The Ancients - Agrippa: Rome's Forgotten Hero

Episode Date: October 1, 2020

There are few men in Roman history that can claim to have been as influential as Marcus Agrippa. The right-hand man of Octavian / Augustus, his career is dotted with powerful positions. And yet, what was arguably so remarkable about his life was his stalwart loyalty to his friend Octavian. Together they irreversibly transformed the Roman Empire. Joining me to talk about Agrippa's remarkable career is his 21st century biographer Lindsay Powell. In this first of two episodes, Lindsay talks me through Agrippa's career up to the climactic Battle of Actium and the key role he played in bringing about the end of the last civil war of the Roman Republic.Lindsay is the author of Agrippa: Right Hand Man of Augustus. Part 2 of this podcast, on Agrippa's life from Actium down to his death, will be released in the near future.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient 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. You've likely heard of Augustus, and with good reason. He was one of the most significant figures in ancient Roman history.

But it's also key to remember that many of Augustus' key achievements would never have come to fruition if it wasn't for his loyal, dependable number two, Agrippa. To talk about Agrippa, I am chatting with his 21st century biographer, Lindsay Powell. We chatted for well over an hour about this fascinating figure, and I hope you enjoy. Lindsay Powell, it is great to have you on the show. Thank you. Thank you, Tristan. Now, we're talking about one of the most remarkable and most important figures in the whole of Roman history.

I quite agree. A man that's probably little known outside of history nerds, the occasional tourist to Rome, but you're quite right. I think it's a story of a very great man. And that man is Marcus Agrippa. With regards to Marcus Agrippa, what do we know originally about his background? What do we know about his origins? The short answer is absolutely nothing. It's one of those remarkable stories where all we have effectively is a strange story about a birth, which is Pliny the Elder saying that he had a misfortune of apparently being born legs first. And this was called an Agrippan birth, effectively. So I think that's now called a breech birth, something like that in modern terms. But it was

seen as being a very bad start to a life to come that way rather than headfirst. Whether that's true or not, we only have Pliny the Elder to to tell us the second thing is that we have a couple of references to people mentioning him as coming from humble origins or a humble birth and that doesn't necessarily mean that he was poor what it actually refers to more is a case that it wasn't fancy full of famous people with a grand historical tradition which which led to him being known as a new man, a novice homo. And that itself came with a number of prejudices and issues which we'll explore later. But frankly, where he came from, the year he was born in, we know nothing of those things. We know only that his father was called Lucius. He had a brother called Lucius. He had a sister called

Vitsania. And that is it. And in this period, the late Republican period, what opportunities were there for a novice homo, a new man? There were opportunities. I mean, the best example is Marcus Tullius Cicero, who eventually became consul of the Roman public. So it was possible for someone who didn't have a consul in the family that they could point to, and therefore this made them someone of high status, high regard. But for those people who had lineages where there was a father or grandfather, great-grandfather and uncle and so on in the family, to be called a novice Homer really was the new guy from out of town.

What the heck does he know? And there wasn't a prestige or panache associated with that. And what it meant was for someone like Marcus Agrippa, he would always have in the eyes of their aristocrats, the patrician class, a sort of black mark, a faint whiff of not really quite clean and proper, all of which was just pure bigotry and prejudice. And what's fascinating is that his best friend, that we later call Augustus, saw through all that, saw the man for what he was and could be, and that mattered nothing to him. So you mentioned Augustus and of course Agrippa's famous friendship with Octavian slash Augustus,

but how do Agrippa and Octavian meet for the first time? Again, sorry to tell you, there's not really a great revelatory story that they met on the corner of a street on the forum or something. We don't know. It's very interesting. I sometimes wonder, and this is something that maybe is not widely known, is that the reign of Augustus was actually quite fundamental from the point of view of historical sources. For example, in the case of Julius Caesar. and you can actually, I think this is in Suetonius,

where he talks about Julius Caesar had a number of comedies and books of sayings and a bunch of other things which Augustus decided really, oughtn't really be in circulation anymore. They needed to be sort of withdrawn gradually and people wouldn't notice. And then a sort of authoritative version of the story could be released. So we have the Civil War, we have the Gallic War,

but things like his speeches, we don't see them anymore. Their comedies, did he write them? No, we don't know. And so on. And there's this sort of, how can I say it, the censoring of sources in sort of an indirect way. I think what's happened in the case of Marcus Agrippa is we know that he wrote some kind of document that you could call a memoir.

