Daisy Dunn on Marcus Agrippa, ancient Rome's king of cement

15:03Shushma Malik:He does. He does. And I think we've got to be aware that's probably some bias in the sources here.

15:10Helen Carr:From Taco Night in Tulum to sushi in Tokyo, make every bite rewarding with gold from Amex. Wherever you dine, four times the membership rewards points at restaurants worldwide are piling up.

15:20Shushma Malik:Learn more at americanexpress.com slash explore-gold. Terms and points cap apply.

15:25Helen Carr:What they are ultimately trying to create is going to replace humans. What it's doing is parboiling the inside of your brain. This could be a turning point in the history of social media. Welcome to The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. Coming up next in our latest episode, we look at the secret meetings at the world's biggest AI summit, the truth about the mystery of a brain-melting weapon, and the lawsuit that could shift the future of social media. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

16:05Shushma Malik:against Antony.

16:07Helen Carr:The battle itself, what exactly were the consequences of the victory?

16:10Shushma Malik:So it was a great victory for Octavian because it essentially meant the end of this alliance that he'd formed with Antony officially is over. Antony Cleopatra commits suicide famously after this. Octavian's the last man standing and he's there with Marcus Agrippa at his side and Agrippa has arguably won that battle for him. so I feel like his position is quite unassailable. And it was such an important battle, it was commemorated on coins, wasn't it? It was and I mean one of the great things about Marcus Griffin, one of the reasons I really like him essentially is he was always turning down honours, particularly triumphs and a triumph is the great thing that all Romans aspire to, it's what you got for defeating a foreign enemy and he's said to have turned down about three of these at least in his lifetime.

16:56Shushma Malik:He didn't like honours at all but the one thing he did do was to wear a gold crown with ship prowls on it. And this was in recognition of his great naval expertise.

17:06Helen Carr:So he was obviously quite proud of his naval victories. But the question that I always want to know about every figure in history, I mean, what did he look like? He had one of those faces that I would say was a man that sort of meant business.

17:21Shushma Malik:You know, he wasn't handsome. Strong jawline. He had a very, very heavy brow. and I can never think of it as a really good sort of modern equivalent because I think most of the men in Hollywood are too good looking but he's a little bit like Will Ferrell. Okay. And that actor, what's his name? John C. Reilly. Do you know what I mean? I was thinking of Christopher Eccleston when you were doing it.

17:43Helen Carr:You know, maybe that's wrong. He's a tough guy.

17:45Shushma Malik:And we know that from busts that were available. They were busts that were made in his own time which still survived. So we can see what he looked like and I don't think he was a bundle of laughs. I don't think he was the kind of guy that you'd want to go and party with. He wanted to get the job done. He wanted to clean up Rome from the kind of cesspool of civil war in which it was mired. He wanted to build. He repaired all of these aqueducts. He gave Rome wonderful lakes for swimming. People could go and swim in these wonderful lakes that he established. He really improved the look of it. And I think he had people's best interest at heart.

18:16Helen Carr:So he does seem unique, but surely there are some other number twos in history that we can talk about. I feel like that has a double entendre.

18:27Helen Carr:I mean did Genghis Khan have a number two? In the period I work on I've worked on John of Gaunt who could be maybe described as a number two

18:35Shushma Malik:What about Margaret of Anjou for Henry VI? Margaret of Anjou for Henry VI Shishma what do you think?

18:41Daisy Dunn:Any others that you can think about in classical history? From the Roman perspective I mean one of the things that's really interesting about Agrippa is after that the idea of having someone quite so close becomes very dangerous So if we think about just the Tiberian period, when we get another figure like this, who's called Sejanus, he, another famous one for My Claudius, but he rules for Tiberius a bit in Rome, but does a lot of the kind of work, I suppose, that we might also associate with Agrippa in terms of the pulling strings, perhaps a little bit more explicitly. We might say that he was also that sort of Agrippa figure.

19:18Daisy Dunn:But it ends very badly for him. It ends completely differently. That happens quite a lot for number two, doesn't it? Exactly. It does end badly. Very quickly, that idea of being quite so close to an emperor starts to become much more dangerous. And we see it again and again, particularly with someone like Seneca to Nero. If you are a good man close to an emperor, that's a very dangerous spot to be in. But also, I don't think we should necessarily underestimate also how dangerous it could have been for Agrippa being that close to Augustus.

