Robert Harris Agrippa
Agrippa is the 2026 historical fiction
novel by bestselling British author Robert Harris. Released in late August
2026, the book marks Harris's monumental return to ancient Rome, following
his highly acclaimed Cicero Trilogy and Pompeii.
Story
Overview
The novel is
framed as the fictional memoirs of Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, the
legendary general, admiral, and architect who helped build the Roman Empire. At
age 50, ailing and isolated in a villa on the Bay of Naples, Agrippa looks back
on his extraordinarily turbulent life.
The
narrative tracks his lifelong, complex relationship with Octavius (who
later becomes Emperor Augustus):
- The Rise to Power: It follows the two teenagers
from the immediate aftermath of Julius Caesar's assassination as they
fight to claim Octavius's inheritance.
- Historic Battles: The book covers iconic
historical flashpoints, including the battle of Philippi and the crushing
of Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium.
- The Price of Ambition: It contrasts Agrippa, a
low-born plebeian who ascends purely through merit and military genius,
with Octavius, a ruthless politician who ascends by blood.
Core
Themes
- The Cost of Power: The book serves as a political
thriller investigating if true friendship can actually survive the brutal
reality of absolute power.
- Historical Reimagining: Harris uses extensive research
to give a distinct voice to a brilliant historical figure who has
traditionally been left in the shadows of Augustus.
Agrippa is published globally by Penguin Random House (under the Doubleday imprint) and is
available at major booksellers like Waterstones.
Review
Agrippa
by Robert Harris review – persuasive portrait of rivalry in ancient Rome
This
fictional memoir by Octavius’s right-hand man shows us bloodshed, betrayal and
hectic jockeying for power
Sam Leith
Mon 17
Aug 2026 07.00 BST
If you’re
one of those people who thinks about the Roman empire several times a week,
Robert Harris has you covered. He follows his trilogy of novels about the life
of Cicero and his one-off about the unpleasantness in Pompeii with a narrative
that takes us from civil war through the assassination of Julius Caesar, with
all the bickering and bloodshed that follows, on to the decisive battle of
Actium and Octavius’s apotheosis as Caesar Augustus. We meet Cicero, Fulvia,
Lepidus, two Caesars and a burly Antony (“Imagine, if you will, a statue of
Hercules with a club in one hand, a wineskin in the other”).
Here’s
the clever bit: he narrates it all from the point of view of Octavius’s
right-hand man, Agrippa, a much less well-remembered figure. Harris tells us he
“left behind no speeches, few letters and only a couple of sentences of direct
quotation”. Yet Agrippa was “effective co-ruler of the Roman world for many
years” and “the greatest general of the period”. Octavius couldn’t have risen
without him, but he seems to have done his best to write him out of the story
afterwards, according him only two passing mentions in the Res Gestae Divi
Augusti.
Harris’s
Octavius is vain, clever, sickly, ambitious, manipulative and prickly. His
childhood friend Agrippa, the only person he sort-of trusts, is established
early on as a bit of a meathead. Their first encounter is when Agrippa duffs up
a couple of bullies he catches picking on a weaker boy; mostly for the pleasure
of duffing a couple of people up. He doesn’t know at the time that the
beneficiary of this duffing is Caesar’s great-nephew. They become friends: “He
helped me with my classwork. I showed him how to fight.” They share a teacher:
“He instilled in Octavius especially a lifelong love of poetry, although my
literary tastes, to his despair, have always tended towards works on
engineering and military history.” Even as they rise to power, our man’s eye is
on the duffing. Octavius returns to Rome amid great danger to give a rousing
speech, and Agrippa reports only: “His voice carried well. I did not pay much
attention to what he said. I was too preoccupied scanning his audience for
potential assassins.”
It is a
sign of Harris’s discipline as a novelist that he has Agrippa tell his tale in
almost comically unambitious prose
Harris’s
framing conceit is that the text we are reading is Agrippa’s memoir, written in
some haste and high feeling. Agrippa, now an old man of 50, has come home early
from an expedition to duff up the barbarians in Illyricum. He has a gammy leg,
which is about to kill him. He limps in to find his wife in bed with his
son-in-law. Since the son-in-law is also the emperor’s adopted son, he
hesitates to get busy with his sword and instead retreats to his chamber. He’s
feeling a bit sorry for himself and, uncharacteristically, he turns to words.
It is a
sign of Harris’s discipline as a novelist that he has Agrippa tell his tale in
almost comically unambitious prose. There’s a lot of pipe-laying in the
military history department, of the “then the legions would wheel around the
far side of the Black Sea by way of Hyrcania, the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus,
and march west” type. And he’s a bastard for an aqueduct, is Agrippa. Loves
them; maybe even more than having a scrap. He’s never happier than when
building infrastructure and explaining the engineering principles and logistics
to the reader.
When
Agrippa is stirred to reflection, he tends to reach for a well-worn phrase.
“The sickly, pungent stink of death lurked round every corner.” “Mercy was now
the order of the day.” “War, which I had once so relished, was gouged into the
countryside like an open wound.” “Power makes monsters of us all.” “In the
words of the old saying – if you strike at the king, you must be sure not to
miss.” (That particular old saying, I think, comes from The Wire, but never
mind.)
But from
all this elegantly drab stuff emerges a more subtle portrait of the man and the
age than you might expect. You get a persuasive portrait of a Rome exhausted by
civil strife, and of the serpentine manoeuvrings of its rulers. Everyone is
betraying everyone else, raising armies, marrying each other’s children,
forming and breaking alliances. It’s hectic. And, gosh, all these people
redrawing the map of the world and changing the course of history are young.
The plot twist – a feature of scholarly speculation since 1937, Harris’s
afterword tells us – concerns the real parentage of the apparently low-born
Agrippa.
But that,
like much else, it suited him to keep quiet about. His most enduring real-world
monument is seven terse words in stone above the entrance to the Pantheon: M
AGRIPPA L F COS TERTIUM FECIT. “Marcus Agrippa, son of Lucius, in his third
consulship, did it.”
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