Most Roman generals and famous people did. That doesn't survive, and not even in a single word. There are no quotations and extracts that we know of. We know that he wrote commentaries on various things to do with geographical matters and waterworks, and none of those survive. And I often think that this is on purpose, so that somewhere in the life of Marcus Agrippa and Augustus, they reached either a formal or more likely informal agreement, which is that Agrippa would always be number two, and that meant that the legend of greatness would always be the one of Augustus,

and the lesser man, the less significant man, would always be Agrippa. And he seems to have been okay with it. And I think what that means from the historical sources point of view, those things which would tell us all the things you've just asked me questions about, they don't exist. And I actually believe more and more that that was probably by design. The idea being that the great man of the two was always going to be Augustus. And the dutiful lieutenant, the lieutenant would always be the one that they'd always be an heir of. I'm not quite sure who this man was, but we know he's really loyal. And that's the thing, you talk about loyalty and Agrippa as a soldier, and that is first and foremost what he's remembered for.

It's that remarkable military career. Indeed. What could you say? The most famous battle, of course, is Actium, 2nd of September 31 BC. There were other battles before that. There was Milo Nalocus in 36 BC. They were naval battles, remarkably, and this is a man that really did not have training as a naval commander. is how on earth did he learn to be one? And I think in so many ways, he typifies what a Roman command schooling was like. You kind of learned it from other people or you learned it on the job. There's nothing in the history that says he actually went off and spent a few days

with a naval captain and said, how exactly do you steer one of these things? So we're left with this great mystery. He amazingly, even before he's fought the war, and the war we're talking in this context is the war against Sextus Pompeius, one of the surviving sons of Pompey the Great. In that aftermath of the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC, he is charged with basically building a fleet to take on Sextus Pompeius, who's basically set himself up in Sicily and is running raids across the coast

of Italy. And the problem there is one of the position of a rather precarious young Octavian, because he's not yet Augustus at this point. That doesn't happen until 27 BC. So in the decade and a bit before that, he's the strongman in Rome with a couple of friends, as it were. And to keep everything going, he's got to make sure that people are fed and that there's there's all the amenities are working and the young uh sexist Pompeius has realized that all he has to do is basically harass the shipping bringing grain from Sicily and stop those supplies coming into Rome and actually Octavian's power base will disintegrate because there'll be riots in the streets and so on and so forth so this begins to happen more and more and actually octavian sort of decides he's got to deal with this and actually um doesn't do terribly well agrippa's given the task go build me a fleet

and he does this and and the way that he does this is by commissioning the cities on the west coast of italy to provide him ships basically hulls and fighting platforms but nothing else so what he then does is build a harbour which he then calls Portus Iulius off the bay of Mycenaeum it's an amazing piece of work that he does there we can talk about that later trains crews of freed slaves on basically benches to how to row this is how you row guys and everybody pull together and so on and builds a fleet I think it's about 300 ships and off they go so so basically they're learning as they go in fact he's the expert by reading the next chapter in the book as it were and we'd looks to him because he's the expert because he's exactly one chapter ahead and eventually he's

able to take this fleet and these enormous triremes byremes and so on eventually encounter the fleet uh ofxtus Pompeius in two massive battles. He wins. And then the land armies of Octavius win in Sicily, and effectively Sextus is knocked out of the game. And that sets Octavius up to be successful in making his power grab more secure.

And interesting enough, the lessons that Agrippa learns in those two sea battles, he is able to take directly five years later to Actium in novel and interesting ways. And you mentioned Actium. We'll get to that in a moment. But regarding that naval clash in Sicily, so you're saying that before then, Agrippa had basically next to no knowledge about naval warfare, but he learns on the job. Yes, that does seem a little bit sort of counterintuitive, doesn't it? In a society where in our day, you have to have qualifications to become the person leading or doing the job.

The ancient world often is not like that. And I think this is one thing that really appeals to me when I write about ancient commanders and leaders, is the innate abilities to manage and learn. So I think what you've got in Agrippa is an amazing tactical and technical ability to manage very complicated situations and by complicated process of project management and just incentivizing people, making them get on with the job and him leading from the front. If this man wore a shirt and tie, he would be the guy that would have the jacket off the shirt sleeves rolled up and the tie tucked in between the buttons. And he would be saying, look, do it this way. And in fact, there are several examples of where we know he sort of micromanages projects a little bit.

