Marcus Agrippa: Right-hand Man of Caesar Augustus

Other titles by Lindsay Powell

ALL THINGS UNDER THE SUN

How Modern Ideas Are Really Ancient

EAGER FOR GLORY

The Untold Story of Drusus the Elder,

Conqueror of Germania

GERMANICUS

The Magnificent Life and Mysterious Death

of Rome’s Most Popular General

COMBAT

Roman Soldier versus Germanic Warrior,

1st Century AD

For Mark,

Partner and Friend.

Foreword by Steven Saylor

Preface

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

List of Maps

Chronology

List of Consuls

Roman Names

Stemmae (family trees)

1. New Man in Rome

2. Champion of the New Caesar

3. Fighter on Land and Sea

4. Mastermind of Victory at Actium

5. Architect of the New Rome

6. Statesman of the Roman World

7. Associate of Augustus

8. Noblest Man of His Day

9. Assessment

Appendix 1: Res Publica: The Commonwealth System of Government of the Late Roman Republic

Appendix 2: Agrippa’s Travels

Glossary

Place Names

Ancient Sources

Notes

Bibliography

I first met Marcus Agrippa in the guise of a Scottish actor named Andrew Keir. The time was half a century ago. The place was a drive-in theatre outside the small town of Goldthwaite, Texas. The film was
Cleopatra
.

The historical figures in the movie made an indelible (indeed, life-changing) impression on me – or at least some of them did. I would never forget Rex Harrison as Caesar, Richard Burton as Antony, and of course Elizabeth Taylor in the title role – or for that matter, Roddy McDowall’s waspish turn as Augustus. Even as a boy, I thought he was woefully miscast.

But Agrippa? Agrippa made almost no impression on me at all. Afterward I would vaguely recall a bristling (and historically questionable) beard, a gruff, military bearing, and lots of carping about Cleopatra (which in the context of the film made him one of the bad guys). A few years later, Andrew Keir would make a much stronger impression playing Dr. Quatermass, and my image of Agrippa would become hazier and more confused than ever.

You know what they say: you never get a second chance to make a first impression. And so, in my mind, Agrippa became relegated to the chorus of history, at best a bit player – a drab workhorse in the business of empire-building, lacking the greatness of Augustus, the glamour of Cleopatra, the gory exit of Caesar, or Antony’s tragic aura.

That view of Agrippa – a minor player, dimly glimpsed in the background – has been the standard view, not only in popular culture but in the work of historians. Things might have gone differently if Agrippa’s memoirs had survived, and we had his version of events. Very little written material passes through the ruthless sieve of time; a first-person account that happens to endure can go a long way to securing one’s place in history. But Agrippa’s memoirs are lost.

Agrippa’s place in history might also be different had he lived in an earlier age. In the centuries before Agrippa, our histories of Rome are crammed with the exploits of swaggering generals, daring heroes, radical politicians, and even rebel slaves. Amid these figures, a man like Agrippa would surely have stood out. But Agrippa lived in, and helped to shape, the transitional period between the freewheeling Republic and the emperor-centric Principate. In the centuries after Agrippa – thanks in no small part to his legacy – the histories dilate upon the imperial succession, until all we can see are the emperors. Despite his pivotal role – perhaps because of it – Agrippa gets lost in the shuffle.

Lindsay Powell would seek to redress this situation. The result is the book you hold in your hands.

There has been no biography of Agrippa in English for almost eighty years. The time has come for a full-scale reassessment, and Powell has risen to the task, scrupulously researching the scattered sources and clearly explicating the complicated details of Agrippa’s long and eventful career. As a result, we now have a much clearer view of the right-hand man of Augustus.

But where is the human interest in this story? As Powell points out, Augustus and Agrippa lived one of the great ‘buddy stories’ of history. (One of the most glaring false impressions left by the movie
Cleopatra
: the brusque, bearded Andrew Keir seemed almost a father figure to the callow Roddy McDowell. In fact, Agrippa and Augustus were almost exactly the same age.) Perhaps a bit selfishly, I like it when historians flesh out the past, bringing passion and zest to the dry dust of long-ago lives. It makes my job – writing historical fiction – that much easier.

More than once in his introduction, Powell refers to working ‘like a detective’ to piece together the story of Agrippa’s life. Indeed, the working habits of the historian and the detective are not that far apart. The clues are widely scattered, and sometimes missing altogether, but the lure of the mystery draws us on – because there is indeed a mystery at the heart of this story, as there is at the heart of every biography: who
was
Marcus Vispanius Agrippa?

