised the line and understood its context, so the punchline would have still landed. As such, the tale is plausible.

As for Dio, he doesn’t state exactly when gold was poured into the already severed head. It presumably wasn’t at the parley, where gold and a source of heat weren’t exactly in great abundance. But he also doesn’t mention the head being sent east to the king, which is a more logical setting for such a spectacle. He leaves us to speculate, which is frustrating. The mention of the gold, despite sounding incredibly unusual and dramatic, is almost a throwaway comment, and his remark that the story is possibly just hearsay perhaps explains why he refuses to go into detail.

So which writer is correct? Plutarch seems to have heavily relied on a memoir by Crassus’ second in command at the battle, a man named Gaius Cassius, who sought to distance himself from the humiliating defeat by savaging Crassus as soon as he got home. Gaius Cassius was obviously able to write an excellent account of the battle but he was not among the prisoners of war sent east to witness any theatricalities. Cassius Dio was likely using Livy’s history as a source who, whilst a small child in 53 BCE, may well have interviewed ageing survivors during his research later in life. Sadly, that portion of Livy’s work is lost to us and we can’t compare narratives.

Whilst the two surviving accounts differ dramatically, both emphasise humiliation and desecration of Crassus’ body.

A Precedent

What we do know is that a Roman was killed in the east by having molten gold poured down his throat whilst he was still alive. Thirty-five years before Carrhae, a former consul named Manius Aquillius was sent to Asia Minor to put Nicomedes IV back on the throne of Bithynia, who had been ousted by Mithridates VI of Pontus. Aquillius even prompted Nicomedes to raid along Mithridates’ borders, in order to gain some loot with which he could ‘thank’ Rome for their assistance (Appian The Mithridatic War 21). Furious at the Roman meddling and Bithynian incursions, Mithridates retaliated with full force, launching the First Mithridatic War. Neither Nicomedes nor Manius Aquillius stood a chance, and Mithridates soon claimed control of all Asia Minor, encouraging the local population to massacre any Roman they saw. 80,000 were murdered in what became known as the Asiatic or Ephesian Vespers. Manius Aquillius attempted to flee across the Aegean, but the citizens of Mytilene handed him over to Mithridates, who paraded him on a donkey to Pergamon. There, to mock Manius for the Roman thirst for cash, Mithridates had molten gold poured down his throat as an extraordinary, if fitting, form of execution.

Perhaps, after Carrhae, Romans assumed all barbarian eastern kings executed former consuls the same way. The two narratives do have several parallels; former Roman consuls with a noted love of cash make disastrous attempts to interfere with eastern kings and both pay the ultimate price. Plutarch’s Parthians have a sense of humour, perhaps Dio was correct when he says they did pour gold into the severed head, potentially as a joke referencing the other humiliating demise of a prominent Roman, a few decades before. We will never know for certain.

Conclusion

Sadly for Crassus, neither his enemies nor his compatriots showed him any respect following his death, with one side making him out to be a villain and the other turning him into a foolhardy buffoon to save face. With two very different accounts, we cannot know what happened to Crassus’s corpse. Perhaps the story of the Greek tragedy is true, or the story of the molten gold. Perhaps both are true, or both are mere rumour. What both sources are absolutely clear on is that Crassus was killed in a kerfuffle over mounting a horse, and that any humiliations afterwards were meted out on his dead body. His reputation has never recovered. As a result, we have rated this claim as false.