The most famous one is that he's tasked with actually, as basically the civil engineering chief in Rome he quickly realizes that the main drain system which is the coarca maxima is really falling into disrepair it's already about 300 400 years by the time he gets to look at it and his crews are set out to go and repair this and it's you know blocks and squeeze it must be a pretty awful place to work raw sewerage coming from the streets into this great big channel underneath the center of rome and then leaking its effluent out into the river tiber i mean this is the reality of roman hygiene and i think it's very easy to think that the toilets were beautifully clean and so yeah they stank i think that's the other thing you have to remember and what he does remarkably he doesn't

take hit the word of the people he puts in charge, the supervisors. He gets on a boat. They go into the Clackamas, and he has a look for himself. So this is a different kind. I'm not going to take your word for it. You have to prove it to me. As we would say here over in the United States, there's a state neighboring called Missouri where it's called the show me state. Show me. I don't believe you until you show me.

And I think this man would have been from Missouri if anywhere. So you end up with this man that I think is really prepared to pick the brains of experts and have a go so if there's nobody um that he knows to to actually fight a command battle he's probably going to dive into the books he's probably going to read ancient histories how did uh the greeks tackle the persians or something like this at salamis i would imagine. That's how a lot of commanders it seems to be learned the arts of war through historical narratives, after action reports and so on.

There were a certain number of tactical manuals available but they seem to be more aimed at the drill of very specific tactics. This which is really build a fleet, train the crews and then come up with the strategy and the tactics for an actual battle and series of battles, requires a strategic level of thinking.

So not only tactical, it is also strategic in his vision. And it is quite extraordinary, I mean, to think that somebody can do that pretty much from scratch. I'm not aware of anything before that event or those series of events that would have led him to become an expert. I mean, it certainly is extraordinary. And is it an advantage of Agrippa being a new man that it's more ingrained in him, that he knows he has to do the work well? He knows he has to do the background research. He doesn't take things for granted because he knows he's had to work hard to get

to where he's got already. I think there's something in that. What intrigues me, there's two dimensions. One certainly is the new man thing, and I'm sure there was an element, I'm out to prove that I'm really the guy you don't want me to be. I'm really the great guy. But I also wonder whether there's an element here of, I have to prove to my best friend. Every of the sort of story that you see with this man is really the biography of the friendship of two men and it is quite an extraordinary one and I was trying to find examples for this podcast I had to capture the spirit of a friendship like that and I really struggled to find one but the only one I can find and it's a really awful example is Hitler and Goebbels but if you the story Goeebbels, he wedded to the Fuhrer, and in the end, he kills himself

and his entire family because, you know, the dream is lost. So that's an extraordinary cultish sort of devotion to a friend. I don't say that Agrippa had that, but hints at that sort of level of fidelity and loyalty. And this is where, when we go back to the origin story of the humble origins, there's a line in Pliny the Elder where he talks about the misfortunes of youth. And it's interesting because it doesn't necessarily mean that he was an unfortunate youth for having a poor, humble background, because it may not have been poor. But it does suggest that something awful or a series of awful things happened to him as a youth but was it abuse i have no idea there's nothing in the sources

uh was there some sort of affliction in the family was there a terrible other event or series of events was there was there a need for him to prove with his dad for example that he was all this we don't know we just have these cryptic clues in plinthiel the natural history 7.6 where he says the misfortunes of youth a life spent in the very midst of arms and slaughter and ever exposed to the approaches of death. Wow. So couching those terms, I mean, yes, certainly I think a strong individual will want to prove himself.

And he does over and over and over and over. But for me, I think there's something fundamental, which is having found in Octavius, later Augustus, which is having found in Octavius, later Augustus, a man who completely and utterly trusts him, sees the value in him. I think that is the dynamic that really propels him through his life. And there are lots of examples we can talk about, I think, that support that contention. So I actually think it's, in a sense, it's a a more personal private thing rather than a public thing. I mean is his actions off Sicily against Pompey's son and particularly in the context as you said that Octavian has actually had some military failings before Agrippa appears is this one of the first times would you argue that Agrippa's there to really prove that he has Octavian's back?

I think it probably is the most obvious one, in the sense, I mean, this is a very high-stakes game. I mean, the fact is that at this point Octavius has aligned himself with Aemilius Lepidus and also Marcus Antonius, and they have set themselves this mission, which is to, in fact, eradicate and hunt down every single assassin of Julius Caesar. If anybody is driven by an obsession, it's friend Octavius, and they seem to all be wedded to this. And it goes back very, very early. I think it's quite fascinating that when Julius Caesar was assassinated, neither Marcus Agrippa nor Octavius were in Rome. They were actually in a place on the other side of the Adriatic in a place called Apollonia, which is apparently a university town. It had a nice harbour. It was quite close to a

