James Middleton pushes his newborn son Inigo in his pram as he and wife Alizee Thevenet are spotted Christmas shopping Eventually, Roman might and discipline prevailed as the campaign moved to the toe of Italy. The body of Spartacus was never found. After he was killed, humiliations rained down on him. His open mouth, shrivelled by desert air, was stuffed with molten gold as a symbol of his lifetime of greed, and his head was used as a prop in a production of Euripides’s Bacchae for the watching King of Parthia. But the rise and fall of Crassus ran through the chaos of the final decades of the republic. His father was killed, and Crassus had to flee to Spain during the height of the populist tyranny of Marius and his supporters. By the time he was in his 20s, “he had seen politics at close quarters since he was a boy.” Witnessing brutality, murder, and scheming, Crassus was resolved to build his own fortune in a subtler manner. Acquiring run-down and decaying manors, he rebuilt them and rented them out to curry favors. He built his own private empire on social trust and financial loans to those in need but also to those who would be useful allies in the future. “Crassus took a more businesslike approach” to politics and social scheming than the murder politics with which he had been previously familiar. After all, even the winners in that latter situation did not seem to last long. Crassus’s story is worth retelling. He was a man who mattered more than almost any other, at a crucial point in Rome’s history, as its power waxed but its old political structures failed and were recast. His world was in some ways utterly alien to ours: life truly was nasty, brutish and short. It was said that the Parthians filled his mouth with molten gold, cut off his head, and later used it as a stage prop in The Bacchae.

Crassus was a breaker of conventions. He was impatient with the old aristocratic models for running the Roman economy. He became notorious for greed and he liked best the money that came from close to home. While his rivals, Caesar and Pompey, marched around Europe and the Middle East, murdering, looting and, in their own eyes and those of later writers, civilizing and bringing peace, Crassus spent most of his life pulling strings in Rome. Pompey brought gold home as booty, massive statues of the kings he had defeated, silver beds and ancient bronze. Crassus, by contrast, owned shares in Spanish mines and lent the proceeds to politicians whom he kept as clients, playing one against the other in the hope that none would ever exceed his own influence on events. He owned huge swathes of Italian land but acted as banker to the owners of much more. He bought property cheaply from owners who feared that he might otherwise burn their houses down. He was a builder and a briber, a very modern man in an ancient world. Gisele Bundchen showcases her toned tummy as she and rumored boyfriend Joaquim Valente enjoy Costa Rica getaway with her childrenSince the days of Plutarch, if not before, Marcus Licinius Crassus has been viewed as the ultimate exemplar of folly and dishonesty in the super-rich. The financier of Rome's Late Republic, member of the unofficial Triumvirate with Caesar and Pompey, and suppressor of Spartacus's rebellion, he is perhaps best remembered as the loser at Carrhae when - after watching his son's untimely death - he has his own head removed from his body, later (according to rumour) to be used as a prop in a Greek play. It is a well-known story and therefore a difficult challenge to breathe new life into this long-dead man. EMILY PRESCOTT: Cressida's chilled to the Bonas... Prince Harry's ex-girlfriend shows she's still a fan of real shops

Some of the captured slaves were put to work in the filthy silver mines that Crassus owned in Spain where the deadly soil and sulphur-filled air were enough to kill them. It was a very Crassus-type bargain — by the time they died they should have mined enough silver to recompense him for the cost of the army which he had to raise to defeat them. First, the Crassus whom most of us know best as the crucifier of Spartacus’s slave army, would probably have owned the lithium fields himself. Rome’s richest man, memorably played by Laurence Olivier in the film of Spartacus, owned most of the city and its surroundings in the first half of the first century BCE. If he hadn’t owned the new mine he would certainly have had the mine’s owner in his debt: almost all the big players of the time, Julius Caesar most of all, owed money to Crassus. That was how a tycoon made his politics happen, then as now.Peter Stothard, the former Times and TLS editor, has followed his previous reconstructions of the Spartacus revolt (2010) and Caesar’s assassination (2020), with this slim but lively biography of Crassus, the first for fifty years. Before that we have only really Plutarch who treated his life as a morality tale. S.’s account is equally unsympathetic but much more readable, using his journalistic eye to frame Crassus in his time and context. With great persistence and skill Crassus made his way through the danger and treachery of Roman politics to approach its zenith, but then fatally overreached, launching a disastrous military campaign against the Parthians that cost him his life and diminished his stature. In The First Tycoon, Peter Stothard, former editor of the Times and the TLS, tells the fascinating and ultimately tragic story of his life, perhaps for the first time since the Greek historian Plutarch wrote his Life of Crassus in the 1st century AD. He was a hard, tough man, Marcus Licinius Crassus, a proper b*****d even by the standards of ancient Rome. Though you had to be tough to survive in those harsh days. Pictured: Laurence Olivier with fists clenched on table in a scene from the film 'Spartacus', 1960

Men should learn from experience, respect their elders, and rise to the top in due time’, Stothard writes, attempting to convey to a 21st-century mind the ubiquity, if not the oppressiveness, of the paternalistic ideology that informed Crassus’ world. The first ancient writer to try to recover those lives and times was the imperial biographer Plutarch, and Stothard’s structure has largely followed Plutarch’s model: the first half of his book focusing on the formation of Crassus’ character, the second an extended set piece in the desert, replete with discussions of Parthian archery tactics, culminating in the doomed general’s defeat.Omid Scobie's book is understood to include of volley of withering criticisms of the Royal Family. Here NATASHA LIVINGSTONE sifts fact from fiction... Now, Peter Stothard has given us the final decades of the republic through the eyes of Crassus—Rome’s wealthiest man and former consul who famously embarked on a vainglorious and ultimately failed conquest of Parthia that culminated in his embarrassing death.” Stothard sees Crassus as the first tycoon, a modern man in an ancient world, willing to use money, power, property and influence rather than brute military might to get his way. Strictly star Layton Williams defends his pole dance routine after viewers compared it to a 'strip club' show Royals warned of careless talk around Harry': King Charles was 'cautious' in conversation with his second son after his memoir Spare

But it was undertaken by an intelligent, cautious man aware of what was necessary to maintain his status, acutely aware of the risks of not undertaking such an enterprise. Today’s super-rich do not, perhaps, contend with the same existential pressures that weighed on Crassus, who feared that if he did not gamble all, he might lose all. But the compulsions of maintaining a status that has been hard won perhaps accounts for behaviour that will ever puzzle those observing from the outside. This unfinished classic novel, published posthumously in 1941, shows a movie man’s deep personal impetus for seeing, concentrating and expanding power, the rare mark of the tycoon. “These lights, this brightness, these clusters of human hope, of wild desire – I shall take these lights in my fingers. I shall make them bright, and whether they shine or not, it is in these fingers that they shall succeed or fail.”

Treats for under the tree: Top 10 festive gift ideas that promise to be all THEY want for Christmas It is a remarkable and fascinating story and Stothard has done his subject proud.”—Roger Alton, Daily Mail Lewis Hamilton showcases his quirky sense of style yet again in orange and brown tie-dye all-in-one ahead of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix I'm A Celeb's viewers SLAM 'insensitive' Nella Rose after she tells ADHD sufferer Sam Thompson to 'calm down': 'Educate yourself!'