The Ancients - Agrippa and Augustus: The Golden Age

Episode Date: November 12, 2020

The Romans, an ancient conquering civilisation with an empire that spread from Europe across the Balkans to the Middle East and North Africa. For this episode, we are returning to our study of one of the most influential men in Roman History, Marcus Agrippa. Lindsay Powell came back to talk Tristan through the later life of the right hand man of Octavian / Augustus. After bringing about the end of the last civil war of the Roman Republic, and his great victory at the Battle of Actium in 31BC, came Agrippa’s twenty golden years. His loyalty to Octavian unwavering, Agrippa delivered countless architectural and artistic developments to Ancient Rome and other cities across the Empire. Lindsay and Tristan explore the lengths to which Agrippa’s devotion to his Emperor would stretch, whether to marriage or even to gifting his own sons.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's podcast, you might remember just over a month ago, I was delighted to get on the show,

Lindsay Powell, to talk through the early life of one of the most remarkable figures in Roman history, Agrippa. And I'm delighted to say that in this follow-up podcast we are continuing the story. Now in the last podcast we talked about the rise of Agrippa, particularly during the 30s BC where Agrippa and his best buddy Octavian, they fight against the forces of Mark Antony and others, ultimately culminating in Agrippa's great naval victory at the Battle of Actium. And in this podcast we are continuing the story, we are talking about Agrippa during his golden age shall we say, the many achievements that he accomplishes between 30 BC and his death almost 20 years later. Lindsay as you're no doubt, is a fantastic communicator. It was amazing to listen to him talk for well over an hour about these achievements of Agrippa during these last 20

years or so. Amazing chat and I hope you enjoy. Here is Lindsay Powell. Lindsay, it's great to have you back on. Thank you very much, Nate. Looking forward to it. So we've got to Actium. Mark Antony and Cleopatra, they famously met their demise. What's the situation for Agrippa and Octavian in the immediate aftermath at the end of this conflict? Well, it's interesting. The situation is still confusing because after the Battle of Actium on the 2nd of September is declared a victory, what he called himself was Imperator Kaiser

Emperor Caesar. That's the way he styled himself as opposed to Octavian. He declares victory and then he goes basically to Maenon in Greece and decides what to do. And he then dispatches Agrippa to take the troops that are really of Marcus Antonius' side. There are 19 legions, which is a heck of a lot of people. If you reckon on a number between 3,000 and 4,000 men per legion, they may not have all been full legions. But still, 19 multiplied by several thousand is a large number of people. Some would have been drafted into Octavian's own units to bulk up the numbers because there had been casualties. But the majority, it seems, that he wanted demobbed.

And the person that Octavian gave the task of demobbing to was his right-hand man, Agrippa. And I think that's very telling because if you think about it, you've got a number of things going on. One of which is you've got the victorious troops saying, we want pay. We've actually signed up for this because we actually wanted the rich spoils of war. When are we going to get our rewards for our service? Because many of those people have already been with Octavian since 44 and 43 BC, so they've been there a long time, already a decade. If you put all those people in the hands of an unscrupulous commander, you actually could create, if you're not careful, a rival to Octavian. So he chooses this right-hand man, Agrippa, to deal with the situation,

and dutifully, he works a solution. He actually takes them to Italy. They set up a number of towns called coloniae, which are really cities for the purpose of setting up veterans and retired troops in an ordered society, so they can run shops and they can run businesses and they can become city councils whatever they may well be it's a very established practice that's where Agrippa goes and his boss eventually has to deal with the situation where he has to track down where Marcus Aetonius is and where Cleopatra are that is resolved at Alexandria in 30 BC and Agrippa is still in it at this point. So with that sorted out, and the famous poisoning by Asp, if that's true even, of Cleopatra, now you have the undisputed

victor of this Actaean and Alexandrian war. And it really means that now Agrippa's in Rome waiting for Octavian to come back. And when he does, it's the reuniting of two old buddies, and Agrippa has everything under control and then they really have to decide what they're going to do because at this point then not only have they seen off all the conspirators of Julius Caesar's assassination which was in 44 BC Ides of March but in the subsequent series of campaigns they've seen off all the oppositions it's really only Octavian who's left. Lepidus who who was one of the original triumvirate members, is now the Pontifex Maximus. So he's kind of in a harmless, lifelong position. And it's for these two young men to decide what they're going to do.

I still find that fascinating how Augustus, Octavian, he was in Alexandria and Agrippa was in Rome, and yet they still work together so well. Well, this is the secret to, I think, their relationship. I don't know how we could describe it. It's a buddy relationship, but it's a profoundly trusting one. And I don't think there's very much that can be used as a comparator in the rest of history. And I think it really talks to the strength of Agrippa as an individual, that he knew his limits, he knew what he was capable of, and he did those things well.

In many situations, he was put in the position of being tempted. He had armies, he had power, he could have used that of and he did those things well. In many situations he was put in the position of being tempted, he had armies, he had power, he could have used that, but he did not. And whatever that pact was, that loyalty that was shown, Octavian understood it and was able to use it and rewarded and respected his friend all the more for it. He became the trusted advisor in pretty much all aspects of his life, all the way through to his final death. Remarkable recurring theme there. So when Octavian does return to Rome, how does he and Agrippa, how do they start laying the foundations for what will end up being the Roman Empire? Oh, it's interesting. In the first instance, what we see is that Agrippa in the years 29 to 23 actually spends a lot of time building. There's certainly a lot of money is available.

You have to imagine that when Egypt falls into the hands of Octavian, it's like Fort Knox multiplied by several times has suddenly fallen into this man's hand. Octavian is up to his eyeballs in debt. I mean, he's had to finance his army basically on a debt plan. And that's very interesting

because what Marcus Antonius had done, he robbed all the Greek cities and all the people that were his allies, got the money first and paid his troops. Octavian did the opposite. He promised them, you'll get lots of rewards, stick with me and I promise you'll get them. Actually, then what he did when he had won, he actually then released the money to his troops and actually bought a great deal of loyalty. And a lot of these colonia were paid for out of the spoils of the Actaean War. Some of that makes its way into public buildings, and we'll talk about those a bit later.

So there's this idea that we have to actually spread the peace dividend, if you could call it that, amongst the populace at Rome so they get to see some of the benefits of this too. And after all, it's great optics if you can say, I'm actually spending all these war spoils on the people as opposed to keeping it all to myself, which often was the case of victorious commanders. And then there's the political dimension, that what really does Octavian now do? Because it's

very clear that his early agenda as a 19-year-old in the wake of Julius Caesar's assassination was to pursue to death every single one of the people who had actually been involved in that conspiracy and even create an avatar, the god Mars Ultor, the god of a vengeance, Mars, to personify this quest. And he builds, ultimately, a forum with the temple where this god is part of it. But in the meantime, there's this beautification program going on to spread the wealth. And this political question really comes to a head in 28 and 27 BC, where they have to sit down with the conscript fathers, the Senate, effectively, and to say, how are we going to make this work in future? Because this man has an immense army, which is really Octavian's army. Agrippa is involved in its command, but really the person it swears its oath

