Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa
When standing in front of the Pantheon in Rome, an ancient structure that defies time as one of the oldest buildings in Europe, one giant phrase jumps out at you, chiseled in stone, engraved in big, bold, fuck-off letters across the front of a 2,000-year-old temple that used to serve as the home of all the Gods of Rome:
It reads: MARCUS AGRIPPA, SON OF LUCIUS, CONSUL FOR THE THIRD TIME, BUILT THIS.
hell yeah
Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa was a badass Roman military commander, engineer, architect, administrator, and builder, the military mastermind who forged the Roman Empire with blood, combat, and tactical genius and money he provided from his own personal bank account, and a guy who not only won two of the most important and badass naval battles in ancient history, but won those battles using a fucking terrifying-looking ship-mounted grappling hook cannon he invented himself because he wanted to try and figure out a way to get his Roman Marines into combat with the enemy more quickly. His badassitude and hardcore exploits tend to get a bit lost when the history books start talking about the rise of Augustus Caesar and the fall of the Roman Republic, but that's because even during his life Agrippa routinely declined personal awards and recognition and did everything he could to step back from his own heroic actions and put the glory on his soldiers, his country, and his emperor.
Which, naturally, is what a real badass would do, so it all checks out.
Agrippa first shows up in history around 44 BC, right around the time that Julius Caesar was literally stabbed in the back by everyone he knew and left for dead on the floor of his workplace. Julius's grand-nephew Octavian fled the city of Rome to escape the throng of murderous old dudes in bath robes, and at this point Agrippa kind of materializes out of nowhere and slides right into the Samwise hetero-life-mate role in Octavian's story. We don't really know who he is, or where he came from, or when he was born, and even his clan name (Vipsanius) doesn’t actually appear in Roman history before his arrival in 44. Maybe he was friends with Octavian from back in the day, maybe they went to school together, or maybe he just happened to be a cool army dude and they decided to be best buds while they were hiding from Roman legions in Illyria. Nobody knows. It all just makes Marcus Agrippa a pretty mysterious guy even from the very beginning, which, of course, only helps his case as a badass.
But sure, whatever, Agrippa and Octavian had a pretty big fucking problem on their hands in 44 BC. Octavian's uncle had been murdered by treacherous Senators, and the kid wanted vengeance. Also, it turned out that Julius Caesar had fortuitously left his lands, title, and money to Octavian in his will, but 17-year-old Octavian was understandably a bit hesitant about strolling into Rome to try and claim his place as the rightful heir of one of the Republic's most badass military heroes. Agrippa convinced him, yeah dude, go get paid, and then let's use that power to crush these assholes under the unrelenting heels of our fashionable strappy military sandals, so Octavian went to Rome, got his money, teamed up with general Mark Antony and a dude named Lepidus, formed a Second Triumvirate, and set off to destroy the Senators who'd betrayed his uncle.
Marcus Agrippa almost certainly took part in the brutal fighting at the Battle of Phillipi in 42 BC, when the legions of Octavian and Antony fought and crushed the armies of Brutus and the other Senators, avenging the death of Caesar and solidifying the Second Triumvirate's place as the true power in Rome. From there, naturally the three guys in the Triumvirate all decided to try and kill each other for supremacy, and Agrippa briefly saw action fighting against Mark Antony's armies in Gaul, commanding cohorts of legionnaires into combat against their brethren. Agrippa eventually helped negotiate a peace deal between Mark Antony and Octavian, and when the fighting ended he became Praetor Urbanis (a high-ranking judge in the Roman court system), where he oversaw a bunch of important legal cases in Rome. After that appointment was up, he spent a couple years beating the shit out of the Gauls and the Germans up and down the Rhine Valley, but even though he returned home at the head of victorious legions with a baggage train of barbarian prisoners and plunder he declined when Octavian offered him a Triumph through the streets of Rome. Agrippa didn't need the accolades and the parades and the fancy dress blues. He was just doing his job.
Ok, well the Traitor Senators still weren't done fucking around yet, and the son of Julius Caesar's old frienemy Gnaius Pompey was still hanging around in Sicily building warships and being a general pain in everyone's ass by not dying a swift and quiet death. Pompey Junior had built a pretty badass fleet from his bases in Sicily, blockaded Roman ports from valuable food and equipment shipments, and was doing a pretty good job of kicking the balls off of anyone Octavian sent to try and stop him. So, in 36 BC, the soon-to-be Emperor appointed Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa commander of Task Force Fuck Up Pompey Jr.
Agrippa had never been a sailor and didn’t know anything about naval combat, but he got to work immediately learning the fine art of old-school aquatic mayhem. First, he built a harbor at a place called Puteoli and ordered the construction of a mighty fleet in the Bay of Naples. Then, he hired a bunch of sailors and marines, built a couple giant warships in a nearby lake, and then had his crews and troops train relentlessly day-and-night in various maneuvers and tactics using the protected confines of the lake as a training ground. Then, while his guys were running combat drills, Marcus Agrippa went to work and personally designed a weapon called the Harpax — a freaking ship-mounted ballista that launched grappling hooks with enough velocity to smash through enemy hulls and winch them close enough for a personal confrontation.
