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 First published in Great Britain in 2015 by PEN & SWORD MILITARY An imprint of Pen & Sword Books Ltd 47 Church Street Barnsley South Yorkshire S70 2AS Copyright © Lindsay Powell, 2015 ISBN 978-1-84884-617-3 eISBN 9781473853911 The right of Lindsay Powell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing. Typeset by Concept, Huddersfield, West Yorkshire HD4 5JL. Printed and bound in England by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY. Pen & Sword Books Ltd incorporates the imprints of Pen & Sword Archaeology, Atlas, Aviation, Battleground, Discovery, Family History, History, Maritime, Military, Naval, Politics, Railways, Select, Social History, Transport, True Crime, and Claymore Press, Frontline Books, Leo Cooper, Praetorian Press, Remember When, Seaforth Publishing and Wharncliffe. For a complete list of Pen & Sword titles please contact PEN & SWORD BOOKS LIMITED 47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, S70 2AS, England E-mail: [email protected] Web-site: www.pen-and-sword.co.uk For Mark, Partner and Friend. Contents 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 Foreword by Steven Saylor 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