at sacramentum to is the grandnephew of Julius Caesar, whose name he bears. So how do they then decide how it's going to work? It seems to be there's two parts to it. In 28 BC, discussions begin, and it really comes to a conclusion in 27. And it's often called the Constitutional Settlement. It's a grand title that modern historians used, and I don't believe that's what it was called in Roman times. Effectively, there's this idea that the Senate will receive back the responsibility for running the Roman Commonwealth, what they call the Respublica. It means really public things. Commonwealth is the way to think

of it. It's not like a republic in the way that the country I live in is, or Germany or somewhere like that. And it's certainly not a monarchy like Britain is. So the idea is that the people and the Senate are in this kind of duality of running affairs of the city. And the issue has now become that really it's being run by one man, kind of with the threat of an army that he could take over things. And the settlement seems to run along these lines. He will basically resign his powers. The Senate will take back responsibility for large chunks of the empire. But crucially, the empire becomes a two-part system the provinces broadly speaking around the mediterranean shoreline become senatorial provinces and that's where every year the senate

will pick the governors and the tax collectors and they will be shipped out and they stand to make an awful lot of money out of that deal because at this time that's how a lot of these people make their money through those assignments but the provinces around the periphery are called praetorian provinces they're the ones ones that basically Augustus takes responsibility for. The idea being is that these aren't quite settled. There's trouble along the frontiers. It requires a deft touch. Ah, who better than Octavian to have this responsibility?

After all, he has the army anyway. So this sets in motion a model for running the empire for really frankly till its demise much, much later. And because Octavian in this, what is seen to be, or at least is portrayed in the sources as being a model for running the empire for really frankly till its demise much much later and because octavian in this what is seen to be or at least is portrayed in the sources as being an amazingly magnanimous decision effectively to yield back his powers because in a sense he was a dictator in everything but name the the senate comes up with a really interesting name and they think why do we call him romulus and actually augustus, as he will become, likes that. But in fact, he settles with this name Augustus, which really means something like revered one. There's not really a

way that it translates into English, but it's sort of between a place of being divine and superhuman and a heroic sort of figure with religious overtones. And that's what he becomes known as. So his full title becomes Imperator Kaiser D.B. Felius Augustus. So Caesar Augustus, son of a god, Augustus, the revered one. And that's how we know him now, is this title Augustus. It was an honorific title. He was very proud of it. And that new arrangement is how things are then arranged and continue. And what's really, really interesting is that part of the deal is that it's not just until you die. He has to keep going back every five or ten years to renew the powers. So the way that the Romans run their commonwealth is to term limit magistrate positions. So if you are going to stand for consul, there are two consuls, and you stand for a year. If you want

to be, for example, a tribune, you stand for a year, and you have what's called imperium. You have a quasi-military power in that role, and you can work within the powers that you're given, and you're not encouraged to exceed those because you're actually accountable for them at the end of it. It can be a review of how you performed. So it's very interesting that the outward look of this deal is that they come to this very interesting political-military pact

where the power in the army is granted to the new man called Augustus, and the Senate keeps what it thinks of being the territories which don't require the military angle, which are the ones where, frankly, all the money is. Now, in the past, before Actium, when we were talking about military matters with Octavian and Agrippa, usually Octavian would give the matters to Agrippa. But in this case, from what you were saying earlier, Agrippa actually takes a more administrative role.

He doesn't go out to these frontier provinces. Well, I think it's very interesting that Agrippa and the other members of his, shall we call it cabinet? I suppose Concilium is the way that he would think of it. One thing that's very interesting about Augustus, and you see this when you read the sources, is he usually surrounds himself by at least one trusted advisor, an adiutor, as it's often called, or just a friend, amicus. Sometimes it's a group of people, and he seems to operate best when he can actually bounce ideas off people.

And you see this writer back in Apollonia in 44 BC when he's surrounded by five or six people, of whom Agrippa is just a name at that point. So by the time we get to 27 BC, where this great deal is cut with the Senate, I have to imagine that Agrippa is part of that. He's already proved his trustworthiness, and you can imagine that he's also fabulously wealthy at this point. So one of the deals about being a victorious commander is you get to keep a lot of the spoils of the loser. And you can imagine that during the war with Sextus Pompeius in the 30s, and the Actaean war against Antony and Cleopatra, and lots of other things in between in Lyricum, there was gold, there were riches,

there was land, and Agrippa would have got his fair share, if not more than his fair share. And a lot of the things that he will do in his lifetime come out of this largesse that he's accumulated. So I think he's quite content. He's got the friendship of the things that he will do in his lifetime come out of this largesse that he's accumulated. So I think he's quite content. He's got the friendship of the most powerful man in the world. He's given a great length of rope to go and do pretty much what he wants within the various titles he begins to garner. And he does go out on these missions. He's given various tasks to do provinces to manage.

And one of the first things, by the way, that happens after... We'll now call him Augustus from now on to make it easier on the listeners because it gets very confusing. We've been alternating between Octavian and happens after, we'll now call him Augustus from now on, to make it easier on the listeners, because it gets very confusing. We've been alternating between Octavian and Augustus, but we'll call him Augustus now. One of the first things he does, he leaves Rome. He must have made a decision, I've got what I wanted, I'm just going to leave the room now.

And he goes off. He's got this idea that there are some unfinished things to do, there's some messiness that needs to be fixed. And where he sets his sights on, he goes to Gaul, which is really, at this point, still in a process of settling down. Agrippa had been there about 10, 15, 20 years before, building roads and beginning to settle towns and cities and get some order, which Julius Caesar had not done. There's an idea that Augustus may go off and begin a campaign against the Britons. There's all sorts of clues in Suetonius and there's poems by, I think it's Horace, that basically says that he has received kings from Britain and they show him a

whole bunch of fealty and, you know, maybe one of the things I could do is actually finish another job that Julius Caesar didn't do and actually go and conquer the Brits. But something grabs his attention, which is in northern Spain, and in fact he then spends the next two years actually in what we now call Cantabria and Asturias, which remained as yet unconquered. There have been 200 years spent by Roman consuls trying to subjugate the Iberian Peninsula. And the people, particularly in the north, have been really successful in keeping the Romans out. The Basque region really was able, like the indomitable Gauls in the Asterix cartoons, to basically keep the Romans away.

And when the Romans thought they'd quelled them, they would rise up and just fight all over again the following year. So that's where Augustus decides he's going to invest his newfound political capital. And he's going to leave Agrippa actually in Rome. And this seems to work very well. So Agrippa is able to turn his attention to basically, for example, finishing buildings that didn't get finished, repairing things that had fallen apart. And you have to remember a lot of

temples in Rome that we know were built were really generals making a pact with the gods, give me a victory and I'll build you a temple. So the general built the temple, having won the war, and forgets to provide money to keep the temple up. So the roofs cave in and the drapes start falling down and one of the things that Augustus and Agrippa between them do is start restoring and beautifying these temples because you have to imagine that Rome in the 30s and 20s BC is a pretty shabby place. It doesn't have a lot of the big buildings that we now think of. The Colosseum is 100 years away almost and some of the great big buildings in the forum haven't been built yet. So these are the sorts of projects that you begin to see Agrippa getting involved with, not least of which is things like repairing aqueducts and providing

water to the city. And it's extraordinary to me, for example, that we think of the Romans as being great plumbers and hydrologists, and they really know how to actually move water around, and they certainly did. Oftentimes what happened was, just like those temples i just talked about the person put in charge to do a bang-up job of building the aqueduct and a bit like the american attitudes of building freeways well they were built by eisenhower who needs to repair those they were built forever right and what you find with the gripper he spends money sometimes his own to repair these things so for example pliny the elder talks about he also formed 700 wells in addition to 500 fountains and 130 reservoirs many of them

