[5] Crassus belonged to the Licinia Gens. His name was M. Licinius Crassus Dives. He was the son of P. Licinius Crassus Dives, who was consul B.C. 97, and afterwards governor of the nearer Spain. In B.C. 93 P. Crassus had a triumph. He was afterwards employed in the Marsic war; and in B.C. 89 he was censor with L. Julius Cæsar, who had been consul in B.C. 90.
M. Licinius Crassus, whose life Plutarch has written, was the youngest son of the Censor. The year of his birth is uncertain; but as he was above sixty when he left Rome for his Parthian campaign B.C. 55, he must have been born before B.C. 115. Meyer (Orator. Roman. Fragment.) places the birth of Crassus in B.C. 114.
[6] Kaltwasser makes this passage mean that Crassus merely took his brother's wife and her children to live with him; which is contrary to the usual sense of the Greek words and readers the following sentence unmeaning.
Kaltwasser observes that we do not know that such marriages were in use among the Romans. I know no rule by which they were forbidden. (Gaius, i. 58, &c.)
[7] The punishment of a Vestal Virgin for incontinence was death. She was placed alive in a subterranean vault with a light and some food. (Dionysius, ix. 40: Liv. 8. c. 15; Juvenal, Sat. iv. 8.) The man who debauched a Vestal was also put to death. The Vestal Virgins had full power of disposing of their property; they were emancipated from the paternal power by the fact of being selected to be Vestal Virgins (Gaius, i. 130); and they were not under the same legal disabilities as other women (Gaius, i. 145; according to Dion Cassius, 49. c. 38, Octavia and Livia received privileges like those of the Vestals).
Another Licinia, a Vestal, had broken her vow, and was punished B.C. 113.
[8] See the Life of Crassus, c. 12; and the Life of Sulla, c. 35.
[9] This may hardly be a correct translation of ἀργυρογνωμόνας: but it is something like the meaning.
[10] King Archidamus of Sparta, the second of the name, who commanded the Peloponnesian war, B.C. 431. Plutarch (Life of Demosthenes, c. 17) puts this saying in the mouth of one Krobylus, a demagogue.
[11] Cicero (Brutus, c. 66) speaks of the oratory of Crassus, and commends his care and diligence; but he speaks of his natural parts as not striking. Crassus spoke on the same side as Cicero in the defence of Murena, of Caelius, and of Balbus (Meyer, Orator. Roman. Fragmenta, p. 382).