'Not a friendship?'

'It was more in the nature of a business partnership.' Fabius smiled. 'But then everything is business with Marcus Crassus. Anyway, in any relationship there must be a stronger and a weaker partner. I think you must know enough about Crassus, if only by hearsay, to imagine which of them was subservient.'

'Lucius Licinius.'

'Yes. Lucius was a poor man to start with, and he would have stayed that way without Crassus's help. Lucius had so little imagination; he wasn't the sort to see an opportunity and seize it, unless he was pushed. Meanwhile, Crassus was busy making his millions in real estate up in Rome – you must know the legend.'

I nodded. When the dictator Sulla finally triumphed in the civil wars, he destroyed his enemies by seizing their property and rewarded his supporters, Pompey and Crassus among them, with villas and farms; thus had Crassus begun his ascent, driven by an apparently boundless appetite for property. Once in the streets of Rome I had come upon a burning building, and there was Crassus bidding on the tenement next to it. The owner, confused and desperate and believing he was about to lose his property to the spreading flames, sold it to Crassus on the spot for a song, whereupon the millionaire called out his private fire brigades to put out the flames. Such tales about Crassus were commonplace in Rome.

'Everything Crassus touched seemed to turn to gold,' Fabius explained. 'His cousin Lucius, on the other hand, muddled about trying to make a living off the land, like all good, old-fashioned plebeians. He lost and lost until he was bankrupt. Finally he begged Crassus to save him, and Crassus did. He made Lucius a kind of factotum, a representative to look after some of Crassus's business enterprises on the Cup.