magnificently adorned upon these works too he erected 300 statues of marble or bronze and 400 marble columns all in the space of a single year now whether that really was in the space of a single year we don't know because it's only pliny that tells us. But you can imagine there's this massive building program. And I wonder, and this is just purely right now speculation, with a lot of demobbed troops and a lot of money coming into the city, there is now the ability to do a sort of back to work program in a sense. And you can build things. The artisans, the Roman citizens will be the craftspeople building the really intricate stuff and slaves will be building all the brickwork and stuff so gripper is supervising that what's extraordinary is the fact that at the end of it we're seeing an introduction of all the things

that we now know rome is famous for for fountains and bath houses and all these sorts of things which had really been haphazard arrangements before so So the impression I have of Grippe is this amazingly architectural mind who thinks in a big way about problems and then works the details to realize those. He understands that public works are essential. So he comes up with a very elaborate plan building the aqueducts and extending some of those things

and putting in fountains into communities. It's wonderful PR because you can imagine that, again, some of these people have gone through hell with the civil wars they've got, and now they're living good times. Now they can walk down the street and fill their bucket with fresh water. They can go and be sure that the streets are safe to walk around. It's a very interesting way of the two people, Augustus and Agrippa, bringing this message that we're the people you can trust now to see good times come forward.

Yes, as you say, especially in contrast with the civil wars that preceded it. I mean, it sounds like such an effective way of garnering popularity, garnering support. I think so. It's hard sometimes because the sources that we have and the problem with a character like Agrippa is that his own memoirs we don't have, not a single word as far as I can see. We have to dig through 10, 15, 20 sources and for example I've mentioned Pliny the Elder, there's Suetonius, there's Frontinus for example who was writing much later about aqueducts as it turns out and what's very interesting is that Frontinus for example talks about how Marcus Agrippa set up basically this DLO, this direct labour organisation, which maintained and managed, professionalised the upkeep of all these public works. And later, when Agrippa dies, this is one of the great things that Augustus inherits,

this organisation that makes all of this stuff work, and he understands its value, and they keep it going. So it's really interesting that this man, who is really hard to categorise, he's self-trained in everything he does. This is the extraordinary thing, I think, when you learn about him, that there's no sort of encyclopedia romanica or something you can go to. I'm going to teach myself to do this. He must spend a lot of time with people who have either done this before or are learning on the job, and they just work through the issues. And the fact that people are seeing these things happening and beginning to get the benefit has to be great and it really comes to a high point in

17 BC where they have what are called the secular games and this is famous because a great poem was written about this to explain the concept that the Romans believed that a lifetime of human could be around about a century about 100 years and these happened sort of roughly every 100 years. The Roman calendar was due to have one of these soon. And Augustus decides, well, we'll have it in 17. And he sets up a board of people to organize this thing. And Agrippa is a key part of this arrangement. And the idea is they're going to have the Festival of Britain in Roman times, if I could put it that way. It's going to be the coming together of all great things. It's going to be religious. It's going to be a great big celebration in technicolour.

And in all the preparations for this, Rome is sort of decked out in bunting and leaves and foliage and so on. Poets are commissioned to write great works. Choirs of boys start learning to sing different things. And there are feasts and theatre works. Choirs of boys start learning to sing different things, and there are feasts and theatre productions and all this sort of stuff. And Augustus is able at this point to reward the people who've been with him before and since Actium. So a lot of the people in this board, I think they call the Board of Seventeen, set this thing up, and Agrippa supervises on the night certain events,

and Augustus supervises other events. And the idea is is that something like this will never ever be seen again in the lifetime of a living Roman. It will be something they will tell their grandkids about. So these secular games that we still have a great poem from are very very significant and I think it's sometimes overlooked that one particular episode because people say it's just a poetry competition. No it's not. It's a religious event which really focused minds and And I think marks an important moment where Romans celebrate their, to use an expression, uniqueness in the world. Americans

tend to think of themselves as being a unique group of people. The Romans felt the same. There was this great sense of being the chosen people, if you will. And Augustus was effectively the front man for this great people. And Augustus was effectively the front man for this great people. And Augustus was one of the enablers for this whole event. So I'd bring that to the discussion too. I think it's an important one. Yes, it sounds like it would definitely evoke pride

in one's nation. Something as big as that, as you said, unseen before in anyone's lifetime back in that time. Well, the next one wasn't on for another 100 years or so. So absolutely. And you've got to remember that most Romans were probably quite short lives, probably 30, 40 years. Oh, absolutely.

And so that's remarkable, especially regarding the buildings and the aqueducts and the temples and all that. So Augustus, it's his famous boast, I think it's on the Redes Gestalt, that he left the city of Rome a city of marble. Actually, a large part of that could be very well down to Agrippa's administration. I'm going to say something like about 70%. That's probably overstating it, but yes, a very large part of. But again, I think it's important to realise that Agrippa probably doesn't look upon this as a competition. He sees it very much, this is what he does for his best friend.

He's always spectacularly wealthy at this point. He's living a fantastic life in a way that, between Augustus being out of Rome, and he actually doesn't succeed quite in quelling the people in northern Spain, we'll come back to that in a moment, Agrippa is trusted so much he can pretty much do anything he wants. And he invests his time in his most amazing building production campaign. For example, if you go through some of them that he

built, the Pantheon is the most famous one. But for example, he built warehouses on the side of the Tiber to store the grain coming in from Egypt and Sicily. There were public gardens and a lake, an artificial lake right next to the River Tiber. There was this voting precinct. We often forget that Romans at this time expect to go to elections. Augustus is still having to stand for things himself, you know, and the Roman electorate system might seem a little strange to modern guys because you would vote in your centuries, which is groups determined by where you lived and the families you part of and so on. Very complicated Roman system. But they went through this process on a regular basis, annually in fact for many of the magistracies, and they needed a space to do

this. So Julius Caesar had had an idea that he would actually take a piece of the campus martius and mark it out and make formal what had basically been a large piece of green a bit like a high park or something and people was okay we'll mark it up with ropes and you'll take your positions and you go and drop your stone in the jar right that would be pretty much the process so the idea was to make this a proper formal structure, and guess who builds it? It's Agrippa. So he builds this huge, I mean, absolutely colossal open space

with a portico all the way around it, and beautifies it with paintings and hangings and artworks. And he does that partly because, one, he's got the money to buy things, and when he goes around the world on his tours in the East and then in the West, he's able to pick up statues and artworks and pots and all sorts of great things and rather than put them in his villa or villas he hangs them on the public buildings and this is another I think a striking example of his awareness of a sort of public side to the world that he and his friend Augustus are creating in contrast in the months after the assassination of Julius

Caesar, one of the first things that Marcus Antonius did was to start collecting statues from the conspirators' houses and put them in his own. I'm going to basically take them for myself. I'm going to look at them in the privacy of my own house. Augustus and Agrippa take a totally different view. They put them on public display. And I don't know if it's selfless or it's just a political thing they're making, but if you went to these buildings when they were finished, and you read, for example, Pliny the Elder, who actually gives us these very interesting chapters in his book,

