Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa

Roman administrator and engineer

• Born: c. 63 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Unknown
• Died: March, 12 b.c.e.
• Place of death: Campania (now in Italy)

Agrippa provided Emperor Augustus with the military support he needed to establish the Roman principate. Agrippa’s gift for planning and building contributed to the improvement of Rome’s roads, water supply, and major public buildings.

Early Life

Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa (uh-GRIHP-uh) seems linked with Octavian (as the emperor Augustus was called before 27 b.c.e.) almost from birth. They were born into politically insignificant families in about the same year. Agrippa’s equestrian (middle-class) family was obscure, and the family name, Vipsanius, was so unaristocratic that in later life he preferred not to use it at all. He and Octavian were friends from childhood and attended school together, according to the emperor’s court biographer.

Nothing certain is known of Agrippa’s life before 44 b.c.e. It seems safe to assume that he performed the military service that young men of his class were expected to undertake at that stage of their lives. At the time of Julius Caesar’s assassination, Agrippa was with Octavian, Caesar’s grandnephew, in Greece, where they had been sent to study. Agrippa seems to have been chosen by Caesar as a suitable companion for Octavian, along with Gaius Maecenas and several other solid, if unspectacular, young men. When Octavian decided to return to Rome, claim his inheritance from Caesar, and become embroiled in the political and military struggle that had been ravaging the Mediterranean world for almost a century, Agrippa accompanied him.

In spite of his youth, Agrippa helped raise an army to oppose Caesar’s assassins and to give Octavian leverage against Marc Antony, who had impounded Caesar’s papers and money and hoped to assume the dead dictator’s place. Although Antony and Octavian reached an accord in order to pursue Caesar’s assassins, relations between them soon soured. In 41, with Antony in the east, his brother Lucius revolted against Octavian’s authority and in opposition to his efforts to provide land for Caesar’s retiring veteran soldiers. Agrippa forced Lucius to surrender early in 40 b.c.e., the first of his many victories on Octavian’s behalf.

Life’s Work

Agrippa proved how indispensable he was to Octavian by filling several important offices during the following few years. As governor of Gaul, he suppressed a revolt in the strategic southern district of Aquitania. In 37 b.c.e., he was Octavian’s colleague in the consulship and built up the navy to oppose Sextus, who was attacking Roman shipping from bases in Sicily in a final act of opposition to the Caesarean faction’s takeover of the state. This campaign brought Agrippa’s engineering abilities to the fore, as he linked Lake Avernus with the Bay of Naples to create a harbor where the new fleet could be trained. His improved grappling equipment played a significant role in Sextus’s defeat.

Augustus liked to boast that he had found Rome brick and left it marble, but Agrippa’s buildings were as much responsible for that accomplishment as anything the emperor did. Agrippa began making his mark by repairing and upgrading the city’s aqueducts during his time as an aedile in 33 b.c.e., a responsibility that he kept in his own hands for the rest of his life. The first of his aqueducts bore the name of the Julian family, into which Octavian had been adopted by Caesar’s will. Agrippa’s major building contributions were the Pantheon, one of the largest domed structures erected in antiquity, and the baths that bore his name. The Pantheon, which visitors to Rome still admire, bears Agrippa’s name on the frieze, but it was rebuilt by Hadrian c. 133 c.e. How much of Agrippa’s original design remains is a disputed question. Also to Agrippa’s credit were a granary and a new bridge over the Tiber River. He constructed buildings and roads in the provinces as well.

If he had any political ambitions, Agrippa subordinated them to Octavian’s needs. He contributed significant victories over frontier tribes in Illyria in 35 and 34 b.c.e. and should be credited with defeating Antony and Cleopatra VII at the Battle of Actium in 31 b.c.e. That victory removed Octavian’s last rival and made him the undisputed ruler of Rome.

Rome had been rent by bloody civil strife since 133 b.c.e., because the Empire had outgrown the republican constitution under which it had functioned since the overthrow of the last Etruscan king in 509 b.c.e. Annually elected magistrates who shared their power and could veto one another’s actions could not effectively govern an empire stretching from Spain to Syria. As Julius Caesar had found, however, the Romans would not tolerate a monarch. He had taken the illegal position of dictator for life, a stopgap measure that probably crystallized the resentment against him into a fatal conspiracy.

Octavian’s problem was the same as Caesar’s: to find a way for one man to govern the Roman Empire while preserving the appearance of the old Republic. Between 31 and 27 b.c.e., Octavian relied on holding the consulship, with Agrippa as his colleague in 28 and 27 b.c.e. While Octavian was away from Rome trying to stabilize affairs in the urbanized, Greek-speaking east (which resented its domination by the agricultural and Latin west), Agrippa directed governmental affairs in Italy and the west with the aid of Maecenas.

These two men seem to have been most influential in helping Octavian solve the dilemma of governing Rome. The historian Dio Cassius records a debate among the three of them, with speeches by Gaius Maecenas and Agrippa advocating, respectively, that Octavian become a constitutional monarch or restore the Republic. The speeches summarize the two philosophical points of view, but they probably have no historical validity. The settlement that Octavian worked out with the senate in 27 b.c.e. appeared on the surface to gratify the Romans’ desire to see their Republic restored, but it actually granted to Octavian (by that time called Augustus) all the civilian and military powers necessary to make him an effective ruler.

