Augustus Caesar & Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa

The Mechanic

Around the year 37 BC, Octavian Caesar, the adopted son of Julius, was a young man in his mid-20s who faced an awkward problem. He needed a navy to fight his rival Sextus Pompey, a Roman general turned mega-pirate who controlled the only navy the Romans had built in the last 200 years. The Romans called the Mediterranean Mare Nostrum, "our sea," but in 37 BC it was Sextus Pompey's sea. Octavian had already ordered one fleet built, only to see it smashed by Sextus' more experienced crews. This time he gave the job to a friend, another young man in his mid-20s named Marcus Agrippa.

Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa was not a Roman engineer. Like his friend Octavian he was a Roman aristocrat, expected to make his career in public service. But Agrippa had all the practical genius of a true Roman engineer. Give him men, money, and a building assignment, and he would build it: solid, sturdy, and practical. So Agrippa built Octavian a navy. He equipped it with ingenious new weapons, such as a grappling hook shot from a ballista (similar to a catapult), to snag an enemy ship and winch it in for boarding and capture.

Agrippa's talents weren't limited to engineering. Octavian gave him command of the fleet he'd just built, and Agrippa proved himself equally skilled as an admiral. Wily old Sextus Pompey met his match; Agrippa forced him to battle and crushed him. The victory gave Octavian and Agrippa a breather in Rome's civil wars. Agrippa traded in his admiral's cap for a civil engineer's hard hat, went back to Rome, and spent the next couple of years repaving the streets, repairing aqueducts, and generally shaping the old town up.

In 31 BC Agrippa was back aboard ship again, this time against Antony and Cleopatra. He cornered and destroyed their combined fleet at the Battle of Actium, one of history's most decisive seafights. The famed lovers escaped to Egypt, but their cause was lost, and both soon committed suicide.

Agrippa's friend Octavian was now the unchallenged master of the Roman world. From this time on we know him as the Emperor Augustus. Having won Augustus' most important victory for him, Agrippa want back to the building trades, his projects including the Pantheon in Rome. It later burned down; the present-day Pantheon is a replacement built about AD 125. But it still bears a Latin inscription saying "Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa built this."

One other quality Marcus Agrippa had was loyalty - something not always to be counted on in Rome at that time. His partnership with his friend made Augustus the first Roman emperor. (Julius Caesar, for all his fame, never became emperor.) Agrippa seemed content to be the loyal sidekick, with no hint that he ever considered muscling Augustus aside. Perhaps Agrippa thought that emperor's best friend was a generally safer and more comfortable job than emperor.

Augustus, in fact, seems to have intended that Agrippa would be his successor, though they were nearly the same age. A decade after Actium he divorced his wife and married Augustus' daughter Julia, a dynastic marriage that made him a member of the new imperial family. (To make things confusing she is called Julia the Elder, even when young.) This marriage affirmed Agrippa's succession prospects, but on a personal level it must have been a mixed blessing: Julia was eighteen years old, beautiful - and soon notorious for her love affairs.

Agrippa put the best face he could on his wife's affairs, and accepted the five children she bore as his (others were more skeptical). In 12 BC he died, leaving behind him a Rome largely rebuilt by his efforts. He might have considered that a fitting monument to a lifetime of loyal service to Rome and Augustus. He also, however, left behind his children by Julia (if they were his), who made him a founding father of one of history's most outrageous soap operas, the Julio-Claudian family of Roman emperors that ended with Nero.