The Natural History, where he discusses various artists, and he describes that on the wall of this building, there's the famous something-something, and this artist is very good at painting landscapes, but not very good at painting people, and things like that, and that's how we know that Rome when you walked around it was ablaze with colour and paintings and vivid depictions of things. He builds one of the first integrated bath complexes in the Roman world. Everybody's probably heard of the Bazaar Diocletian Caracalla and Trajan and we think of these huge structures with almost basilican style halls with

life shafts coming in and great big swing pools. Agrippa was the first one to build one on that scale. And interesting enough, it was actually behind what we now know as the Pantheon. It's amazing this sort of megalomaniacal ambition that he has. The ideas may not have been his original ideas. It seems to be Julius Caesar had marked out a lot of these things as part of his plans. And there could well have been surveyor's drawings or something marked out. They never got built. And Agrippa thought, I can do this. And I can build really big because I've got the money to

and I've got the land. I don't have the restrictions. He is, after all, the city aedile. He's the guy that is the minister of public works. And that's what he does. And it's quite extraordinary. A lot of these buildings he's building really to celebrate his best buddy. For example, the Pantheon was originally going to be called the Augustium. And the idea was that right outside the front, there were two statues. One was Agrippa as the builder, and the other one was Augustus. And Augustus was sensitive to the idea.

It was a little bit too close to making him look like a god and that wouldn't go very well with the crowd in Rome so he says I like it love the idea but you can't use that name so we now know it as the Pantheum or the Pantheon and that building which interesting enough has the name of Marcus Agrippa on the outside is actually the building that finally has survived from the Roman world and it's got his name on it. It's not actually the building that Agrippa built, ironically, but it's the one that has his name on. That's very interesting. Just imagining these two just bouncing ideas off each other, but always with a consideration, what will the people of Rome think about it? I think that's right. And again, it's very easy now with the benefit of 2,000 years

of hindsight knowing that Augustus goes on to die in AD 14. Of course, he didn't know. I mean, you've got to remember that when this is all happening, so let's pick, for example, when Gripper builds the Pantheon, that's going to be around about 27. He's only 35 or 36. This is extraordinary. We think of these people as being old guys. They're not. They're fighting at him in their early 30s, late 20s. It's a young man's world. I think they have a lot to prove. There's still the nagging question that Augustus has to go through the cycle, they're called lustrum cycles, of five years. And he has to go back and go through at least the formal process of renewing his powers. Because Augustus has these provinces around the edges of the empire.

They're going to be, for example, the Alpine regions all the way around and parts of Spain. The issue there is that there are going to be campaigns and wars going on. And of course, it'd be very inconvenient if he doesn't continue to take command of those things. So some of it's contrived that will continue that way. But the fact that they run the potential risk that the senate may well say it's been a good run we really appreciate what you've done but we're not going to renew your powers what happens then actually in the four decades this process takes place there is never any doubt partly because you could argue augustus has rigged the senate a little bit

maybe more a little bit you maybe more than a little bit. You've got to remember a lot of people in the Senate by now are people that were his supporters, the people that he brought in. But nevertheless, there's this sense, I think, that we can't take everything as a certain bet. And by doing these public works and engaging people in what they're seeing as visual improvements. And you have to imagine that if you're in the sort of 20s BC going around Rome, you'd be falling over logs and bricks and people and cement and it would be pretty chaotic as people are trying to do their daily business. But they would see things rising out of the ground and paint being put on buildings and plaster and little things like for example a roman roof was made of typically red baked tile and it was two types of tile the idea was that you'd actually

put these things up on a roof and where they joined up you'd put a curved one on top of it so you get this beautiful tiled roof effect but right at the end where the ends of these tiles you'd end up with these sort of rather ugly looking open spaces. What the Romans used to do was they'd put little triangular finials on them. And what's really interesting is that a sort of emblem emerged, which is a symbol that you still sometimes see on Roman coins of the period, which is the prow of a ship, two crossed spears, a sort of skeleton figure with armour.

And the idea, this is a symbol of victory of Actium. And you see it on coins, and we actually have some of these things called antifixes, which were attached to a lot of the public buildings that he repaired. And you can imagine, everywhere you go in the public world as Augustus's era moves on, you're reminded of his success in war. And some of these will be of his own doing. Some will be of his other generals, like Titus Taurus and people like that, but also Agrippa.

And by the time you get to when these guys are in their 50s, I mean, some of these buildings are actually being finished now. If you were a guy that's seen the Civil War, you probably not recognise large parts of the city anymore because they've built this new Rome, effectively. So that comment you made there about brick and marble, and you've got to remember a lot of the city anymore because they've built this new Rome effectively. So that comment you made there about brick and marble, and you've got to remember a lot of the times it was brick on the inside and just a cladding of marble, it was a different place. And it's not just Rome, is it, where Agrippa leaves his mark in a city? No, indeed. It seems to be one of the things that

he does, and by the way, Augustus too, so the double act that they run where Augustus is in the west and then Agrippa goes into the east. And you'll think, hold on, doesn't that mean there's nobody in Rome? It's interesting, isn't it? There is enough trust within the system that they will just keep doing business. So when Augustus, for example, is out in the west and Agrippa might be visiting the Anatolian area, Turkey, and going maybe down to Syria. He'll be visiting the Greek and Roman cities. He would actually be meeting with the ministers and the elected magistrates, doing the shaking hands, the kissing babies type of thing. Interesting to think of, you know, as the 30-year-old Agrippa

kissing babies. I don't know if he did that, but interesting idea. But the point is, he was putting the public face on the administration. He'd come a long way. I mean, he wasn't flying, and he was coming by boat, and he was coming by horse, and he was walking some of the way. And one of the things he would bring would be largesse. So we know that in places he would pay for a temple here, he would actually build a theatre there. We know that in the case, I think, of some of the cities out in Syria, he actually built a circus racetrack. There was an earthquake at one point and in fact, he was very quick to spend money to actually see it repaired. Because a lot of the time, he never saw the buildings finished. But everywhere he went, somebody would pay for a statue to be erected to basically say,

the city is very grateful for the benefactions of Agrippa. And they put a statue up. And it's very interesting that you can imagine, as he's going from place to place, statues are being put up. Reminders that he was there and that the burghers of the city and their populations can feel, we were special, we got a visit. In some of the Greek communities, in fact, there begins to be some people who actually begin to consider him

a sort of semi-divine figure. It's a very interesting idea that there is a statue basis with the Greek word basically hinting that he's more than a saint. He's not quite a god, but he's sort of in that interesting more than a man position. And he's followed by a retinue. I mean, there's lots of people coming with him. He's not quite a god, but he's sort of in that interesting more-than-a-man position.

And he's followed by a retinue. I mean, there's lots of people coming with him. He's not going on his own. He probably has an armed guard, and he's got sort of civil officials and people in charge of the cash box. But everywhere he's going, you're absolutely right, there's building and inscriptions going up.