military base. And it was a place you went to go to get a good education, which meant learning to do public speaking. And Julius Caesar had sent his great nephew there with the intention of him being part of the campaign against the Parthians, ultimately, which he planned for 44-43, of the campaign against the Parthians ultimately which he planned for 44-43 which obviously didn't happen and and there's this scene where the letter arrives from I think it's actually Octavius's mother and he opens this letter and you can imagine my son I've got some very bad news your great-uncle's dead stay where you are and there's this discussion between octavius and four or five of his friends one of whom is marcus agrippa and they have a kind of conflag they said what are we going to do and by the way this i think is a very interesting insight into how even at a young age and is he's 19 at

this point is octavius and probably 18 19 is the same age that agrippa was and they decide what they're going to do and the report that we have from Nicolaus, who writes A Life of the Early Augustus, tells us that, effectively, the friends say, no, no, no, we must stay here and work with the local army and do this. And Octavius gets the idea, no, I think I have to go back to Italy. I have to be there and get on the ground and understand what's going on. And Agrippa ultimately is given the choice, by inference of that, that you've got to come with me or you can stay here. I'm not going to hold it against you,

but you have to make a choice. And Agrippa goes with him. So we have this evidence right at the start of the thing, when he's 19, 18, something like that, that he's going to follow the fortunes of this friend who is apparently destined for some kind of destiny of greatness. And interestingly enough, there was an episode in the months before that where uh the the two friends go to of all things an astrologer

and i think the name is of the guys are theogonies and they both go in there and you can imagine this is two teenagers going in and having a bit of a dare and the story reported is that uh agrippa goes first and the guy looks at his i don don't know what he does, the equivalent of tea leaves for those days, dregs maybe in the wine glass or something, and says, oh gosh, you're going to be a great man and this is amazing. And Agrippa's taken aback by this. And then he does that for Octavius's friend. And the man literally collapsed on his knees and bows and said, you really are going be having a great life and you can wonder Romans are superstitious they believe in the presence of spirits in places and things and so on and if these these stories are true in essence which is to say that people believe these sorts of things you can almost imagine that someone like Agrippa

whose background we know very little about, but is humble, has decided that I really like this guy. I think he's special. I'm going to be with him. And there are even omens in this. I have to go with him. So you said this forms something of a pattern of a personality begins to follow. And the fact is that it's Octavius who inherits the name of Julius Caesar, the reputation fearful as well, or fearsome rather, as well as, you know, the pragmatic name Caesar has a lot of baggage, most of it good for the followers, certainly. And they are able to work together. It's Agrippa and Octavius that will go to Campania to raise an army together,

not the other friends. The other friends are kind of doing other things, but like Mycenaeus, for example. But it's Agrippa who's the one that everywhere Octavius goes, Agrippa is very close by. And I just find those things fascinating. It's like these become best buddies, BFF, in a way that history has few examples. I mean, so these best buddies, the way they're portrayed in the aftermath of Caesar's assassination for those next 15 years down to Actium is it a very similar pattern throughout that we get in the sources that they're always together helping each other through it well what happens at a certain point is that Octavius Oct, makes a decision that I really trust this guy. We can't

be together everywhere we go because this is not a clever use of resources. And I think they recognize the skills and talents in each other. And they also realize they can do more if they actually go and do the things they're good at. So very early on, Octavius leaves Rome and is going different places to get money together, get troops together, you know, just to do the political stuff. And Agrippa is often left in Rome to run the place there. And it's a great mark of trust, I think. And one of the things that Agrippa has to do early in his career, we've talked about him as a military man, but don't forget that military careers in ancient Rome also were paralleled by a civilian career. So you would alternate between a military position and serve in the army, for example, or in some kind of support role. But you'd also go

back into jurisprudence. You'd become an advocate for the law. You'd become a bureaucrat somewhere in the system, apportioning budgets and so on. The person that leads the trial against Caius Cassius Longinus, the famous Cassius and the know, the assassination, the daggers and all the rest of it, is Marcus Agrippa. And he actually gets a guilty plea. It's kind of a foregone conclusion, kind of, right? Because, you know, they all know he was there, but you have to go through the legal process and procedure. And it's Agrippa is the one who gets the guilty verdict. So that's a very public thing. He is actually appointed very early on to the highest levels of political prominence. So one of them is a position called Praetor Oranus, which is effectively the chief magistrate in Rome from the legal perspective, which is great

because you can then particularly prosecute whoever you need to. And in the later years of where they're doing these things called prescriptions, where they're marking people out because they need their money. So they basically have them executed or done in or exiled. These are all kind of useful things to have on your resume. You know the legal system from the way it works on the inside. So very early on, Agrippa is given positions where he wields a lot of power and he operates alone, and it's because he's trusted by Octavius that he's able to do that.

