The Man Who Owned Rome

Marcus Licinius Crassus, according to Pliny the Elder, was worth roughly 200 million sesterces — a sum said to equal the annual net worth of the entire Roman Empire. Whether that figure survives scrutiny is another matter; historians have squabbled over it for centuries, and comparing purchasing power across two thousand years is a fool's errand at the best of times. But the number sticks, partly because Crassus himself gave us the yardstick. He liked to say that no man could count himself rich unless he could afford to maintain an army. He could. He raised legions the way other men buy furniture.

The interesting part isn't the size of the fortune but the method. Crassus assembled the first fire brigade in Rome — a genuinely useful innovation in a city built largely of timber and packed tenements. The catch was in the terms of service. When a building caught fire, his crew of some 500 slaves would arrive, then stand about doing nothing while Crassus negotiated to buy the property, along with the surrounding buildings, at a price that fell as the flames rose. Agree, and his men put out the fire and rebuilt. Refuse, and they watched it burn. He acquired a substantial chunk of Rome's real estate this way, one emergency at a time.

The end was fitting for a man so devoted to gold. In 53 BC, chasing military glory to match his money, Crassus led an army east against the Parthians and was routed at Carrhae. Later Roman writers — never ones to let a good moral go unornamented — claimed the Parthians executed him by pouring molten gold down his throat, a gesture aimed squarely at his greed. The story is almost certainly invented, but it has outlasted every honest account of how he actually died, which tells you something about the appetite for poetic justice.

Whether Crassus was the richest human ever is unanswerable. John D. Rockefeller, at his death, held a fortune estimated at $600 billion in modern terms, and his income once accounted for more than 1.5 percent of American GDP. Mansa Musa of Mali is often nominated too, on the strength of having crashed the price of gold across the eastern Mediterranean simply by spending on his way to Mecca.

There is one consolation for the rest of us. For all his sesterces, all his legions, all his burning buildings, Crassus could not have bought a single mobile phone, a refrigerator, or a dose of antibiotics. In strictly material terms, most people reading this outrank the richest man in Roman history — which is either humbling or reassuring, depending on how your day is going.