And again, this is another visual trail that the world is getting better because the people who'd come before, if you remember in the days before actium when a roman showed up he normally stole everything because they were looking to fund their civil war effort so what agrippa is effectively doing is reconciling with those communities so they're there we are actually going to make it better we're here to restore your confidence as you say right there the east of the empire must have been such a

remarkable place back then. It had sided with Mark Antony. Before that, you had the fall of the Seleucid Empire and the Romans taking over Syria. You have the clients in Judea. And of course, as well, you had Crassus' famous campaign in the east and the disaster at Carai. On all of those things as well, yes. And of course they all spoke Greek, which is another thing. So once you basically leave the Balkans and head east of there, it's a different Roman Empire. And I think the other thing to try and consider is

we're very seduced by looking at modern maps where you can colour code things and say, look, there's the Roman Empire. But actually I think on the ground, it was very different. People didn't travel great distances. Some people did, like Agrippa and Augustus and his military people. But the majority of people, a bit like Jane Austen's time, as far as you could walk, as far as you could take a pony, you might go to the next town or maybe a town beyond there.

But most of your world revolved around your city, town, village. And what that meant was is that the Roman Empire was a federation of people buying into the process. And as long as you went along with it, they'd pretty much leave you alone. I mean, you'd actually elect your officials, by and large, in the Roman process. Some of the Greek cities actually would continue some of their older practices, and they'd still continue with Greek titles for magistrates, like Archon, for example. In other instances, there would be these Roman colonies, where you've actually got literally a drop on a parachute, a Roman city where the troops are pretty much speaking Latin, and it must have seemed quite strange that you'd actually have

a brand new city with a lot of people who were in their 40s, who used to be walking around killing people and now trying to learn to be carpenters and selling leather goods and things and shops. It's strange when you look at the Roman world in that sort of way, but it's more and more Greek, Anatolian, and even there are influences from the Orient when you get to places like Syria. And you've got that really interesting area, which then, of course, borders what is rival empire. And it's really fascinating. The one great achievement that certainly Augustus felt, and I'm sure Ripper felt the same way, was that you mentioned Crassus, that the failed attempt at a Parthian war. Julius Caesar had brought his young grand-nephew, Tappalonia, and Agrippa went with him in preparation for a war which ultimately was going to deal with what they would have thought of being the Parthian question.

Augustus had a different way of doing that. He was about recognising where limitations lay. And he knew the only way to deal with Parthia was through a negotiated diplomatic process. And what's really interesting in the 20s BC, there's a lot of diplomatic effort. And one of the things that they will do is they take hostages. And that doesn't mean hostages in the sense that we have now, where you've got these poor people who are blindfolded and terror is sitting in a darkened room with the threat being killed. A Roman hostage isn't that way.

It's a political gesture of trust. So the king, the Parthia, would send his selected sons from his extended family to be educated in Rome, basically a school, an international school that Augustus ran. And they'd be taught Latin, and they'd be taught all the arts of culture and war and things that Rome was very proud of. And the idea would be that they would go back. And this whole idea of cross-cultural fertilization

meant that there would be an understanding. And again, you've not got a world where you can send a telex or you send an email or diplomatic. Somebody would physically have to go there and deliver a letter. And there may have been a role in which Agrippa played in this sort of negotiation. So in the 20s, there was still this raw feeling of humiliation. The Romans had lost these standards back in 53. And Marcus Antonius, with money from Cleopatra, had gone on these crazy wars, I think three of them, to try and take back Roman honor and had his backside whooped every single time. It was very embarrassing. And Augustus wanted to try and do this. At stake were these famous standards.

Several Roman legionary standards were still in the possession of the Parthians, and there was this sort of psychological issue that the Romans invested in a Roman legionary standard. They desperately wanted them to be held by Roman hands, not a foreigner's hands. And interestingly, they get into a series of negotiations, and ultimately these eagles are returned there's a ceremony on the euphrates where basically a treaty is held and you can imagine tents and armies on both sides of the euphrates and before that happened there's a hint in the

text that there was a fallout between augustus and agrippa and the issue seems to be over the rising members of the family. And so Marcellus is the nephew, the son of his sister Octavia. And if you read the ancient sources, you get the impression that Agrippa gets really, really pissed off about this thing and decides, I've had it, I'm leaving, I'm going. Another historian in the First World War years came up with a really, really interesting, cool idea, which said, this was a very clever ruse. So, as I've said oftentimes now, that they would swap between East and West, and where Agrippa usually went to was a place called Mytilene. It was an island, and it was a very sophisticated Greek city with great access

to the coast of Turkey and from there. So, the idea that this First World War historian put forward was that Agrippa actually was there on a secret mission, which was to negotiate with the Parthians, but he couldn't do it directly, because you see, that's very awkward at this point. So because of where he is, and because of his rank in Roman society, he's acting as a sort of diplomat with portfolio, and is using channels to work with the Parthians, so that about three years later, Tiberius, who is the stepson through his wife Olivia, is able to go to the ceremony on the Euphrates I've described and receive the surviving prisoners, if there are any, and also these very valuable standards. And with that, there's this

amazing peace breaks out. And Agrippa's not directly involved in that, in the sources. In fact, so this is a really, really interesting tantalizing hypothesis. It's really hard to prove. You can build one of these circumstantial cases for it. I think it's a really neat idea. And after that, anyway, Agrippa comes back to Rome, and it's like, hey, nothing happened. There was no forward.

So one of the great achievements that they both seem to be involved in was this deal, this peace deal with the Parthians. And by doing that, it took a lot of pressure off the eastern provinces, which almost had to, in a sense, be war-ready. So Syria, which was one of the imperial provinces that Augustus had, I think had four legions in it. It was always on a war footing. It wouldn't take long for him to dispatch troops to the frontier with Armenia, or to actually go further south, because at this point, King Herodod's still alive so he's a client king he has his own army and he's actually very much a sympathiser to Augustus and is reliable on that and becomes a great friend of Agrippa by the way but with the peace treaty

with Parthia the king of kings some of that pressure has taken off. You mentioned him just then King Herod of course made famous in Christian history in the Bible. And he has a interesting, very interesting relationship with Agrippa. He does. And it sounds like, if you read, and again, we've got people like Josephus that writes about this at some length, best buddies at some point. There's an official state visit where Herod basically invites Agrippa there, and he goes to Jerusalem, and they really do the ticker tape welcome. It's festivals, and it's a great welcome that he is given there. And there seem to be shared interests, and it's, you've got two immensely powerful individuals with immense wealth. And in many sorts of ways,

you've got to think that there was a rehabilitation going on here. Originally, Herod had been on the side of Marcus Antonius. He'd actually been an affiliate of Cleopatra. He sort of had to be because Egypt's quite close to Judea. But what was very interesting is that, again, we go back to 31 BC, Herod wanted to be part of the Battle of Actium and Cleopatra and Marcanty didn't want him to be there and they sent him packing. They said, go away, don't trouble us, go away. So in a sense, his job of trying to reconcile with the victors was a lot easier because he sort of really wasn't there, he was turned away. But anyway, there's a sort of magnanimous approach to reconciling with people any way that goes on and Augustus and Agrippa well as long as you're genuine in your apology they'll say okay you know you're on side now let's make this work and Herod absolutely buys into this

and for example goes on a major number of building projects in a way that Agrippa loved and there are a couple of cities within Judea and Samaria that really follow the Roman model to the point where they even have things like Sevastos. Sevastos is the Greek version of Augustus. He was actually naming buildings and towns after Augustus would you believe. It seems to be that the harbour that he built at Caesarea where you've got those break breakwaters that go out to the sea, and you can still see them underneath the crashing waves if you go to Caesarea today, they're humongous big blocks. They were basically wooden forms would have been filled with Roman hydraulic cement and then sunk in the water. And then through the process of chemistry, they would have hardened and they built these breakwaters that way. And I'm convinced that these were the sorts of things that Agrippa would have discussed together

because back in the 30s, we're talking about 37 BC, Agrippa had built one of those at the Portus Iulius in the run-up to the Battle of the Wars with Sextus Pompeius. So these two people have a shared interest in architecture. They like travel and they have buildings and history and so on. And at one point, they go on this long journey together. And at one point, there go on this long journey together. And at one point, there is a revolt that breaks out into one of the Roman and client kingdoms up in the Crimea area. And being that he's responsible, he's given this really interesting title,

effectively Governor General. So not quite emperor, but certainly a very important guy. And Augustus has entrusted Agrippa with looking after the east for him, fix the problems that are out there because there are corruption issues and there are things going on that need to be sorted. He hears that one of the client kings is in trouble, I think the name is Palamon, and a usurper steps in, I believe his name is Scribonius. So what does Agrippa do?

