MY AGRIPPA

Twersky’s historical novel chronicles the dawn of the Roman Empire.

The story begins in 45 B.C.E.: Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa is a young man traveling to Apollonia (in present-day Albania) with his friend Octavius and another boy named Rufus. The boys are there to study and learn the ways of the military. Octavius’ great-uncle is none other than Julius Caesar. The training goes well, but the next year, Caesar is assassinated, and the repercussions for Octavius are immense—he not only inherits Caesar’s estates, but he also officially becomes Caesar’s adopted son. As Octavius’ sister, Octavia, puts it, her little brother “thus became a major player on the Roman scene.” Octavius will go on to become Augustus, the first emperor of Rome. But for now, Caesar’s death has “created a power vacuum that was only filled by the fear that pervaded the streets of Rome and was perpetuated by the factions that vied for control.” Octavius and his friend Agrippa have their work cut out for them. Agrippa, who tells much of the story from his personal perspective, handles affairs in Gaul (present-day France) and Germany. He likes to settle things with diplomacy: “I preferred not to fight, but would if necessary.” As it turns out, there’s plenty of fighting to be done; one of Caesar’s old enemies, Sextus, commands a force at sea that is affecting grain shipments to Rome. Then there’s Roman general Marc Antony, who famously throws in his lot with the Egyptian pharaoh Cleopatra. Meanwhile, Octavia has her own views to share as she observes and comments on events, recalling a time when “The Forum was a cauldron of fury, the air choked with dust and the acrid scent of sweat and desperation.”

The narrative consists mostly of the first-person recollections of Agrippa and Octavia, with occasional letters and commentary from outside sources, like the “Testimony of a Sailor” who was on a ship with Sextus. Agrippa and Octavia witness much as the Roman Republic becomes an empire at the hands of someone they both know very well; sometimes, however, they merely state the obvious or make bland proclamations—for instance, when Agrippa is on a ship in 22 B.C.E., he remarks “I was thrilled to finally go back to Rome.” Octavia looks fondly on Agrippa’s financing of the construction of the Pantheon, as she feels he did it “not for [the] sake of rivalries or personal elevation, but for the sheer good of the people and city he loved.” Still, the text effectively illuminates the ways in which Agrippa in particular helped to shape Rome, even if his name is not widely remembered. (It’s Octavia who points out that, though Agrippa is “barely mentioned by the heralds,” his impact was immense.) Agrippa’s account reveals what he thinks of things like a monument that Augustus has built at Actium (in present-day Greece); Agrippa reflects that “here, at the very site where the Empire was shamelessly won,” Augustus’ monument “twists reality.” In 33 B.C.E., he observes that the Senate, “once the bastion of order and authority,” has become “a hotbed of strife and infighting that [rivals] the most heated brawls of the taverns.” The novel offers many such tantalizing looks at a fraught period of ancient Roman history.

A meticulous account of a watershed event in ancient history from the perspectives of two less famous names.