WholeCogan

[WholeCogan @BottomRopeElbow]

@davemeltzerWON @grok

Is the following phrase grammatically correct?

“That is not something people want to hear, but the actual reason it happened is even more so.”

[WholeCogan @BottomRopeElbow]

@davemeltzerWON That is not something people want to hear, but the actual reason it happened is even more so.

If you know what I mean

[WholeCogan @BottomRopeElbow]

@Dameshek You don’t have to preface it with that.

[WholeCogan @BottomRopeElbow]

@Argonaut1535 Pikeman being upset they couldn’t pillage as efficiently as Musketeers because of their long pikes is always funny to me.

Why didn’t they team up and watch each others pike, while the other pillages?

[WholeCogan @BottomRopeElbow]

@TheDrainmaker Yep, she resigned

[WholeCogan @BottomRopeElbow]

@ExposingClay He’s extra mad because he just started watching again after his last boycotting of the NFL b

[WholeCogan @BottomRopeElbow]

@RationalGMENFan If Coach isn’t going to be polite in a professional situation, do the writers have to?

Pat Leonard does deserve it though b

[WholeCogan @BottomRopeElbow]

@KFILE Be pretty funny when Bari Weis fires Donie and gives Stein a show at 12:00 am

[WholeCogan @BottomRopeElbow]

@MattHarmon_BYB @HaydenWinks To apologize for your sins against us?

[Bobby Skinner @BobbySkinner_]

Best damn preview pod for Giants-Cowboys

Giants should be able to play their game on offense. LISTEN

[Ancient History Hub @AncientHistorry]

The richest man in Roman history made his first fortune off dead men's houses and his second off burning ones.

Marcus Licinius Crassus was born into a good family that got destroyed. His father and brother died in the Marian purges of 87 BC. He ran to Spain and hid in a cave on the coast for eight months, fed in secret by a family friend, waiting for the political weather to change.

It changed. Sulla came back, Crassus fought for him and won the right wing at the Colline Gate in 82 BC while Sulla's own flank was collapsing. Then came the proscriptions, the public lists of men declared enemies of the state whose property went to auction. Crassus bought. Whole estates for coins. Plutarch says he was eventually accused of slipping a man onto the list who had no business being there, purely for the real estate, and that Sulla never trusted him with public business again.

But the fire scheme is the one people never forget.

Rome was a city of packed wooden tenements with no fire service. Crassus owned around 500 slaves trained as builders and architects, and he turned them into a private brigade. When a building went up, he'd arrive while it was still burning and open negotiations with the owner on the spot. Lowball price. Agree and his crews went to work. Refuse and they stood in the street and watched it burn, and then he'd make an offer on the ashes and the neighboring properties too, which were now also on fire.

He bought enormous stretches of Rome that way, rebuilt with his own labor, and rented it back to the people who lived there.

Add silver mines and farmland and the trade of training slaves in valuable skills and hiring them out, and you get a private fortune of 7,100 talents by his own count. That is in the range of what the entire Roman Republic collected in tax in a year. His personal standard for wealth, according to Plutarch, was that no man deserved the word rich unless he could pay for an army out of his own pocket.

He proved it in 71 BC. After Spartacus had beaten a string of Roman commanders, Crassus took the war on and raised six new legions largely on his own money. He revived decimation, an obsolete punishment, and had a defeated cohort execute one in ten of its own men by lot. He walled off the toe of Italy to pen Spartacus in. He won. Then he crucified 6,000 survivors along the road from Capua to Rome, one every 40 yards or so for over 100 miles, and left them up.

Pompey happened to be marching back from Spain, ran into 5,000 escaping rebels, wiped them out, and wrote to the Senate that Crassus had won the battles but he himself had ended the war. Crassus got an ovation. Pompey got the triumph. Crassus never let it go.

For the next 20 years he was the money behind everything. He covered Julius Caesar's debts when Caesar's creditors wouldn't let him leave Rome to take up his command in Spain, standing surety for 830 talents. He built the alliance with Caesar and Pompey in 60 BC that ran the Republic between them. He was a man who lent to half the Senate without interest and then called it in at the exact hour it was due, which is a very specific kind of power.

What he did not have was military glory on the scale of the other two. So at about 60 years old, with everything already won, he took the command of Syria and went to invade Parthia.

At Carrhae in 53 BC his seven legions met a Parthian force under a young general named Surena that was almost entirely cavalry. Horse archers wearing the Romans down at distance, heavy armored lancers to break anything that formed up, and a train of camels loaded with spare arrows so the barrage never stopped, which is the detail that broke Roman morale. His son Publius led a breakout with the cavalry, was surrounded and killed, and the Parthians rode the perimeter of the Roman square with his head on a spear.

Around 20,000 Romans died and 10,000 were taken prisoner and marched east. Crassus was killed during a parley he did not want to attend.

Most people know the ending where the Parthians pour molten gold down his throat. That comes from Cassius Dio, writing roughly 250 years later, and it is almost certainly a moral fable rather than a fact.

The older story is stranger. Plutarch says Crassus's head was carried to the Parthian and Armenian courts, where the two kings happened to be watching a performance of Euripides' Bacchae, a play whose climax is a woman walking on stage holding her son's severed head. The lead actor took the real head, walked out with it, and delivered the lines. The court thought it was the best thing they had ever seen.

The richest man in Roman history ended his career as a stage prop.

[WholeCogan @BottomRopeElbow]

@English_Jew Who’s they?

[WholeCogan @BottomRopeElbow]

@bivouac444 He is in the larger of the 2 groups

[WholeCogan @BottomRopeElbow]

@AEWNeckbeard They’re having fun with their friends.

[WholeCogan @BottomRopeElbow]

@WONF4W Ya know. Doing stuff and everything like that

[WholeCogan @BottomRopeElbow]

@GiantsNationPod It’s a sin he’s not wearing a single bar

[WholeCogan @BottomRopeElbow]

@Switchblade97 200,000 buys for All In. Source? Tony Khan’s Ass. Dave fetched it himself. I’m

[WholeCogan @BottomRopeElbow]

@UpdatingOnRome I would do nothing differently. I would just debauch and party until I got assassinated.

[WholeCogan @BottomRopeElbow]

@davemeltzerWON “is not something people want to hear, but the actual reason it happened is even more so.”

You’re a professional writer?

[WholeCogan @BottomRopeElbow]

@57u2l @davemeltzerWON “Yep, she resigned.”

She did not, in fact, resign.