He immediately does what he does, he gets on top of the problem, he jumps aboard his trireme and sets off and in the meantime he says, Herod, I need your fleet fleet will you please provide me a fleet and of course Herod says absolutely I'll get my fleet together and so Agrippa is able to sail up all the way through the Bosporus into the Black Sea and it's almost as though his reputation is going ahead of him the revolt collapses and another ally that the Romans have is sent on ahead because time is of the essence here. The guy arrives from Sinope and then himself becomes a problem. So the guy sent in to fix the problem himself becomes a problem and Agrippa has to deal with it. It ends reasonably amicably and

one of the net benefits of it is that Rome secures basically that whole of the Crimea area. There's a town on the other side called the Karanesos. And from this, Rome starts to be getting tribute and auxiliaries for its army. But what's interesting is you begin to see the metamorphosing of Agrippa doesn't necessarily need to be on the battlefield anymore. His reputation alone is enough to go ahead that gets people to think again about what they're doing. Do we really, really want to do this? And this happens a couple of times, in fact. And Herod, by the time he arrives, the whole thing is pretty much over.

But there's an interesting example of how Agrippa is able to inspire loyalty amongst the friends that he makes in high circles and low circles. And Herod was there when he was needed. Wow. So from Egypt to Judea to Parthia, all the way up, you said, to the Crimea and the Bosporan Kingdom and all that, Agrippa really makes his mark. Here he does. And of course, he was also in the West.

I was telling you earlier about how along the Catabrian Mountains, the Romans had fought for 200 years to try and quell this Celtiberian people. Ultimately, Augustus falls ill in the 20s, by the way. He does this quite a lot. So, for example, at Philippi, he falls ill in the 20s, by the way. He does this quite a lot. So, for example, at Philippi, he falls ill. So there are two battles at Philippi where Brutus and Cassius fight, the side with who's then Octavian,

and Marcus Antonius. And the scene there, by the way, is that he falls sick. He's taken back to his army tent, and Agrippa has to attend to him as the best friend, you know, nurse him through this crisis. It's said by rumour that apparently even Octavian was sick during the

Battle of Actium. But the point was when he was actually in northern Spain in, I think, 26 BC, he fell ill again, this time quite seriously. It's thought to be typhus. And his doctor, whose name was Antonius Musa, used supposedly cold presses and cold treatments. And over a period of time, they were able to cure him of this typhus. The war progresses by little by little by little. The race general is sent in and ultimately, around 19 BC, Agrippa is sent in, in a sense, as the heavy guns and also the last resort. And what's interesting is that when Agrippa arrives in northern Spain, there's, for example, Leon, which actually was in Roman times Legio,

so that's how the ancient name is preserved in modern Spanish. There are several legions there and a multiplicity of auxiliary troops. And what he finds is the army is completely and utterly demoralized. They've been fighting this campaign for decades. And when they think they've won, they then discover they turn their backs and then the whole thing falls apart and so on. And then for a brief interlude, one of his generals called Publis Carisius is successful

in quelling this whole area, but seems to have done a terrible job of pacification. He just fans the flames and another revolt breaks out. So one of the things Agrippa has to do is mend the morale of the troops. And one of the things he does, and it shows that he can also be tough and interspyrian, one of the legions we understand actually had the honorific title Augusta. We don't know which one it was. There's a supposition it was Legia I Augusta. He removed it. He said, you guys have betrayed the honor of Augustus. I'm stripping this title. So it was humiliation. And through a process of disciplinarian measures and incentives,

carrot and stick, if you will, he begins to restore morale and eventually rebuilds this fighting force. And they go on to, amazingly, complete the 200-year conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. And eventually, the Cantabrians and Asturias are brought to heel. The resistance is broken. And what's really intriguing about this is the fact that Agrippa writes a letter, basically, an after-action report, which generals are required to do. And the general protocol do and the general

protocol is that the general will write to the senate and effectively say i bring good news the army as well the campaign has been successful we have prisoners and wealth and blah blah blah and you can see me in the new year what agrippa does he sends his report to augustus and in a sense it's a snub to the senate but it's also recognition who really is in charge, at least of the army. And what's interesting, he does this twice, and then this now sets in motion, this will now become accepted procedure from that point on. It will always be the guy that we now consider to be the emperor, who in those days was thought of the princeps, the first man in Rome, effectively, that would receive the news before the Contra's father so

interesting enough in this quasi-revolutionary way Agrippa is rewriting the textbook of how things are supposed to be done but amazingly he is entitled to a triumph effectively and declines it so there are two occasions in Agrippa's history where he is given the ultimate victory celebration and defers and says I I'm going to decline. So I don't know how you explain that. Everything that a Roman was turned on by was public recognition. The tick-a-tick parade, which we call the triumph, they loved collecting garnering awards and so on. Agrippa, in a sense, inverted all of that, said that the less publicity I get, the better for me.

He thrived on getting a blue pennant that went on his trireme for winning the Battle of Actium. Now what was interesting is he's the only man in the entire world who had a blue pennant. So when a ship showed up at the harbour with this blue flag, this is the great Marcus Agrippa. So everybody can have a crown, but only one has a blue pennant. Talking of crowns,

he gets one which actually has the ship's rostra at the front, which are these bronze beaks. They make little tiny models and stick them in this crown and Agrippa is allowed to wear this wherever he goes and for other victories he's actually given another one which has these crenellations castellation effects like a city wall and in the end he combines these so he's able to wear this interesting crown which has these ship's rostra and this sort of city wall around his head almost like a crown so he doesn't do this other stuff and he gets these other things and only him. So is there a megalomania going on here?

I don't know, but it's a really interesting personality trait, isn't it? Well, yeah, very much so. So was there really a feeling that Augustus was wanting to make Agrippa his successor? There are hints. So for example, I'd said that augustus fell ill probably with typhus in i think it was 26 and the scene is that he basically calls his closest advisors in interesting enough he keeps a record of where all the army units are and this is considered to be if you read the sources state secret there's only one copy and he gives this to calpurnius piso who's the one consul but he gives his signet ring to Agrippa.

