How Did Crassus Die at the Battle of Carrhae?
Marcus Licinius Crassus, the Roman triumvir, was killed on 9 May 53 BCE, near the town of Carrhae in southeastern Turkey, after his seven legions had been destroyed by the Parthian general Surena. The manner of his death is described in several different versions in the surviving sources, and the disagreement among them is itself a piece of evidence of real value for how the story was told in the generations after the battle. The fullest account is Plutarch’s Crassus 24–33; Cassius Dio’s epitome (Book 40) and Florus add details, and at points contradict Plutarch.
The short answer
Plutarch’s version, which is the most detailed and the most often quoted, runs like this. After the Roman army had been broken by the Parthian horse archers and cataphracts, Crassus began to retreat from the field with a small escort of Roman officers and some auxiliary cavalry. He was overtaken by a Parthian detachment under a man named Surena (the Suren-Pahlav in the Parthian sources). A parley began. During the parley — the exact moment is disputed in the manuscripts — Crassus was struck by a sword, either by one of his own men (Plutarch names Pomaxathres, a name that is uncertain in the manuscript tradition) or by a Parthian officer. He died on the field.
A second version, in Plutarch and Cassius Dio, has Crassus die in the fighting itself, with no parley. A third, in Justin, has him captured and executed afterwards. The three cannot be reconciled, and modern scholarship has not settled the question. The “parley” version is the best attested; the “death in the fighting” version is the simplest; the “captured and executed” version is the most literary. The truth is unrecoverable.
The longer story
Crassus’ death was the end of a political career that had begun promisingly and ended badly. The First Triumvirate, the alliance of Crassus, Pompey, and Caesar that had dominated Roman politics since 60 BCE, was already showing signs of strain by the late 50s, and Crassus’ decision to seek a military command in the East was, in part, an attempt to recover his standing. He was sixty years old, the richest man in Rome (his fortune, Plutarch says, was sufficient to maintain the Roman state at its own expense for a year), and the only member of the triumvirate without a recent military triumph. The Parthian war was meant to be a quick and profitable campaign that would give him a victory to match Pompey’s in the East and Caesar’s in Gaul.
It was not. Plutarch (Crassus 16) records that Crassus, on crossing the Euphrates, said he was marching against “men who fight with slippers and trousers” — a remark that captures the Roman contempt for the Parthians but also the strategic error. The Parthians were not a Roman-style infantry army, and the Roman tactics that worked against infantry did not work against horse archers. The Roman army, having crossed into Mesopotamia, was drawn into the open plain of Carrhae, where the Parthian horse archers could use their mobility and their bows to devastating effect. The Roman square, formed to resist the arrows, was gradually emptied by missile fire; the Roman auxiliaries who charged the archers were drawn out of formation and cut off. The cataphracts, hidden behind a screen of horse archers, charged at the decisive moment. The Roman line broke. By the end of the afternoon, of the seven legions that had crossed the Euphrates, perhaps a quarter had survived as a coherent force. The rest were dead, captured, or scattered in the desert.
The molten gold
The most famous detail is the story that the Parthians poured molten gold into the mouth of the dead Crassus, mocking his famous wealth. Plutarch gives the story (Crassus 33), and Cassius Dio and Florus repeat it. Dante later placed Crassus in the fourth bolgia of the eighth circle of Hell, the place of the avaricious, where his mouth gapes eternally for the gold that will not come.
Whether the story is literal is doubtful. Plutarch himself notes that it is the kind of detail that “the Parthians say,” and most modern scholars treat it as a Roman literary construction. The desecration of corpses, particularly of defeated kings, was a well-attested steppe convention, and the story may have a basis in a real Parthian practice; the molten gold is a Roman flourish. The story tells us, in any case, that the Romans saw Crassus as the paradigm of the avaricious general, and that the death at Carrhae was treated as the moral punishment of avarice. Plutarch’s Crassus is, in substance, a moral essay as much as a biography. The death at Carrhae is the moral centre of the work, and the molten gold is the moral lesson.
The standards and the political use
The eagle standards (aquilae) of the captured legions were carried to Ctesiphon and paraded in the royal palace. The recovery of the standards became a major political issue in Rome. Augustus recovered the Carrhae eagles in 20 BCE in a diplomatic settlement with Phraates IV. The return was celebrated in Rome with a formal supplicatio and the dedication of the temple of Mars Ultor in the Forum of Augustus, on 1 August 2 BCE. The standards were placed in the temple, and the political programme of ultio (vengeance) was at least symbolically completed.
The death of Crassus at Carrhae was the central event of the long Roman engagement with the Parthian state. The story is mentioned by Plutarch, by Cassius Dio, by Florus, by Eutropius, and by a long line of Roman historians. The aquilae of Carrhae were a Roman topos for the dangers of eastern overreach; the molten gold, a topos for the moral of avarice destroyed. The Battle of Carrhae is, on any reckoning, one of the few ancient battles whose full cultural afterlife can be traced.
Sources
The principal primary source is Plutarch, Life of Crassus, best read in Robin Waterfield’s edition (Oxford World’s Classics, 1999) with Christopher Pelling’s notes. Rose Mary Sheldon, “The Death of Crassus and the Moral Story of the Battle of Carrhae,” in Latomus 70 (2011), 17–34, is the most useful modern article. The older German literature is summarised in Josef Wiesehöfer’s Ancient Persia (1996).