So again, in the deeds that he does trusted by Octavius that he's able to do that. So again, in the deeds that he does, one of the things that happens early on is that Agrippa gets an assignment where he's in Gaul as the provincial governor. And at that point, you know, you can remember that Julius Caesar had been operating there in the 50s, but other than basically committing the equivalent of genocide there and causing a great deal of damage, hadn't done very much to establish Gaul as a province. It was effectively a damaged series of tribes really trying to pull themselves together, some being friendly to Rome,

taxes being levied on those people by officials out there, and Agrippa goes out there too to sort it all out, builds the first road system, effectively, in the province or provinces, the three Gauls, radiating out from Lugdunum, which we now call Lyon, all the province or provinces the three gauls radiating out from lugdunum which we now call leon all the way up to the rhine and at one point even is engaged with a treaty partner across the rhine a dramatic tribe called the ubi who appeal to the romans and say we're being handed our back by the swaybee what can he do for us there's this treaty that says

you'll come to our help and indeed they do and Agrippa is the second man only in Roman history after Julius Caesar to go build a bridge and get help to those people. And then he actually brings those people across the Rhine and settles them in now what we call Cologne. Obedum obiorum was the name. So we already see that he's trusted by Octavius as a man that can do things on his own, and there's no fear that he will go and do things that will work against him. And this is remarkable, because at this time, Agrippa's still only in his twenties. So you can see

in a sense, you've got these young, ambitious we're going to change the world type young guys, and they're working in tandem, they come together, they agree strategy and tactics, and then they go off and do their separate things. And throughout their life, they swing back and forth. You'll see through the lifetime of both Augustus and his best friend that the one will go off on a grand tour of the West

and visit Spain and Gaul and so on. And the other guy will be out in Syria and Judea and places like that. So they perform as a double act. And what's remarkable is that they have enough support within the city that they're never really under threat. There's never going to be anybody that rises up and pushes them away, except the threat of Marcus Antonius. And this is the bit of the story that gets quite interesting, because there's an interval between Actium and the assassination where this triumvirate between Lepidus Antonius and Octavius is

formed. And interestingly enough, by the way, Agrippa is not part of that triumvirate, you notice? He is the helpful guy in the second row. He is the dutiful guy that's going to carry the bag, as it were, and carry the orders out. And what happens is that there are various battles in the north part of Italy, again hounding down

the assassins and their various followers, and it turns out that the, I hounding down the assassins and their various followers. And it turns out that the, I think it's the sister of Marcus Antonius, really causes a ruckus. And Agrippa performs a role there in actually fighting a land war up in Phylginia and other cities, and actually again is able to bring them round. And it's the way he does it, which is this sort of methodical step-by- step. Makes a few mistakes, learns from the mistakes, then carries on. That, again, is informative. It tells you about the way he learns about things.

You mentioned Mark Antony and that time there. Is it more remarkable this trust and the independence that Octavian and Agrippa, they have, this working together? Is it more remarkable because of the time period, when we think of Caesar, of Marius, of Sulla, these generals who have the loyalty of their soldiers to basically strive for their own power? It is, but I think, again, you've got to remember how young these men are. I mean, so Octavius in 44 and Agrippa are both in their late teens, about 19, going into their 20th year. The men you've mentioned there, the Sulla, the Caesars,

were men in their 40s and 50s when they did their great things. So there's three decades of life that these young... They're not pretenders. I mean, they're people who've got a mission. They've decided that it's on their shoulders that the mission to save the Roman world is for them. And what goes with that is that the lack of any kind of military experience. So again, the fact that Octavius has the name of Caesar means he can go to the veteran troops

that served Julius Caesar so well and loyally and say, look, now is the time you have to show your loyalty to me as his legal heir, who's with me. You know what, by the way, I've got a chest of money here, which will get you some way. So there's a certain element of bribery in buying the services of these guys. But also, you know, this is your time to come and live up to the reputation of your great leader. And I think as they start to chalk up victories, their reputation as, you know, there's something behind these. There's a line I seem to remember from Cicero, effectively, in the early years after the assassination, Octavius plays this really interesting game which is that he knows

quite frankly he's outgunned and all the heavyweight and the armed forces are really with the conspirators I mean it's a terrible dilemma what's he going to do and Cicero kind of writes in one of his letters words to the effect we'll use him and then we'll dispose of him and what they mean is he's got this army now guys this is this is really interesting we could use him to get to the army and we can then neutralize marcus antonius and all these people who you know uh stand in the way of us of our agenda and what they misunderstand or underestimate is that tavis can play that game too because he has he has a bigger game in his head which is he understands in the game of chess to get to checkmate, he may have to make a few other maneuvers and sacrifice a few pawns. And in this case, he makes demands on the Senate that he will be regarded as an equal partner,

