[lbo-talk] The uses of a general's head - Crassus in Parthia

[Jerry Monaco]

On 10/12/06, Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 10/12/06, Jerry Monaco <monacojerry at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Oh, the abuses of art....
> >
> > 'Three and a half centuries after Euripides' death the Roman
> > multimillionaire Crassus led a Roman army into Syria, was defeated by
> the
> > Parthians, and killed. When the messenger arrived at the Parthian
> capital
> > with his head, the court was watching a Greek company perform
> > the Bacchae.
> > They had reached the scene in which Pentheus' mother Agave, still in
> > Dionysiac frenzy, comes on stage carrying her son's severed head.
> > The head
> > of Crassus was thrown on the floor; Jason, the actor playing Agave,
> > substituted it for the prop he had been carrying and resumed the
> > performance, singing the famous aria "I bring from the mountain, this
> bough
> > fresh-cut…." The audience went wild.'
> >
> > Bernard Knox
>
> Uncanny.
>
> The Bush administration has behaved in Iraq just as Crassus behaved
> during his expedition to the same region.
>
> <blockquote>On his arrival, things went at first as he [Crassus] had
> hoped, for he easily bridged the Euphrates and led his army across in
> safety, and took possession of many cities in Mesopotamia which came
> over to him of their own accord. But at one of them, of which
> Apollonius was tyrant, a hundred of his soldiers were slain, whereupon
> he led up his forces against it, mastered it, plundered its property,
> and sold its inhabitants into slavery. The city was called Zenodotia
> by the Greeks. For its capture he allowed his soldiers to salute him
> as Imperator, thereby incurring much disgrace and showing himself of a
> paltry spirit and without good hope for the greater struggles that lay
> before him, since he was so delighted with a trifling acquisition.
> After furnishing the cities which had come over to his side with
> garrisons, which amounted in all to seven thousand men-at-arms and a
> thousand horsemen, he himself withdrew to take up winter quarters in
> Syria, and to await there his son, who was coming from Caesar in Gaul,
> decorated with the insignia of his deeds of valour, and leading a
> thousand picked horsemen.
>
> This was thought to be the first blunder which Crassus committed, --
> after the expedition itself, which was the greatest of all his
> blunders, -- because, when he should have advanced and come into touch
> with Babylon and Seleucia, cities always hostile to the Parthians, he
> gave his enemies time for preparation. Then, again, fault was found
> with him because his sojourn in Syria was devoted to mercenary rather
> than to military purposes. For he made no estimate of the number of
> his troops, and instituted no athletic contests for them, but reckoned
> up the revenues of cities, and spent many days weighing exactly the
> treasures of the goddess in Hierapolis, and prescribed quotas of
> soldiers for districts and dynasts to furnish, only to remit the
> prescription when money was offered him, thereby losing their respect
> and winning their contempt.  (Plutarch, "The Life of Crassus,"
> <
> http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Crassus*.html
> >)</blockquote>
>
>
I agree with you completely here.  But I guess I was thinking about the
severed head.

But today I was rereading Plutarch on Crassus and Pompey and then moved on
to the Bacchae and came across this coincidence between the two.

Crassus was very much like the Bush family.

Jerry
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