No wonder that he inspired in his fellow citizens a rare dread. Campaigners against Sulla’s laws would violently abuse other public figures, but never Crassus. Asked why, a tribune compared him not to a spider but to a bull with hay on its horns – ‘it being a custom among the Romans’, as Plutarch explains, ‘to tie hay round the horns of dangerous bulls, so that people who met them might be on their guard’.32 Such respect was what Crassus most craved. More clearly than anyone else in Rome, he had penetrated to the heart of the lesson of the civil wars: that the outward trappings of glory were
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