The significance of the signet ring is that it has an engraved intaglio. And I think at this time it has a figure of Hercules in it. And this is what's used on official papers. So when you sign a document in papyrus, you'll use an ink pen, put your signature on it, and they'll roll it up, and they'll then use wax to do this. And you can almost see, this seal, unbroken, do you see what it is? This is the only one of its kind. This is Augustus' seal. So by giving Agrippa the ring, he's basically saying,

you have my authority to issue edicts in my name. And in fact, he'd been doing that pretty much anyway. But actually having the ring is very, very significant because that really shows the trust that he is giving in this man. He is accumulating all sorts of honours. He's been made consul three times. He was made this kind of governor general, which is an honorific thing in the eastern part of the empire.

There are all these other things like tribunician powers that begin to be issued. It's very clear that Augustus was very careful in the way that he collected these magistracies. So effectively, he was an autocrat because he was, on the face of it, a consul. The tribunes could stand up and say, no, I refuse, that is against the public interest. But he was also a tribune. So he could actually basically say, well, I'm actually going to veto what the Senate says, we're going to do this.

But anyway, the Senate was mostly his people, so they would probably not say no. And gradually, more and more of these sorts of powers go to Agrippa. So there is a sense that he is more and more trusted. And in his final years, he's pretty much an equal. But the one thing Augustus always has is that crucial title, Augustus. And with that, this idea of Roman auctoritas, which is really an influence. It's a prestige that comes from being who he was. I mean, he was the heir to Julius Caesar. He was the man who had masterminded all of these things all the previous years. And Agrippa, for all the great things he did, didn't have that sort of influence. He had a different kind of influence by being who he was, and certainly could command

good wishes. But what's really interesting is the way that the Senate and the aristocracy, for example, Neumann, that never went away. There was this disdain that the people who came from the wealthy families, the people who'd had consuls in their family trees, really, really never accepted Agrippa. They always thought of him as being somewhat of an unstarved country bumpkin. And I think they felt in his shadow

because in lots of ways, Marcus Agrippa represented all the things that they thought a good man should be a good citizen a man of moderation a man of courage rotus and things like this which our man agrippa had in spades but there just was this prejudice and i think that's a good word to use that this particular part of society felt with the public people who were enjoying his baths and his public fountains and entertainments and all this art and sculpture around the place, nothing but good words. That signet ring analogy you said earlier, what did Alexander the Great do when he was dying? He handed his signet ring to one of his adjutants to oversee the succession.

It sounds very similar. Yes, and in a sense, you're dealing again, it's important to realise again, we tend to think of this as being Roman Empire. And I've just read a book called Augustus the Failure, very interesting book, where he mentions the point that Augustus didn't think of what he was doing about restoring a Roman Republic, because as far as he was concerned, it never went away. There was a committee to actually restore the powers of the Commonwealth to its various places, the Senate and the popular assemblies, but the Republic had always been. And he didn't think of himself, in a sense, as being an autocrat. I mean, there was a reason why he was still known as consul when he had the title and all these tribune positions I've

mentioned. And the coins are very careful to point this out. There is no magistracy for his province. So all those areas, all those lands around the periphery of the Empire which he was responsible for, was basically his province. But he had to keep going back for the powers to be renewed. So there was no sense, I think, that there was a certainty about this. And I'm sure that Augustus and

no doubt Agrippa, they would talk about this endlessly about how are we going to ensure that this great project that we have embarked on, the first project was just basically a hunt down the assassins. They find themselves now being the dual act running the show. And there were assassination attempts both on Agrippa and also Augustus during their lifetimes.

And they sort of were able to deal with those things. But there's the sense of it could really come apart at the seams because it was an experiment in lots of ways and to quote or garble gibbon it's amazing the thing worked as long as it did actually and i think it was really force of personality and the goodwill these two guys generated and the fact that people thought this is way better than while grandfathers and fathers told us what they lived under i like this let's keep this going and what you have under. I like this. Let's keep this going. And what you have, therefore, is the sense of how do we keep this going?

And you see, for example, the emerging idea of Augustus beginning to adopt people into his family to continue this idea of succession. And curiously, and this is very interesting, Augustus actually has, in the first instance, Agrippa marries his niece and he's married to her for a period. And interestingly enough, to marry her, he had to divorce another lady who was actually the daughter of Atticus, the famous Atticus of the Cicero letters, a man that Agrippa felt immense feelings for. And in fact, when Atticus died, was mortified. But at a later point, Augustus says, I need you to marry my daughter,

Julia, Julia Kassaris. And you remember that point we were talking about earlier where Agrippa goes to Mytilene and this idea of falling out. Well, the falling out was around this figure of Marcellus. Marcellus was actually married to Julia. And what's very interesting is very quick order. Actually, Agrippa has to marry Julia and it's a little bit of a tempestuous marriage it's one where the impression I get from the sources is that Julia has been moved around I mean she's this is a second marriage and you can imagine she's she's just chattel in this whole deal unfortunately Roman women were just considered to be political pawns in marriages but what you're seeing is in fact what augustus is recognizing my son-in-law agrippa

and this changes completely the dynamic of all of this thing and what goes on is that julia will bear agrippa three sons one is caius one is lucius another one actually is marcus sanis agrippa who we know now is posthumous because he was born after agrippa died and one of the most astonishing things that Agrippa does is he gives his own sons, Caius and Lucius, to Augustus for adoption. And it was Augustus' suggestion. And so most modern people would think that's really weird

because, hold on, it's not like they were orphans and Agrippa was alive and he gave his sons to Augustus. And that's what he did. And these young kids, four, five, six, whatever age they were, were adored by the public. And there was this gradual consensus formed around that one of these would be the successor. Maybe the two of them would rule together. Somehow there was something to come out of it. And they grew up to be sport brats. That's the trouble tragedy in all of this. So you've got this father figure who's this man's selfless service,

moderation, self-deprecation. None of that is in his sons, who were spot-rotten by Augustus. And it's just absolutely fascinating. I don't know of any other examples in history where a living man does that. I mean, can you think of any? Well, giving away their sons to... No, I mean, definitely not that I can think of. But this, again, is a clue to understanding the selfless devotion, and maybe that is the word, that this man feels towards Augustus. It's a big project that they've undertaken on a political level, but it's immensely personal as well. Unprecedented, as you say. And with this experiment, you kind of touched it then as well. Agrippa continues with this experimental system until his dying days.

time we don't really know we know that augustus was born 63 bc we think that because the way the sources are written they say he died in his 51st year which means it could be either sort of late 64 or very early 62 it could be 63 we don't really know and basically agrippa continues to do all the things he's expected to do there would be no reason why they wouldn't so he carries on doing what he's doing so for example in 16 bc he's, in 16 BC, he's actually in Athens. He's back in Mytilene doing service there. It was a good place. It was very civilized. It was very calm, nice part of the world to live. He travels around Asia Minor, for example.