because he has the army, right? And they kind of reluctantly go along with it. And they play this kind of optical game of, yeah, okay, you know, we're working with this man to try and neutralize. And then at some point it all goes horribly wrong for the senate and in the end octavian does a deal with marcus antonius and they then turn tails and actually now with their combined forces go after the other people and it all ends rather horribly for cicero and those people but it's just interesting to me that

they may be young but they think like older men. And was it because they read stuff? Because in the younger years, you can imagine when Caesar would have dinner parties, and he was a great man for meeting with people and networking. He was probably history's great networker. You can imagine a young teenager, probably 12, 13, is sitting in this triclinium with Julius Caesar, hearing all these stories, and they're discussing politics, and how they're going to do this, and the importance of one thing over another, use people this way, but not that way. This must be a great education. And where Agrippa is in all this, I don't know. It's not clear. We do know from one of the sources that Agrippa seems to

have been known to Julius Caesar and approved of by him. There's an interesting story where, when Julius Caesar is actually in Spain fighting Pompey, the idea is to bring his grandnephew over and the guy arrives too late. And it may be possible that because he went a separate route that Agrippa went there first. But anyway, the war is over effectively before any great things can happen for young Octavius and Agrippa. And then they're sent back to Rome to do things for him in preparation for this war against the Parthians. And he basically is regarded, gets a pat on the back and say, I think you've got good friends. And now to get that kind of accolade from Julius Caesar, I think is profoundly important. It's an approving moment for the young grandnephew. But can you imagine if you're a friend of the

grandnephew? Gosh, you know, the great Caesar said, I'm an okay guy. That's kind of a gold star against the name and you're okay to move forward. I mean, that must have been the highest praise. And as you say, if he uses Caesar's name to his advantage in the later years, it shows, as you say, he was acting older than his years would have suggested. say he was acting older than his years would have suggested. Yes, I think so. And it's intriguing, isn't it, that when you look at ancient history, and there's this idea that because the death rate was appallingly high for young kids and babies, so that lifespans were quite short. In fact, once you get over that, people could live quite long lives. I mean, you know, people can live to their 60s, 70s, 80s, but the death rate's appalling right at the start of it so it's if you can get

through that you reasonably can can live a long life what was against these two guys was that they were bringing brought up in the civil war and they went on to live through another one that was partly of their own making proactively put themselves in harm's way through fighting campaigns in fact you could it's amazing they lived as long as they did. And you mentioned the Second Civil War there. I guess we ought to go on to that now. Yeah. You were mentioning all this underestimating of Agrippa and Octavian and the team they formed.

Did Mark Antony also underestimate them? Oh, I think so. Yeah, I'm one of those people who probably think that one of history's great fools was Marcus Antonius, which is a shame because I'm sure he was a great guy and he was certainly Caesar's close confidant and generally I think he was a master of horse, magister equitum. So there was something that Caesar saw in him,

but he was a playboy and a gambler and took stupid risks and really I don't think knew how to leverage what he had. And he went to Cleopatra, who smartly didn't give him a fleet, but she gave him money to go build one and troops and these sorts of things. But I think she saw the weaknesses in him. And I think every step of the way, I think he underestimates the opponents. What we already know by this time that Lepidus, the third man in the Triumvirate, has basically been booted out by Octavius. He's given the Pontifex Maximus title, which is keeping quite a nice prestigious job, but now there's just two of us. And effectively, it's Octavius in the west and Marcus Antonius

in the east. And a political game breaks out of the two sides, because you've got to remember that Marcus Antonius has lots of followers in Rome, right? So he has members in the Senate that are pro him and against Octavius. And it's a case of managing this really tricky situation. But every step of the way, it seems to me, at least, that Marcus Antiochus underestimates the power of Agrippa as the strategic and tactical thinker. We see this played over and over and over, ultimately, in the Battle of Actium and the months leading up to that, that there's a sort of hubris in this man that is not in the other one. So, ironically, the humility in the BFF of Octavius is his great ace up his sleeve, as it were, which the other man just thinks, hey, I've got what it takes. And cruelly, history proves to be not the case. And so does Agrippa, does he play a major role in the whole Lactium campaign? Yes. The account suggests that very early, having decided that basically there was going to be a military campaign between the two sides. And again, the optics of this are terrible. I mean,

when Roman fights Roman, this is effectively to acknowledge the worst of scenarios. I mean, Romans do great when they're fighting foreigners, the people outside. What we're looking at here is Romans fighting Romans and nothing good comes out of this. So it's always managing optics. And what you've got to do in the case of Augustus Octavius' camp is not to make it personal in the sense of,