19:49Helen Carr:You're listening to The Great Life of Marcus Agrippa, chosen by Daisy Dunn and also here is Shushma Malik. I'm Helen Carr, but you might be wondering where Matthew is. Don't worry, he will be back as normal, perhaps with a healthy winter tan. Marcus Agrippa was an early character in Robert Graves' I, Claudius, and he's negotiating with the Emperor over his price for returning to help him in Rome. Let's seal this bond tighter than it's ever been before. Ah. What's closer than a family tie? To be related by blood and marriage is a public declaration of what we mean to each other. You're thinking of your children?

20:28Helen Carr:I'm thinking of myself. You probably know that I don't get on with my wife. No, I didn't know that. Oh, I don't. We haven't slept together for years. Of course, I'm speaking a little soon, I know, and one must observe the decencies, but Julia's a young woman. She'll get married again soon. Why not to me? To you. Why not? Don't tell me I'm not good enough for your family. There's Marcus Agrippa sealing the deal to marry the Emperor's daughter. For one point, either of you, who was playing the Emperor Augustus? It was the great Brian Blessed, the unforgettable Brian Blessed. And how old was his daughter, not Brian Blessed's daughter, but Emperor Augustus's daughter, Julia?

21:12Helen Carr:Do we know?

21:13Daisy Dunn:Yeah, she was about 18 or 19 years old. OK, so why does this marriage matter so much? Political marriages, the daughters of sort of key figures have been for a very long time sort of important in forming alliances. And one of the interesting things is that Agrippa might not be of a particularly noble family, but by this point he has become so integral to the Augustan principate that it almost seems natural or expected that there will be some sort of family repercussions of this. So for Agrippa to be married to Julia, although there is a big age difference and that is often the case and we see this time and time again, is not unexpected as part of the solidification and the establishment of this new imperial regime.

21:55Helen Carr:Daisy, you mentioned that he didn't like receiving honours, but it seems like he probably quite liked receiving this one.

22:01Shushma Malik:It's a tricky one, because he had been married a couple of times before. I mean, his first wife was incredibly wealthy. It's probably from his money, from her money rather, that he managed to finance so much of the building work he did. And then he'd been married again to the niece of the emperor. So it made sense that he should marry Julia. One of the really weird things you find in the sources is Mycenas, who Shishma mentioned earlier, another of the advisors to the emperor. He supposedly said to Augustus that you better get Agrippa as your son-in-law, otherwise he will murder you, which seems so bizarre to me because, I mean, this seems so far from what Agrippa was like.

22:42Shushma Malik:You know, to me, I kind of sense this almost rivalry between Mycenae and Agrippa. I don't know what Shishma thinks about this. It's one of those strange things you find in the sources.

22:50Daisy Dunn:Yeah, there's right. I mean, they quite like to give Agrippa rivalries against all sorts, because there's also the one against Marcellus, who is Augustus's nephew. And in 23 BCE, when Augustus gets very ill, it's expected that Marcellus will have a bigger role in sort of becoming an heir figure. And then Augustus actually gives his signet ring to Agrippa instead. And suddenly, you know, our sources play that up. I think that's generally the scholarly consensus at the moment. But actually one of the most fascinating bits of history for me is in written history. So historiography that is written about this period.

23:26Daisy Dunn:It comes from much later. It comes from the late second, early third century is from Book 52 of Cassius Dio. And practically the entire book is given over to this debate between Agrippa and Mycenas. So it's just after the Battle of Actium before Augustus receives his title, Augustus from the Senate. So those years between 31 and 27 BCE. they're having a discussion about, well, what should we do? What is the political system going to be? And Agrippa says, you must restore the republic. And Mycena says, you must establish a monarchy. And obviously we know which one won out. It was Mycena. But it's a really extended, fascinating debate.

24:05Daisy Dunn:And the idea that this later historian, who will probably have had some sources, but also be thinking about his own political theory in there, is sort of setting up these sort of advisers as having these really important discussions and thinking about the nature of how Romans should be ruled and want to be ruled. And at the end of it, he sort of says, well, even though Agrippa's opinion didn't win, he wholeheartedly supported the moves that Augustus made and went forward with and was absolutely instrumental and fundamental in those things. So actually, they're figuring these big, big, big political questions out together.

24:40Helen Carr:Now, Daisy, I'm interested because it seems like he's too much of a nice guy to really be a problem to Augustus. I mean, you seem to really like him.

24:49Shushma Malik:I do. I just think he's such a rare thing. He seems to be a politician without an ego. How often can you say... There was a sort of palpable silence and stillness there, wasn't there?

24:59Helen Carr:Between us all, like, wow.

