Post-Mortem
The fates of all five of Agrippa’s children by Julia were similarly unhappy.
Lucius Caesar died of illness while with the army in Gaul, aged eighteen.
A year and a half later, his elder brother, Gaius Caesar, also died, of wounds sustained while fighting in Anatolia, aged twenty-three.
Four years after Gaius’s death, Agrippa’s daughter Julia was arrested for adultery, and banished like her mother to a remote island, in her case Trimerus, in the Adriatic, where she died aged forty-seven.
Agrippa’s remaining son by Julia – the child with whom she was pregnant at the end of this novel – was born about three months after his father’s death.
Known in consequence as Agrippa Postumus, he seems to have suffered from some kind of mental illness.
At any rate, he was kept secluded from public view during Augustus’s lifetime and lived under close guard in the same villa in which Agrippa died.
He was eventually murdered there by one of his guards, aged twenty-four or twenty-five, shortly after Augustus died and was succeeded by Tiberius: which of the two issued the order for the killing is uncertain.
Agrippa’s other daughter by Julia, known as Agrippina the Elder, was a victim of political intrigue during the reign of Tiberius.
She was also exiled to her mother’s old island prison of Pandataria, and died there, allegedly of starvation, at the age of forty-six.
She left behind several surviving children, including a son, Gaius – Agrippa’s grandson – who in time inherited control of the Roman empire from Tiberius.
He is better known today as the emperor Caligula.
So much for Augustus’s succession planning.
Augustus proved to be the embodiment of the old English proverb that a creaking gate lasts longest. Against all expectations, he survived to the age of seventy-five, outliving Agrippa by a quarter of a century. His last words were said to be: Acta est fabula, plaudite. ‘The show is over – applaud.’
Livia was a widow for fifteen years, reaching the remarkable age for the period of eighty-seven. She too was interred in Augustus’s mausoleum.
At the entrance to the burial chamber, engraved on the bronze pillars that flanked the doors, Augustus left behind his testament to posterity, the Res Gestae Divi Augusti – the Deeds of the Divine Augustus. Written entirely in the first person, its tone is set in the first sentence:
In my nineteenth year, on my own initiative and at my own expense, I raised an army with which I set free the state …
Listing the military victories of his lifetime, and the great public works undertaken, including the aqueducts, Augustus takes sole credit. The English translation of the Res Gestae runs to more than three thousand words. The name Agrippa occurs in passing twice.
To the modern eye, there is something totalitarian in the way the Great Leader all but effaced his closest comrade from the official record.
Agrippa left behind no speeches, few letters and only a couple of sentences of direct quotation.
The greatest general of the period, he never triumphed.
Though he was the effective co-ruler of the Roman world for many years, his family origins are almost entirely unknown, his inner life a blank.
It was F. A. Wright, professor of classics at London University, who in 1937 first floated the possibility that Agrippa might have been Caesar’s illegitimate son.
The theory is purely conjectural, unsupported by any facts apart from a few ambiguous contemporary remarks and inscriptions and the circumstantial evidence that Caesar, who was notorious for sleeping with other men’s wives, was certainly in Rome in the year before Agrippa was born, and probably fathered various children over the years whom he never openly acknowledged.
In the absence of any hard facts, Wright abandons the speculation after a couple of pages.
But it would certainly solve some mysteries.
Why was the son of Lucius Vipsanius, an unknown plebeian, expensively educated alongside the highly connected Octavius?
Why did Caesar take him on his final campaign to Spain, and bring him home again afterwards on his personal flagship – a singular honour for an eighteen-year-old?
Why did he give him a commission and send him to Apollonia with his great-nephew?
Above all, where did Agrippa’s military and organisational talents come from?
Of course, such qualities are by no means hereditary.
Plenty of sons of geniuses turn out to be duds.
But so many of the gifts Agrippa displayed as a commander from an early age – speed, originality, elan, a remarkable grasp of strategy and logistics – are so reminiscent of Caesar’s, it’s not unreasonable to wonder if they might have been inherited.
It would help explain why Agrippa was careful never to upstage – or perhaps was never allowed to upstage – Octavius, whose familial connection with Caesar was in truth somewhat tenuous.
It could also be a reason why his family background is so puzzlingly obscure.
Such speculation, in the absence of supporting evidence, is pretty much worthless to a historian. A novelist thankfully has more freedom.
The great masterpiece of Agrippa’s building programme, the Pantheon, burned down about a century after it was completed.
The version that stands today was rebuilt by the emperor Hadrian on the same spot in AD 126.
It is the most visited heritage site in Italy, attracting nine million tourists a year.
Almost two thousand years after its construction, it still boasts the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world.
Like millions of others, I have gazed up at the inscription above the entrance and wondered about the character of the man behind it. And in its terse, plain, no-nonsense language, speaking to us in stone, I like to imagine there is a clue.
M·AGRIPPA·L·F·COS·TERTIVM·FECIT
Marcus Agrippa, son of Lucius, in his third consulship, did it.