Robert Harris has returned to Rome with his new novel, Agrippa. It’s a fictional autobiography of M. Vipsanius Agrippa, right-hand man of the Emperor Augustus, purportedly written in the days before Agrippa’s death at the age of 50 in 12BC.
In Harris’s Cicero trilogy (2021), narrator Tiro allowed readers to see an intimate side of the Roman statesman Cicero. In a similar way, Agrippa – and the device of his “real – but now-lost”– autobiography – gives Harris a perspective on the life of Octavian (also known as the young Caesar, and later Augustus).
