at men are
"ad justitiam natos" must have been to him simply absurd. Blood was to
him nothing. A friend was better than a foe, and a live man than a dead.
Blood-thirstiness was a passion unknown to him; but that tenderness
which with us creates a horror of blood was equally unknown. Pleasure
was sweet to him; but he was man enough to feel that a life of pleasure
was contemptible. To pillage a city, to pilfer his all from a rich man,
to debauch a friend's wife, to give over a multitude of women and
children to slaughter, was as easy to him as to forgive an enemy. But
nothing rankled with him, and he could forgive an enemy. Of courage he
had that better sort which can appreciate and calculate danger, and then
act as though there were none. Nothing was wrong to him but what was
injudicious. He could flatter, cajole, lie, deceive, and rob; nay, would
think it folly not to do so if to do so were expedient.[234] In this
coalition he appears as supporting and supported by the people.
Therefore Mommsen speaks of him as "the democrat." Crassus is called the
ally of the democrats. It will be enough for us here to know that
Crassus had achieved his position in the Senate by his enormous wealth,
and that it was because of his wealth, which was essential to Caesar,
that he was admitted into the league. By means of his wealth he had
risen to power and had conquered and killed Spartacus, of the honor and
glory of which Pompey robbed him. Then he had been made Consul. When
Caesar had gone as Propraetor to Spain, Crassus had found the money. Now
Caesar had come back, and was hand and glove with Crassus. When the
division of the spoil came, some years afterward--the spoil won by the
Triumvirate--when Caesar had half perfected his grand achievements in
Gaul, and Crassus had as yet been only a second time Consul, he got
himself to be sent into Syria, that by conquering the Parthians he might
make himself equal to Caesar. We know how he and his son perished there,
each of them probably avoiding the last extremity of misery to a
Roman--that of falling into the hands of a barbarian enemy--by
destroying himself. Than the life of Crassus nothing could be more
contemptible; than the death nothing more pitiable. "For Pompeius," says
Mommsen, "such a coalition was certainly a political suicide." As events
turned out it became so, because Caesar was the stronger man of the two;
but it is intelligible that at that time Pompey should have felt that he