Agrippa by Robert Harris review – persuasive portrait of rivalry in ancient Rome

This fictional memoir by Octavius’s right-hand man shows us bloodshed, betrayal and hectic jockeying for power If you’re one of those people who thinks about the Roman empire several times a week, Robert Harris has you covered.

He follows his trilogy of novels about the life of Cicero and his one-off about the unpleasantness in Pompeii with a narrative that takes us from civil war through the assassination of Julius Caesar, with all the bickering and bloodshed that follows, on to the decisive battle of Actium and Octavius’s apotheosis as Caesar Augustus.

We meet Cicero, Fulvia, Lepidus, two Caesars and a burly Antony (“Imagine, if you will, a statue of Hercules with a club in one hand, a wineskin in the other”).

Here’s the clever bit: he narrates it all from the point of view of Octavius’s right-hand man, Agrippa, a much less well-remembered figure.

Harris tells us he “left behind no speeches, few letters and only a couple of sentences of direct quotation”.

Yet Agrippa was “effective co-ruler of the Roman world for many years” and “the greatest general of the period”.

Octavius couldn’t have risen without him, but he seems to have done his best to write him out of the story afterwards, according him only two passing mentions in the Res Gestae Divi Augusti.

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