Agrippa — Review

Agrippa, the new novel by Robert Harris, is a supposed autobiography of the famous Roman general Marcus Agrippa, right hand man and personal friend of the Emperor Augustus, and military genius behind many of his victories, including the Battle of Actium fought against Anthony and Cleopatra in 31BC which, as they say, changed the direction of history forever.

The Augustus portrayed here is very much an antidote to that portrayed in the BBC I, Claudius TV series, where he comes across as a slightly bumbling, slightly dim, avuncular old man. Robert Harris' Augustus is nothing of the sort. Even though he is seen through the eyes of his best friend Agrippa, he is a scheming, manipulative and increasingly vicious Roman mobster. At some points in the story we find his behaviour difficult even for Agrippa to take.

Agrippa himself is much more introspective - although this may have something to do with the fact that he is secretly writing his own biography: at the end of a long career in the army and at the side of the now Emperor and god, he is fretting about an old war wound and needs to (in the modern parlance) vent. He is still a slightly lukewarm character, constantly suffering bouts of insecurity, not unlikable, but not the sort of person whom you would seek out at a dinner party. In particular, he worries endlessly about being descended from a plebeian. Until, that is, he admits to the reader that he thinks he is Julius Caesar’s real bastard son. Which rather changes things. If he is Caesar’s son, then he is not merely Augustus’s subordinate: he is his equal, perhaps even his superior. Augustus is only an adopted nephew, after all. And that might explain Agrippa's military genius, despite his obscure beginnings, and his rapid promotion to Augustus' side....

There are plenty of war stories, and plenty of engineering. Agrippa is as much engineer as soldier. We get biremes, triremes, quadruple- and even decaremes - iron claws locking ships together, molten fire, broken oars, rams and close hand-to-hand fighting. Then back to sleeping in tents, marching about in the mud and generally having a soldier’s life. Agrippa tells us often that he likes being with the soldiers - and this resonates with the sort of military descriptions of, say, Caesar himself and Tacitus: all the best leaders sleep rough, are first to go out, fight hand-to-hand with the enemy. After a bit, even Agrippa realises that we can have too much of fighting and as he gets older and wiser, he sets his mind to engineering and building rather than slashing and burning.

There are some nice touches along the way - the cities they pass through, the endless civil wars and the alliances made up, broken and made again; wars made up to distract from politics at home or to get personal enemies away from Rom; the destruction of foreigners as collateral damage in wars fought between individuals for supreme power back in Rome.

There is an endless succession of Roman houses and their occupants: Pompey's house goes to Anthony, Anthony's house goes to Agrippa. Rather like the wives - an endless merry-go-round.

Oddly, there is little sign of Agrippa’s worries about his last wife Julia, Augustus' own daughter, until quite late in the book, when we get more of Augustus’s morality laws and the obvious hypocrisy behind them.

Some of the more surprising parts for me are Agrippa’s work as a builder and engineer. His civilising and rebuilding of Rome, particularly the aqueducts and public bathing facilities, are genuinely interesting, especially if you have been there and know where to look. Harris captures the scenery of Rome and its development as an imperial city of some million people. There is something satisfying about the contrast between the man who spends one chapter destroying cities and the next worrying about how to get clean water into one. Agrippa himself, though, can be a bit boring. The Roman aqueduct-meister Fronto, whose lengthy work on aqueducts, is boring too. There is a certain amount of earnestness about the whole thing.

Augustus is much more interesting.

He starts as Octavius. Then he becomes Caesar. Finally he becomes Augustus. And each time he seems to shed another skin, like some terrible spider or scorpion, moving further and further away from being a mere man and closer to becoming an immortal.

That is the real strength of the book. Agrippa is the soldier, engineer and narrator, but Augustus is the great looming presence behind everything. What begins as the story of a young Roman becomes a study of how a man acquires absolute power - and how, in doing so, he gradually stops being a man at all.