My Review of Robert Harris' "Agrippa"

Caesar’s General

This is the fourth Robert Harris historical novel I have reviewed. (See: Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Robert Harris', "An Officer and A Spy: A Novel", Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Robert Harris' "Munich: A Novel", and Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Robert Harris' "V2" ) Here Harris in the voice of Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa retells his life story in the form of a dying man’s memoir starting from his very plebian beginning to rising to the heights of the Roman Empire. His rise is the result of his boyhood and ultimately lifelong friendship with Octavian who would become Agustus Caesar, the supreme ruler of the empire.

 

Agrippa was not only Caesar’s general, but he was also his admiral, and, in many respects, he was the Robert Moses of Rome by building aqueducts, public baths, parks, and waste removal systems. When Agrippa was 19 and Octavian was 18, they both exhibited high-order military skills. By the time there were 30 they were in charge of all Roman and land and naval forces.

 

Here you have to brush up on your Shakespeare because Octavian had to defeat Brutus and Cassius and later defeat Antony and Cleopatra. While Agrippa was the military strategist, Octavian was the political strategist in outmaneuvering all his rivals from the outside and from within. He does this through guile and having his children engage in strategic marriages, including forcing Agrippa to divorce his wife in order to marry Octavian’s daughter.   

 

So great was Agrippa’s military skills that in a period of 18 months he built a port and an entire naval fleet that would successfully defeat Sextus Pompeaus’s pirates in the Bay of Naples. Would that our Navy work with the same alacrity today?

 

Harris gives a very real sense of the power politics of the late Roman Republic and the dawn of the empire. From Julius’s Caesar crossing Rubicon the days of the republic were numbered, and constant fighting made the once great Roman Senate irrelevant. Harris also brings up with anecdotal evidence, but no proof that Agrippa was Julius Caesar’s illegitimate son.

 

Harris does a real service in presenting the grandeur that was Rome in a very readable format. He gets the history right and gives the reader a chance to be a fly on the wall when many of the great decisions were made along with getting a real sense of what life in the Roman army and navy was like.