25:01Shushma Malik:I think that is the case. I just don't think he has any kind of ulterior motive. I just think he wants to achieve the best for Rome he possibly can. He's just trying to make Rome function again. And I just think it's quite an altruistic purpose that drives him.

25:17Helen Carr:According to Pliny the Elder, he's formed 700 wells, in addition to 500 fountains and 130 reservoirs, 300 statues of marble or bronze and 400 marble columns and all of this in the space of a single year. But I also just wanted to add, I read that he built a gym that he called the Spartan sweat bath. Is that true?

25:40Daisy Dunn:He had a huge bath complex. It was much more than a spa. It would have had lots of different parts of it to do physical activities, but also to hold meetings and social. Did he have something to do with the Trevi Fountain? He did, yes. So the Trevi Fountain is on the site of the Aqua Virgo, one of Agrippa's aqueducts. And so where we now visit that site, that's also where the terminus of that aqueduct was.

26:04Helen Carr:I think his architectural legacy is almost more impressive than his military legacy, isn't it? I mean, the Pantheon, he paid for that. Is that right?

26:12Shushma Malik:Well, we're told that he personally funded the restoration of all the buildings, all the streets. And it's difficult to know whether this is completely true. We're told explicitly that he did not put his hand into the public treasury in order to pay for this. Was he wealthy enough to do that? I think it's from his first marriage, quite likely, and also from some of these military victories. So after vanquishing sexist Pompeius, he seems to have got estates. They were helping him to fund these great projects. And isn't that great of him?

26:40Helen Carr:Dio actually writes about the death of Agrippa when he was around 50, 51. And it's a public loss to all Romans. And he claimed that owls kept flitting about the city while lightning struck the house where the consuls would sometimes lodge. And also you can imagine sort of the city on fire. Reading behind that, what do you think it actually means?

27:00Shushma Malik:I think you have so many descriptions in the ancient sources of weird phenomena happening, particularly if there was a battle going on or someone just died, as is the case here. I think the fact that it's been described in this way really attests to the popularity of the man. You know, it was recognised as being a great loss when he died. He was only 50-51, as you say, so he still had a lot of life in him. He fell ill while he was travelling, died near the Bay of Naples. so I think it was premature and it was recognised that he had more to offer.

27:34Daisy Dunn:When he died he was actually en route to Pannonia or had got to Pannonia and then was coming back so he's still trying to secure the borders that are seen as unstable. He spent a lot of time in Spain as well doing similar things because one of the things that's also important in this period, in the Augustan period is something called the Pax Augusta So the idea that after civil war, there's a need to consolidate, a need to sort of get the empire, which is really big by this point, not quite at its largest extent, but not far off under some sort of control. And so he's really still very important to that kind of Augustan idea that after this horrific period of trauma and civil war, that peace is returning, not just to Rome, but actually to the empire.

28:23Helen Carr:And we've talked about his death having an impact on the people and all of this sort of imagery of Laos flitting around the city. But on a personal level for Augustus, what kind of loss was that for him? I imagine quite extraordinary.

28:39Shushma Malik:I mean, I think it was devastating. I mean, the thing with Augustus, we don't exactly know at what point he was trying to sort of line up a successor. It was sort of very behind the scenes. At one point, as we said, he gave his seal ring to Agrippa, almost marking him out. After Agrippa's death, Tiberius, the stepson of Augustus, seems to come more and more to the forefront. He picks up some of the work that Agrippa had left undone, finishes it off. And he seems to sort of rise and almost take his place. So I think there's a sense that his legacy was just as important as his life to Augustus. I think he would have been slightly at a loose end, actually, without him.

29:21Shushma Malik:Sort of on a practical day-to-day level, he was very, very heavily reliant on Agrippa. And I think the fact that their friendship managed to endure, in spite of huge dramas, actually, breaking out in the family, particularly between Agrippa and his wife, Julia, that says something.

29:39Helen Carr:So he was described as a cunning fox imitating a noble lion. And he was the grandfather of Caligula and the great grandfather of the Emperor Nero. My thanks to you, Daisy Dunn, and also once again to Shushma Malek for helping us out on this show. Other Romans you can find in our back catalogue include Julius Caesar and the satirist Juvenal, who was suggested by Natalie Haynes in 2012.

30:07Helen Carr:What they are ultimately trying to create is going to replace humans. What it's doing is par-boiling the inside of your brain. This could be a turning point in the history of social media. Welcome to The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. Coming up next in our latest episode, we look at the secret meetings at the world's biggest AI summit. the truth about the mystery of a brain-melting weapon, and the lawsuit that could shift the future of social media. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.