He gives freedom to various cities. He arrives in Syria. He goes to Antioch on the Orontes. He goes to Beirutus, which was the Roman military colony. So he's doing his things that you do to the glad hand, shake hands and keep everybody on side on the team. He also, for example, at this point, confers legal rights on the Jews in the Greek cities, because the Jews actually were getting a pretty raw deal, by the way, we're talking about Herod earlier. I think what's really fascinating, and one of the

reasons why Agrippa is actually a popular figure in the Jewish community, is the fact that he understood there was a great sense of unfairness that the Greek-speaking populations, what we now call pagan populations, treated a lot of the Jewish community members as second-class citizens. And they would appeal through the court system. One of the things they had to do was pay a temple tax. And oftentimes what would happen is that the Greeks would just say, yeah, pay your temple tax, but we expect you to work on the Sabbath, because that's what we all do. And they would not respect some of the basic tenets and premises of judaism agrippa understood this and basically dealt with it he issued missives to the cities and saying look these are members of your community they are law-abiding citizens of the community they have their religious cultural position respect it

okay i'm telling you and this would actually be sent out to the cities and their letters are actually preserved in josephus it's quite remarkable that he does this. I think he's a very fair-minded individual. In the meantime, then, we come to, for example, 13. And what's interesting is that this is the fifth time that Augustus, who is himself now 50, these guys are moving on in age. And they've seen the world and so on. And there's a sense of, I don't know, maybe these guys could hang up their hang up their leather sold shoes but they decide not they're going to carry on news comes in of a revolt in illyricum

which is on the west coast of the balkans and it's interesting it happens again because the province was assumed to be settled then emperator caesar octavian had gone there several times and fought wars at metellus and various other cities sustained injuries and at that point they they pretty much fixed the war but it kept them breaking out into the revolts and one of the ways they finally dealt with it was to break Illyricum into effectively two provinces and Pannonia in fact which is the bit that borders the Danube broke out into revolt and what happens happens is that, guess what? Augustus turns to his white-hand man and says,

got a job for you. And Agrippa sets off. It's now the fall. And gets on his horse and off he goes. It may well be he arrived at Brindisium and took a military boat, no doubt, with his blue pennant fluttering in the back. And news arrives in the rebel camps that Agrippa is on his way to settle this for once and for all

and they basically say okay we'll talk about this let's come to terms terms are agreed Agrippa comes back in fact he doesn't go to Rome he goes to his villa in Campania and he dies and he's maybe 51 maybe he's not quite 50 but he's certainly in his fifth decade. And Augustus, one of Agrippa's adjutants, we can imagine, would have raced off to get Augustus here as fast as he can. Not quite sure where Augustus is, and races to get back and finds his friend dead. And you can imagine he is bereft. I mean, these men have been friends for three and a half decades. What is he going to do?

And one of the things he does is to put on a state funeral. And in a sense, he models it a little bit after things he does is to put on a state funeral and in a sense he models it a little bit after things he did for marcellus and other members of family but he really goes to town on this one so each of the towns are on the road from campania capo area all the way to rome basically come out and they garb themselves in black and the city fathers and the magistrates will take turns to bear the hearse as it moves through the city so they can presumably tell their grandsons i carried the funeral beer of the great marcus gripper and eventually it arrives in rome it's put in one of the temples where it is laid

to rest interestingly enough augustus is not officially supposed to be able to see the body under some religious terms and on the day of the funeral they have this delivery of the body on the hearse and speeches are made and eventually the body is burned in a crematorium that exists in the campus marcius and his ashes are buried in the mausoleum that augustus has built for himself this great mounded building which is being restored now in rome the Arapacis. And interestingly enough, Agrippa had already built his own sepulchre, but it never got used because, of course, at this point the son-in-law is expected to be in the tomb, along with several other members of a growing number of people in Augustus's extended family. And then they have to deal with the aftermath, and we know that Augustus is bereft, he inherits this vast wealth this DLO this labor

organization that looked after all the public works is one of the things he inherits he takes that on board and keeps it going he gives a mass distribution to the public again in the name of Agrippa because there's lots of coin and you get the sense that there is a moment in time when the life of Marcus Agrippa is celebrated. And remarkably, there is a fragment of a papyrus from Oxyrhynchus, which we believe actually has part of the funeral speech written in it. And it's been partly restored. And if it is what we think it is, it basically is Augustus talking to the Roman public about how this man got here through his own sheer will and effort and the goodwill of the people he worked with.

And if you like, that's a direct poke in the eye to the aristocrats who really despised him. And they lay on funeral games. And oh, by the way, the aristocrats in large numbers decide not to attend them because they want to get their own back. But it's just very interesting that the public see the great man that they have lost. And interestingly enough, the person that Augustus now looks to be his next BFF,

or at least the guy who's going to do the job that Agrippa used to do, is his stepson Tiberius, who is in a way a similar kind of personality. He's a man of moderation. He's a military guy. He does orders. But he lacks the imagination. He hasn't got the skills and all the rest of it. does orders but he lacks the imagination he hasn't got the skills and all the rest of it and the tragedy of all this is that the sons Caius and Lucius turn out to be really disappointing individuals and it's rather sad the aftermath of Agrippa's death really never lives up to the great achievement of the dad that lived all those years but it's still as you say with the funeral just then it's this inspirational rags to riches heriches, he-made-it-himself story.

Oh, I think so. And I think really if we were able to have more historical content from those days, we would have a great deal more insight into that. You've got to remember that the name of Agrippa is downplayed on the Res Gestae, which is the great inscription, which we know actually were on obelisks that stood outside the mausoleum which is augustus's first take on the great things i did when i was alive and you know a grip is really a bit player in that interesting enough there's a figure carved on the arapakis the only figure with his toga over his head the toe gate is believed to be a gripper because by the time they'd finished that he was dead but they wanted him on this procession so they showed him that way he's shown on coins but not really named he's the sort of figure where there are two consuls depicted. The other figure is assumed to be Agrippa. So he's always kept sort of in an opaque

fashion. And I think that was part of the deal. Agrippa went along with it. He was never going to be the man with all the press. He had always decided it was going to be his best friend. And it suited Augustus, of course, to do that. But I think it suited Agrippa too. It's very hard to know what kind of person he was. And maybe your listeners will create their own impressions from what I said. I think he was immensely dedicated to Augustus as his friend. He was driven by the agenda that they had formed. He was temperamental. We know there are a couple of instances where he basically, temper explodes

and he tends to wear his emotions on his sleeve. Maybe, because there's only one example of that we can point to. But he's a driven man. He's a man of honour and he's got these talents for building and architecture and planning and naval warfare and stuff. But always he does this knowing he's

going to never be the number one but he's he's okay with it that's that's amazing finally big question because there are so many achievements of a gripper that you've gone through all remarkable in their own way but is there any one achievements that you think you personally think stands out among all the others oh it has to be the esoteric one. I think by what he did in helping Augustus reconstruct, refine and retool the political and military apparatus, he kept it going. I think it was so damaged in a way in 44 BC, and you can only imagine, had the young Octavian failed, it's not outside the realms of possibility that the emperor could have fractured into sort of an eastern west. There could have

been a sort of Greek Marcus Antonius Cleopatra client system over there, and some kind of senate driven operation out in the west. But what Agrippa did by this patient, dogged, hands-on approach, he built this edifice which lasted. We call it Pax Romana now. In its time, it was called Pax Augusta. And I think that's very telling, Pax Augusta, the August piece, the Revere piece. And it was blood, sweat, and tears, big emphasis, by the way, on the blood, that the Roman idea, the Augustus idea of Pax is really

interesting. If you look at chapter 13 of the Res Gestae, there are the three words partau victoris Pax, which means peace won from victories. A lot of those victories were Agrippa's victories. And that was the bedrock, the Pax Augusta was the bedrock of everything else that came after him. I think that's the great achievement. Lindsay Powell, that was fantastic. The book on Agrippa is called? It's called Marcus Agrippa, Right-Hand Man of Caesar Augustus. Fantastic. Thanks once again for coming on the show.

You're most welcome. Anytime. Thank you.