Aqueducts

Any readers of Robert Harris’s new novel who aren’t ancient historians might be surprised to discover what an important figure Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa was: Caesar Augustus’s right-hand man since they were at school together; the builder of some of Rome’s most significant buildings; the winning commander in several battles that changed history; even, as Harris puts it in an afterword, ‘the effective co-ruler of the Roman world for many years’. Happily, that same afterword also suggests that such ignorance of Agrippa’s achievements isn’t necessarily our fault – because Augustus ‘all but effaced his closest comrade from the official record’. This, of course, leaves a handy gap for the novelist to fill. But how to fill it?