Showing results by author "Peter Stothard" in All Categories

Marcus Licinius Crassus (115-53 BCE) was a modern man in an ancient world, a pioneer disrupter of finance and politics, and the richest man of the last years of the Roman republic. Without his catastrophic ambition, this trailblazing tycoon might have quietly entered history as Rome's first modern political financier. Instead, Crassus and his son led an army on an unprovoked campaign against Parthia into what are now the borderlands of Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, losing a battle at Carrhae which scarred Roman minds for generations.

This is an unusual history of a time that still defines our world - a view of the early Roman empire that its historians never intended us to see. Beginning sixty years after the assassination of Julius Caesar, it graphically depicts a story parallel to that of Caligula and Nero, and shows us those struggling to survive around them. This is the Roman imperial world seen through the eyes of men and women in a single house on Rome's Palatine Hill.

The final years of the Roman republic are usually recounted from the top, through the eyes of the big winners and losers: Brutus, Mark Antony, Emperor Augustus. But The Last Assassin, a thrilling narrative history, tells the well-known history from an exciting new perspective. For 14 years after 44 BC, Cassius of Parma (Cassius Parmensis), one of the lesser-known assassins of Julius Caesar, watched from the wings as all of his coconspirators were murdered.