This subtle monarchy, called the principate, had one flaw. Because it was not technically a legal magistracy or a hereditary monarchy, it could not be passed on to a successor designated by the princeps, the head of state. In 23 b.c.e., Augustus was taken ill and almost died. In the depths of his illness, he gave his signet ring, which served as his signature and the symbol of his power, to Agrippa, perhaps indicating his desire that his loyal friend succeed him. On his recovery, Augustus gave Agrippa proconsular power similar to his own.

In spite of his respect for Agrippa, Augustus soon realized that the aristocratic senate would never accept him as princeps because of his plebeian origins. Augustus hoped to groom some member of his own family to succeed him, but he had difficulty finding anyone suitable. He had only one child, a daughter, Julia, so he promoted the career of his nephew Marcellus by sharing the consulship with him and marrying him to Julia.

The attention showered on Marcellus provoked the first strain between Agrippa and Augustus. It was said of Agrippa that, while he did not want to be the first man in the Empire, he would be second to only one man. His departure to govern the eastern provinces, though touted as a promotion, seems to have been regarded by Agrippa as a kind of exile. He did not return to Rome until after Marcellus’s untimely death in 22 b.c.e. In 20 and 19 b.c.e., Agrippa put down minor revolts in Gaul and Spain. His policy in dealing with the provinces was to defend, not expand, the borders. Soon after Agrippa’s death, Augustus began listening to other advice, and Rome suffered two of its worst defeats ever in Germany.

Not all Agrippa’s service to Augustus was military. In 28 b.c.e., he married Octavian’s niece Marcella; in 21 b.c.e., with Augustus’s approval, he divorced her to marry the widow Julia, who was then about sixteen. Augustus may have taken him as his son-in-law because Agrippa had become so powerful and so popular that he had to be taken into the Imperial family or suppressed like an enemy. With Julia, Agrippa had two daughters and three sons, two of whom Augustus adopted and promoted as possible successors.

Augustus continued to honor Agrippa and to associate him in the Imperial power. In 18 b.c.e., Agrippa was given tribunician power, one of the basic grants on which Augustus’s position rested. The holder of this power could veto the actions of any other Roman magistrate. The grant was renewed in 13 b.c.e. By March of the next year, Agrippa had quieted a revolt in Pannonia (in modern Yugoslavia) and returned to Rome ill. He died by the end of the month, and his ashes were laid in the Julian family mausoleum.

Significance

Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa was a remarkable man, willing to subordinate his military and engineering genius to the service of a friend who was less talented than he. Writers such as Suetonius and Cornelius Tacitus, who could find some hint of scandal to besmirch any reputation, report nothing of the kind about Agrippa. In an age when treachery and shifting alliances were common in politics, Agrippa displayed unswerving loyalty to Augustus for more than thirty years. His support enabled Augustus to defeat his rivals and assume power in the first place. His buildings and public works—many of them financed out of his personal funds—contributed to the well-being and happiness of the populace of Rome. This general good feeling was an essential element in maintaining the stability of the principate. It is extremely doubtful that Augustus could have taken power in the first place or held it for long without Agrippa’s assistance.

Not only did Agrippa have a profound impact on the course of events in the first century b.c.e. and for some time after that, but he also contributed directly as the progenitor of two later emperors. His daughter Agrippina the Elder was the mother of Caligula and the grandmother (through her daughter) of Nero. While his descendants may not have been popular leaders, Agrippa cannot be blamed for all of their flaws. Through a complex web of Imperial marriages, they also carried the genes of Augustus and Marc Antony.

Agrippa would be better known if his autobiography and his geographical commentary had survived. The latter was used to make a map, which was prominently displayed in Rome and was an important source for Strabo, Pliny the Elder, and other writers with geographic or ethnographic interests. The opinion of antiquity, that Agrippa was the noblest Roman of his day, has not been revised by later historians.

Bibliography

Badian, E. “Notes on the Laudatio of Agrippa.” Classical Journal 76 (1981): 97-109. This article discusses a recently discovered papyrus containing a portion of Augustus’s funeral oration for Agrippa.

Buchan, J. Augustus. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1937. This slightly romantic biography of the first Roman emperor covers in detail Agrippa’s contribution to his success.

Evans, H. B. “Agrippa’s Water Plan.” American Journal of Archeology 86 (1982): 401-411. A good analysis of Agrippa’s contribution to Rome’s system of aqueducts, which provided more water per person in Augustus’s day than does the system of modern Rome.

Firth, J. B. Augustus Caesar and the Organization of the Empire of Rome. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1903. Helpful references to Agrippa throughout and an insightful chapter on Maecenas and Agrippa.

McKechnie, P. “Dio Cassius’s Speech of Agrippa: A Realistic Alternative to Imperial Government?” Greece and Rome 28 (October, 1981): 150-155. Agrippa’s speech is a set piece, not truly reflecting his views on democracy. In other passages, Dio describes Agrippa as an ardent supporter of monarchy.

Reinhold, M. Marcus Agrippa. Geneva, N.Y.: W. F. Humphrey Press, 1933. Despite some traces of hero worship, this volume is still among the most thorough studies of Agrippa available in English. It follows his career and characterizes him as a self-made man, lacking in the subtle intellect of Augustus or Maecenas but a master of practical matters of organization.

Shipley, Frederick W. Agrippa’s Building Activities in Rome. St. Louis, Mo.: Washington University, 1933. This short book studies Agrippa’s building activity by location in various districts of Rome. It also discusses the problem of determining exactly where some of the buildings were. Shipley argues that the Pantheon as Hadrian rebuilt it bears little resemblance to Agrippa’s original plan.

Woodward, Christopher. Rome: C. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Historical guide to the architecture of Rome fully describes each of two hundred buildings.