A closer look
Marcus Licinius Crassus was one of the wealthiest men in ancient Rome who built his massive fortune entirely through real estate speculation and running the city's only heavily armed, privately funded fire department. When a residential building inevitably caught fire, his trained slaves would rush to the scene but absolutely refuse to put out the flames until the desperate homeowner agreed to sell the burning property to Crassus for a microscopic fraction of its actual value. If they bravely refused his extortionate offer, he simply let their house burn to the ground, bought the ruined land for pennies, and built a new highly profitable apartment complex on top of the ashes. He basically invented the concept of aggressive venture capitalism and disaster profiteering, proving that the ancient world was just as ruthlessly corporate as Wall Street, except they replaced hostile takeovers with actual hostile arson