Turn the pages and find out.

A visitor to Rome will inevitably stop to admire the Christian Church of St Mary and the Martyrs in the Piazza della Rotonda. Better known as the Pantheon, this world famous temple was the great domed home of earlier pagan gods. Set upon towering columns of marble imported from Egypt, the ancient inscription on the entablature is cast in elegant bronze capitals. It begins with the name of its original builder, ‘M. AGRIPPA’. This fantastic building – one of several erected by Agrippa in this part of the city – was actually rebuilt by the Emperor Hadrian over a century and half later, after it had been destroyed by fire. Agrippa’s Pantheon probably looked very different, but it is telling that the famous builder of the great wall in remote Britannia chose not to put his own name on the temple but retained his antecedent’s. It was a mark of respect for the man who made it possible for Caesar Augustus to claim ‘I found a city of brick and leave it one of marble’ (Cassius Dio,
Roman History
56.30.3). It was one of many things Augustus relied on Agrippa to carry out for him during a lifetime of high adventure and exceptional achievement.

It is not stretching a point to say that without his devoted aide and indispensable deputy Augustus would never have been able to secure his position as leader of the Roman Empire by winning a devastating civil war, or to rule it as successfully as he did in peacetime. If there was ever someone who personified the term ‘right-hand man’ he was M. Agrippa. From an early age, Agrippa’s fate was inextricably linked to the great nephew of the Perpetual Dictator Iulius Caesar. How the two men became best friends and together combined their talents to transform their world in turmoil is one of the great buddy stories of history.

Agrippa was a remarkable and multifaceted man who complemented his friend in age, outlook, personality and skills. He was a talented general on land and a fine admiral at sea, a pragmatic diplomat, a hard working public official, a generous philanthropist and the loyalest of friends. He was Augustus’ ‘go-to guy’, the man the boss turned to whenever he needed a difficult job done, whether it was beating tough guerillas in northern Spain or fixing creaking sewers in Rome. There were many times when he could have challenged Augustus and usurped power for himself, yet he did not. It seems he was never tempted. Intriguing to historians is to ponder the answer to the question of what drove him to sublimate his own desire for power – and still put his life at risk – when he had the means to take it and to be content with serving another? Or was it, in fact, that simple?

That life of selfless service put Agrippa in the forefront of world events. He was well connected and personally knew many of the great men of the age – Iulius Caesar, Cicero, M. Antonius and King Herod. He was also probably the most
travelled man of his age. By the end of his life there were few places in the Roman Empire which Agrippa had not personally visited. Augustus implicitly trusted his friend’s judgment and delegated him decision-making powers that finally matched his own. The result was that the world, which emerged from the bloody conflict following Caesar’s assassination into one of peace under the protector-ship of Augustus, was in large measure shaped by his right-hand man.

Agrippa wrote an autobiography. Sadly not a word of it survives. Fortunately details of his life are recorded in a number of surviving accounts by ancient world historians – among them Appian, Cassius Dio, Josephus, Nikolaos of Damaskos, Pliny the Elder, Plutarch, Seneca the Elder, Strabo, Suetonius and Velleius Paterculus. Inscriptions from public buildings attest to his extensive travels. Additionally there are statue busts and coins which give us a very good impression of how he actually looked in life. Like a detective, by critically assembling this diverse source material, it
is
possible to convincingly reconstruct the life story of Agrippa and to create a nuanced portrait of the man and with it to make a critical assessment of his achievements.

Agrippa has been the subject of close study and scholarly biographies, the earliest of which was 1717. In more recent times German readers have been served by a popular work by Helmut Signon in 1978 and French readers have been fortunate to have access to Michel Roddaz’s excellent academic reference published in 1984. Italian readers have the collected papers of the XVII Giornate Filologiche Genovesi of 1989 edited by the University of Genoa. All three are now out of print. The last biography of Agrippa in English, however, was published in London in 1937 by Frederick Adam Wright. Its author popularized the landmark volume by Meyer Reinhold – his doctoral thesis in fact – published in New York in 1933 (Dr Reinhold died in July 2002). Today, either biography is extremely difficult to find outside a major university library. A new telling of the life of this noteworthy man is long overdue in any language and I am fortunate to have had the opportunity – no, the privilege – to be the one to do so.