I'm fighting another Roman. I'm fighting an the Roman. I'm fighting an Egyptian queen who has, through her guile and witchcraft and all those sorts of things, has managed to bring under her influence this great Roman. And this is the way it's portrayed in a sense. But the battle on the ground is Agrippa is put in charge, basically, of all the forces, military and land, and very quickly arranges this campaign of a sort of guerrilla warfare along the west coast of Greece from Epirus all the way down to Peloponnese. They land a military operations setup base in Corfu, Kerkera in ancient times,

and then they use that as an operating base to then start making reaches into the mainland of the western Balkans. So what's really interesting again, whereas Agrippa had learned to fight two big sea battles, Nalicus and Meli, what he learned from that seems to have been there were limitations in using very big battle cruisers and battleships, warships. What it made sense was actually to have the kit and the equipment of the usurper, the upstart.

And in this case, Sextus used much smaller ships called Liburnians, which were popular amongst pirates of all people, would you believe, from Liburnia, which were two-decker ships, small, fast, maneuverable. And rather than building these huge big ships that he had used and deployed in the war against Sextus Pompis, now Agrippa decides, I need to build small ships. I need to actually play the guerrilla warfare game. And that's what he does. And interestingly enough, what Marcus Antonius

has done, has done the opposite thing. He must have said, hey, I'm going to actually do what Agrippa did. I'm going to build big ships. And I've got the fleet from Egypt after all, and I'm going to put all this stuff together and I will have a great naval force. And Agrippa comes along and surprises the heck out of stuff together and I will have a great naval force. And Agrippa comes along and surprises the heck out of him because he's got this fleet of little boats, effectively, which move very fast. And they're cruising up and down the coastline,

nipping at the supply lines, and they're cutting off corn supplies and vegetables and all the rest of it that has to come by sea, having closed off various access routes that way. And he's also nipping at allies that Marcus Antonius has. So he's effectively grinding down. It's a war of attrition. And eventually they're able to get a foothold on the other side of the bay at Actaeon, facing the army and navy of Antonius and Cleopatra on the south side of the bay. And then it becomes a waiting game. So at this then octavius who has been fighting this political optical game in rome is able to arrive first in corfu and say see i've left brindisi every i've got the whole of italy behind me and it's good news every step of the way and then he comes to actium and they sit there for about six months in the heat and mosquitoes and the stench. And they try to provoke a war and

nobody's prepared to play ball on this occasion. But it very much is in the hands of Agrippa to determine these things. Wow. When you mentioned that naval campaign, it's remarkable that the little ships against the big ships. I mean, you think of Salamis with something quite similar with the smaller ships against the bigger Persian ships. But then history goes on with the Hellenistic period. Then you get the bigger warships, which become the more dominant force against the smaller warships. But now Agrippa, as it were, he's turned the tables again. It's now the smaller flexible warships,

which ultimately attack to improve, more able and better than Antony's bigger and more powerful Hellenistic ones. And this comes back to, he's playing two levels of the game. He's playing the strategy, which is that we know, well, he knows, he knows that really, that they're roughly equal in terms of manpower. So they have to strike an advantage. They have to turn it asymmetric in some shape or form. And I think his calculus, which history proves to be the right one, is to play a different game. And he had seen it successfully in the wars in the Tyrrhenian Sea, and therefore being the master of that, knowing all the weaknesses of his opponent. I mean, Cleopatra, you know, was used to

selling on these great big Nile galleys. What do they know about naval warfare? And Marcus Antonius knows as little as she does, because he's a cavalry commander, he's an infantry guy. So really, once again, there's this insight to learn from doing that Agrippa has, and again the smarts here are to Octavius, because he's had to

learn to fight the war the same way. I mean, he's not a naval commander at all. In fact, the one occasion where he does have a naval war, which was in the months before Agrippa did the victories out in Sicily, they were disastrous failures. So I think what's the secret also is that, in understanding the future of Augustus, to understand he knows his limitations.

He knows where he can find the skill sets he lacks. And it's all in the head of Agrippa. And Agrippa plays this beautifully. So he just, I think, takes everything he knows and plays this game. I would imagine he would have worked this out using little wooden boats and things on charts or what have you

to try and game theory these things out long before game theory was a thing. And working out that you've got to play a guerrilla war to weaken the opponent and the weaknesses were to grind down the supply chains so that if nothing happened at all they could just simply have a siege they could besiege the people in the bay of actium and what were they going to do i mean the queen is already a thousand miles away from where she is her home in egypt and you know octaviusius has Italy across the way where he can stop Marcus Antonius going to Italy.

