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If you’re one of those people who thinks about the Roman empire several times a week, Robert Harris has you covered. He follows his trilogy of novels about the life of Cicero and his one-off about the unpleasantness in Pompeii with a narrative that takes us from civil war through the assassination of Julius Caesar, with all the bickering and bloodshed that follows, on to the decisive battle of Actium and Octavius’s apotheosis as Caesar Augustus. We meet Cicero, Fulvia, Lepidus, two Caesars and a burly Antony (“Imagine, if you will, a statue of Hercules with a club in one hand, a wineskin in the other”).
Here’s the clever bit: he narrates it all from the point of view of Octavius’s right-hand man, Agrippa, a much less well-remembered figure. Harris tells us he “left behind no speeches, few letters and only a couple of sentences of direct quotation”. Yet Agrippa was “effective co-ruler of the Roman world for many years” and “the greatest general of the period”. Octavius couldn’t have risen without him, but he seems to have done his best to write him out of the story afterwards, according him only two passing mentions in the Res Gestae Divi Augusti.
Harris’s Octavius is vain, clever, sickly, ambitious, manipulative and prickly. His childhood friend Agrippa, the only person he sort-of trusts, is established early on as a bit of a meathead. Their first encounter is when Agrippa duffs up a couple of bullies he catches picking on a weaker boy; mostly for the pleasure of duffing a couple of people up. He doesn’t know at the time that the beneficiary of this duffing is Caesar’s nephew. They become friends: “He helped me with my classwork. I showed him how to fight.” They share a teacher: “He instilled in Octavius especially a lifelong love of poetry, although my literary tastes, to his despair, have always tended towards works on engineering and military history.” Even as they rise to power, our man’s eye is on the duffing. Octavius returns to Rome amid great danger to give a rousing speech, and Agrippa reports only: “His voice carried well. I did not pay much attention to what he said. I was too preoccupied scanning his audience for potential assassins.”
Harris’s framing conceit is that the text we are reading is Agrippa’s memoir, written in some haste and high feeling. Agrippa, now an old man of 50, has come home early from an expedition to duff up the barbarians in Illyricum. He has a gammy leg, which is about to kill him. He limps in to find his wife in bed with his son-in-law. Since the son-in-law is also the emperor’s adopted son, he hesitates to get busy with his sword and instead retreats to his chamber. He’s feeling a bit sorry for himself and, uncharacteristically, he turns to words.
It is a sign of Harris’s discipline as a novelist that he has Agrippa tell his tale in almost comically unambitious prose. There’s a lot of pipe-laying in the military history department, of the “then the legions would wheel around the far side of the Black Sea by way of Hyrcania, the Captain Sea and the Caucasus, and march west” type. And he’s a bastard for an aqueduct, is Agrippa. Loves them; maybe even more than having a scrap. He’s never happier than when building infrastructure and explaining the engineering principles and logistics to the reader.
When Agrippa is stirred to reflection, he tends to reach for a well-worn phrase. “The sickly, pungent stink of death lurked round every corner.” “Mercy was now the order of the day.” “War, which I had once so relished, was gouged into the countryside like an open wound.” “Power makes monsters of us all.” “In the words of the old saying – if you strike at the king, you must be sure not to miss.” (That particular old saying, I think, comes from The Wire, but never mind.)
But from all this elegantly drab stuff emerges a more subtle portrait of the man and the age than you might expect. You get a persuasive portrait of a Rome exhausted by civil strife, and of the serpentine manoeuvrings of its rulers. Everyone is betraying everyone else, raising armies, marrying each other’s children, forming and breaking alliances. It’s hectic. And, gosh, all these people redrawing the map of the world and changing the course of history are young. The plot twist – a feature of scholarly speculation since 1937, Harris’s afterword tells us – concerns the real parentage of the apparently low-born Agrippa.
But that, like much else, it suited him to keep quiet about. His most enduring real-world monument is seven terse words in stone above the entrance to the Pantheon: M F AGRIPPA L F COS TERTIUM FECIT. “Marcus Agrippa, son of Lucius, in his third consulship, did it.”
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