After several months of drilling, training, and designing steampunk siege engines, Agrippa was finally ready to rock. He brought his forces into the Mediterranean and sailed all-ahead-full against Sicily, easily outmaneuvering the enemy fleet through some tricky straits and eventually forcing an all-out ship-to-ship battle against the navy of Sextus Pompeus (did I mention the guy's name was Sextus? I feel that is important).
Sextus Pompey's fleet was not as well drilled, not as well armored, and they were not expecting a bunch of damn harpoons to slam into their ships and start tractor-beaming them towards warships full of hardcore Roman marines in full kit. In the final epic showdown, Agrippa destroyed 30 enemy ships while only losing 3 of his own. The enemy power was smashed, the rest of Pompey's fleet scattered, and Agrippa’s legions were deployed onto Sicily to re-take control of the island. For his heroics, Agrippa was awarded a golden crown by Augustus, and was offered another Triumph through the streets of Rome. Again, he declined.
Agrippa then went on to lead victorious legions in battles against the Illyrians, before returning to Rome in 33 and being appointed Magistrate for Public Works. Now, to you and me it might not sound all that exciting to be in charge of city sewer systems after you'd just spent most of your summer break decapitating Dalmatians with a gladius while leading heroic charges against enemy cities (and by Dalmatians I mean Croatian people, not puppies), but Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa never did anything in his life by half and when Octavian put this dude in charge of public works this guy fucking owned public works. He cleaned the city sewers, built baths, scrubbed the water supply to give clean drinking water to the Roman people, built aqueducts (including the massive Aquia Julia), and oversaw the construction of 700 cisterns, 130 water towers, and repairs along a 55-mile stretch of the Marcian aqueduct. This guy was so hardcore about this post that when the city ran out of budget Agrippa just started paying for these construction projects and repairs with his own money instead.
In 32 BC that temporary peace Agrippa orchestrated between Octavian and Mark Antony did what everyone knew it was going to do and blew up in spectacular fashion, and after a long string of political fuck-ups there ended up being a civil war between the Second Triumvirate. So, once again, Octavian called in Agrippa to step in and smash his enemies into skull dust. Agrippa re-formed his fleet, called up his vets, and sailed for Greece, where he needed to take on the combined forces of Mark Antony’s Roman legions and Cleopatra’s well-trained Egyptian military. After a series of brilliant strategic maneuvers that outmaneuvered even the great Mark Antony (a lifelong soldier and badass military commander who’d been leading Roman legions since the glory days of Julius Caesar), Agrippa cornered Antony in Greece, cut him off from retreat, and forced him into – you guessed it – a big ass naval battle.
On the sea, Agrippa's guys did what they do. They generated driftwood.
At the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, Agrippa bottled up an enemy of roughly equal size, then charged in and attacked with harpaxes, fire arrows, bad language and cold steel. Agrippa smashed Antony's forces, sinking or capturing 200 ships and kicking balls so hard that the Egyptian fleet bailed mid-battle and ran for it. Antony also fled, barely evading the Romans on his way back to Cairo. Agrippa and Octavian pursued, landed at Alexandria, defeated the Egyptians on land, and then Antony and Cleopatra killed themselves to avoid being dragged back to Rome in chains. The death of Antony marked the end of the final obstacle to Octavian and Agrippa's full control over Rome, and from that point on Octavian annexed Egypt, changed his name to Imperator Augustus Caesar, and declared the beginning of the Roman Empire.
I know the New York Times's thing is about democracy dying in darkness, but in 31 BC it died with fire arrows and ship-mounted grappling hook launchers. Maybe if Cleopatra had retained Batman's bodyguard services things would have turned out differently, but alas.
Now from this point on Augustus Caesar ran shit as Emperor, and Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa was his right-hand dude. Agrippa married Augustus's daughter (Romans were into that sort of thing), built the Pantheon, carried out the Empire's first census, and constructed the Roman Baths and a huge temple called the Septa Julia. He was appointed Imperium Majus (second-in-command of the empire), given full veto power over the Senate (awesome), and set up colonies and granted land and homes to the veterans who had fought for him in the wars against Brutus, Pompey, and Antony. He hung out with Herod the Great in Judea, managed colonies in Pannonia, and even found time to write a book about geography that was probably pretty great but we'll never know because no copies of it have survived. He also went off to fight wars in Spain and Illyria, won both of them, and declined two more Triumphs because that was just kind of his thing at this point.
Oh, right, and the measurement for a Roman foot was standardized around this time. The measurement was literally just the length of Marcus Agrippa's foot. It formed the basis for their entire system of Imperial length measurements, with the length of a Roman mile being established as 5,000 feet in length. I find this to be totally fucking rad to the max, especially considering that this is basically still the length of measurement we use in America today.
Marcus Agrippa died in 12 BC at roughly the age of 51, but, again, we don't know for sure because we still don't actually know when or where this dude was born. Augustus gave the eulogy at Agrippa's funeral, spent a month in mourning, and had his friend buried in Augustus's own mausoleum. Agrippa had been the muscle that backed up Augustus's cunning, and without this hardcore warrior’s military genius and naval asskicking abilities the Roman Empire may well have never been forged.
And, just to tie it all together, Agrippa also awesomely left a going-away present to the nascent Empire – his daughter married the war hero Germanicus, and their kids ended up being fucking Caligula and Agrippina the Younger. This means Agrippa's great-grandson was the notorious Emperor Nero, because, hey, if you're going to go down, you may as well bring the rest of the city down with you, right?
