Harris Novel Retells Rome's Rise Through Agrippa
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- Robert Harris's new novel "Agrippa" narrates events from civil war through Julius Caesar's assassination to Octavius's apotheosis as Caesar Augustus, told from the point of view of Octavius's right-hand man rather than the emperor himself.
- Marcus Agrippa left behind "no speeches, few letters and only a couple of sentences of direct quotation," yet Octavius mentioned him just twice in the Res Gestae Divi Augusti despite his role as "effective co-ruler of the Roman world for many years."
- Harris depicts Octavius as vain, clever, sickly, ambitious, manipulative and prickly, while his childhood friend Agrippa is established as a "meathead" who loves fighting and later, infrastructure projects like aqueducts.
- The novel is framed as Agrippa's memoir, written in haste at age 50 after he returns from Illyricum with a gammy leg and discovers his wife in bed with his son-in-law — who also happens to be the emperor's adopted son.
- A plot twist addresses the real parentage of the apparently low-born Agrippa, a thread of scholarly speculation since 1937 according to Harris's afterword.
- Agrippa's most enduring real-world monument is seven words carved above the Pantheon: "M F AGRIPPA L F COS TERTIUM FECIT" — "Marcus Agrippa, son of Lucius, in his third consulship, did it."
Why it matters: Harris hands the founding myth of the Roman Empire to the man who actually built it — and whom Octavius/Augustus spent decades writing out of the record. Readers of historical fiction gain access to Rome's transition from republic to empire through an engineer-soldier whose aqueducts and the Pantheon outlasted every speech Cicero ever gave, making the book as much about historical memory as about ancient power.
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