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.

Trump Crosses the Rubicon

In 49 BCE Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in northern Italy thereby declaring war on the Roman Senate. The phrase has since come to mean “passing the point of no return.” President Trump with his B-2 bomber strike on three Iranian nuclear facilities has gone where no president has gone before, including Bush II, Obama, Trump I, and Biden. As a result of this action the middle east has been irrevocably changed, hopefully for the better.

 

It remains to be seen how successful the bombing mission was and to what degree Iran will retaliate. It will take time to do a bomb damage assessment, but the early indications are that the damage was substantial. The key question will be how hard the underground Fordow site was hit. (See: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2025/06/israel-and-iran-fog-of-war.html )

 

The bombing raid was coordinated with Israeli strikes earlier in the week that took out Iranian air defenses in southern Iran. With the Iranian nuclear threat presumably removed, Israel prime minister Netanyahu will now have a freer hand to make peace in Gaza. He now may be strong enough to deal with the hard right members of his cabinet.

 

When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he reportedly said “the die is cast.”  The dice are now rolling in the middle east which means the middle east will look quite a bit different than the way it looked two days ago.

 

One last point, Wall Street’s “TACO trade” (Trump always chickens out on tariffs”) may no longer be valid.  (See:

https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2025/06/my-ucla-anderson-forecast-presentation.html )   If anything, Trump proved that he is not a chicken.     

A Funeral in Washington

We buried John McCain yesterday and most of our Nation mourned and many watched on live television the four days of services celebrating his life. We won’t know for a while whether his passing represents the end of a once noble era that has been trampled under the ever-increasing weight of tribal politics shamelessly lead on by our President or a renewal of the American spirit. The realist in me suggests the former while the romantic in me hopes for the latter.

Sometimes funerals signal major change such as those of Julius Caesar of Shakespearian fame and Edward VII’s in 1910 which heralded the end of the European Century, although few realized it at the time. In contrast Ted Kennedy’s funeral in 2009, whose memorial was also held in the Capitol Rotunda, left nary a mark on our politics. In fact in his absence the political discourse continued to worsen.

While watching McCain’s memorial service in the Capitol is was difficult not to notice the supreme hypocrisy of Paul Ryan, Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell. Their conduct stood in complete contrast to McCain’s. All three are, what I have characterized before, moral eunuchs. Similarly John McCain’s great friend Lindsey Graham has become a Trump toady. I just wonder what McCain thought of Graham’s new relationship with Trump.

Nevertheless because I still have faith in our better angels, perhaps the motley crew mentioned above might have been moved just the slightest by the example of John McCain’s life. One can only hope. A harbinger will be who Arizona governor Doug Ducey appoints to fill McCain’s shoes. Will he/she be a McTrump or will he pick someone in the style of Meghan McCain?

In the Jewish religion we are now entering the season of repentance.  There is still time for Ryan, Pence, McConnell and Graham to see the error of their ways and repent. Otherwise in their faiths they will learn that the cost of a tax cut or Supreme Court Justice will be their immortal souls.