So the advantage is theoretically on his side, but they still don't really know how all this is going to play out. So I think Agrippa is very clever in how he does this, but he's also, it seems to be, plays a little bit conservatively. So he could have at any particular point uh provoked um an action by just sailing the fleet up against the beach and then having a marine

amphibious landing and you know take a chance but they don't do that they they wait for very particular conditions and they then they deploy their their fleet in a very defensive manner to to play against this kind of arrogance this hubris that I think he sees in Marcus Antonius. And it works out that way. It turns out that he was absolutely right. So in the aftermath of Actium, Augustus, well, Octavian, and Agrippa, they're now the top dogs in the Roman Empire. But what do they do to make sure that Actium is the end of the last civil war? A couple of things. The interesting thing, the aftermath is really curious. So Agrippa took the decision not to go chasing after Marcus Antonius and Cleopatra. There's a moment in early in the battle on the 2nd of

September where, and just to set the scene for your listeners, the normal sort of style of war fit this time is really to charge your boat, the normal sort of style of warfare at this time is really to charge your boat against the other guy's boat, and you hope that you go faster and you get there sooner, and your metal prow will smash as a whole in the side or front of the opponent's vessel, and it sinks. That's kind of the basic crude way you fight a war.

If you don't achieve that, you get as close as you can to them, and you get your men onto their decks, and then you fight a land battle at sea. That's kind of the characters they play. There's a moment in the battle where Cleopatra sees a gap in Octavius Agrippa's line and they sail the fleet through. And what Marcus Antoneus does, which is absolutely bizarre, he panics.

He gets his boat to chase after her boat, jumps on her boat and sails away, leaving the army to fight the battle, both on land and at sea, without its commander-in-chief, which you can imagine is pretty humiliating. But his people are loyal to him and they keep fighting this battle.

And eventually, by the morning of the 3rd, because it's actually on the 3rd of September that victory is declared, and the sun rises, and you can imagine a bay filled with burning boats and men floating, it would have been an absolutely awful thing to behold. And it's about nine or ten days later that the rest of the forces,

I think it's about 19 legions, who are based in that part of Greece, finally surrender. Because they sit there thinking, Marcus Antonius, this is a last stand. He's going to come back. He's going to come back the other way, and he doesn't. And what's extraordinary is that Octavius and Agrippa seek their surrender, total surrender,

and these men surrender to him. And one of the first things they decide to do is disband the army. They demob the troops. So there are something like 120,000 troops, I think it says in the Res Gestae, which is Augustus's famous inscription of things he achieved in his lifetime. And demobbing troops was one of the things that he actually said was very important. And Agrippa, interestingly enough, is not told, take these people and go come all the way around and fight in Egypt. No, he's take these guys and find places for them to live, right? Demob them, find towns, do something. And that's Agrippa's next job. He has to take hundreds of thousands of troops, keep them alive

and fed and well, and actually sweet because any number of those could decide to cause a ruckus and they would be another problem. And in the months afterwards, they redeploy these demobbed soldiers to cities throughout that part of the world in northern Greece and in Italy. So it's extraordinary. One of the first things they do is actually an act of peace, as it turns out. And what Octavius is doing in the meantime is going on the hunt for Cleopatra and Marcus Antonius. And eventually, after arriving in Egypt, they actually fight a battle, often negotiating with the Queen of Egypt. And everybody knows the story about Mark Antony committing suicide and Cleopatra dying on some means. I actually think she was assassinated rather than killed by an asp, but it makes a

great story for the newspapers. So what you've now got is a situation where Agrippa is in Rome in this amazing aftermath of the civil war, and Octavius is actually in Egypt. So they maintain this kind of interesting position of keeping both sources of power and potential conflict under their control. And eventually Octavius comes back and they start working on their political agenda, which is eventually to work out the details of how do they work with this new power structure, effectively. And that's where I think that the next phase of evolution emerges. And so this paves the way for the start of imperial Rome. Yes, in the sense that you now have an autocrat. We can discuss the idea of imperial at another time, I think. We can

indeed. Lindsay Powell, that was fantastic. Once again, your book is called? Marcus Ripper, Right Hand Man of Caesar Augustus with a Ford by Stephen Saylor. Brilliant. Thank you very much, Lindsay, for coming on the show. You're welcome.