It began, for me, with a book I haven’t even read yet.
Robert Harris has written a new novel about Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, and I have the hardback on order. I knew almost nothing about Agrippa beyond the name, so I thought I should learn just enough about his world to appreciate the story without spoiling it.
That turned out to be a rather wonderful journey.
Agrippa was born around 63 BC and died in 12 BC. In that relatively short lifetime, he witnessed — and helped bring about — one of the great transformations in human history.
He was born into the dying Roman Republic and died in the new world of Augustus.
When Agrippa was young, there was no Roman emperor. Rome already dominated much of the Mediterranean, but it was still formally a republic: consuls, senators, assemblies and an almost visceral Roman hatred of kings.
The trouble was that Rome had become far bigger and more powerful than the political system created to govern it.
Successful generals commanded armies increasingly loyal to them personally. Wealth and conquest magnified political competition. Julius Caesar fought Pompey, crossed the Rubicon, won a civil war and accumulated extraordinary power. Then, in 44 BC, Caesar was assassinated.
Agrippa was perhaps 19.
Out of the chaos emerged another young man of roughly his own age: Caesar’s adopted heir, Octavian.
We know him as Augustus.
And beside Augustus stood Agrippa.
He was a remarkable soldier, admiral, administrator, politician and builder. Where Augustus was the extraordinary political strategist, Agrippa possessed formidable practical and military abilities. He helped defeat Sextus Pompey at sea and, most famously, played the crucial military role in the defeat of Mark Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 BC.
Eventually Augustus stood alone.
But he did something much cleverer than simply declaring himself king. The Senate remained. Consuls remained. Republican institutions remained. Augustus presented himself as the first citizen rather than a monarch.
The Republic’s architecture survived while real power increasingly rested with one man.
Agrippa helped build that new world — literally as well as politically. Aqueducts, baths, public works and buildings transformed Rome. The Pantheon standing today is a later reconstruction, but across its front remains Agrippa’s name.
And then something about his dates struck me.
Agrippa died in 12 BC.
Jesus was probably born only six or eight years later.
Suddenly two pieces of history I had always kept in separate mental compartments were almost touching.
The world before Christianity
Agrippa never knew Christianity.
It did not exist.
His religious world was Roman: Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Apollo, household gods, sacrifices, priests, auguries and omens. Romans borrowed and absorbed gods and practices from the peoples around them, particularly the Greeks.
Judea existed within Rome’s eastern sphere, of course. Jerusalem mattered to the people who lived there enormously. But from the centre of Roman power it was one comparatively small part of a vast Mediterranean political world.
Then, a few years after Agrippa’s death, a Jewish child was born there.
Nobody in Rome noticed.
Jesus lived and died under the Roman Empire Agrippa and Augustus had helped create. His crucifixion, probably around AD 30, took place under Roman authority during the reign of Augustus’s successor, Tiberius.
At first Christianity was a tiny movement within the Jewish world.
But it travelled.
Within decades, Christian communities appeared around the eastern Mediterranean and eventually in Rome itself. Memories and oral traditions about Jesus became written texts. Paul’s surviving letters date from only a few decades after Jesus’s death; the Gospels followed during the later first century.
Over succeeding centuries Christians argued about what their faith meant, who Jesus was, which writings carried authority and how the divine and human fitted together.
And then, more than three centuries after Agrippa, came Constantine.
This was where I had muddled two empires in my own memory.
Constantine was a Roman emperor, not an Ottoman one.
He supported Christianity, and in AD 325 convened the Council of Nicaea, from which came the ancestor of the Nicene Creed still familiar to Christians today. He also established Constantinople as a new imperial capital.
The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople would not occur until 1453 — more than a thousand years later.
That is worth getting straight simply because our minds have a habit of compressing centuries into paragraphs.
Christianity did not simply travel to Rome
There was another assumption worth disturbing.
Looking backwards from modern Europe, it is easy to imagine Christianity travelling from Jerusalem to Rome and then becoming a European religion.
Its history is much richer than that.
Christianity travelled south and east as well as west.
Egypt became one of its great intellectual centres. Christianity became established in the ancient African kingdom of Aksum, centred in modern Ethiopia and Eritrea, during the fourth century. Christian kingdoms later flourished in Nubia, in what is now Sudan.
Christian communities also spread east through Syria, Mesopotamia and Persia and eventually much farther into Asia.
The later division between Roman Catholic Christianity in the West and Eastern Orthodoxy centred on Constantinople took centuries to develop. The conventional date of the Great Schism is 1054 — more than seven hundred years after Constantine.
Again, what looks neat when compressed into a schoolbook timeline was anything but neat to the people living through it.
Meanwhile, there was another world
And then the story took another turn.
While I was thinking about Rome, Christianity and the preservation of stories, I began thinking about the great centres of knowledge farther east.
Two names came back into focus: Taxila and Nalanda.
Taxila, in what is now Pakistan, lay at an extraordinary crossroads between the Indian subcontinent, Persia and Central Asia. The wider region of Gandhara became a meeting place of Buddhist, Indian, Persian and Hellenistic influences.
You can actually see that meeting in art.
Some early images of the Buddha from Gandhara have draped robes and artistic forms strongly influenced by the Greek world. Alexander’s conquests had reached this region centuries earlier. Cultures we tend to place in completely different chapters of history had actually encountered one another.
Farther north-west, parts of what is now Afghanistan also became important centres of Buddhist culture. The enormous Buddhas carved into the cliffs at Bamiyan, tragically destroyed in 2001, were remnants of that world.
And farther east, in what is now Bihar in India, stood Nalanda.
From around the fifth century AD it developed into an extraordinary Buddhist monastic and scholarly centre. Thousands studied there. Its reputation travelled across Asia. The seventh-century Chinese monk Xuanzang undertook an immense journey to India and studied at Nalanda before carrying texts and knowledge back towards China.
So while Christianity was travelling through the Roman and post-Roman worlds, Buddhism and Buddhist scholarship were moving through India, Afghanistan, Central Asia and China.
And the connections did not stop there.
Trade carried more than goods. People carried languages, mathematics, medicine, astronomy, philosophy, religious ideas, manuscripts and artistic styles.
Later, the Islamic world became another extraordinary participant in this movement of knowledge. Greek texts were translated into Arabic. Indian mathematical ideas travelled west. Persian and Arab scholars made major advances of their own. Some of this knowledge later travelled again into Latin Europe.
Human knowledge was never simply a torch passed neatly from Greece to Rome to modern Europe.
It behaved much more like a web.
And what about Alexandria?
The Library of Alexandria sits powerfully in our imagination: the great storehouse of ancient knowledge destroyed in a catastrophic fire, taking an irreplaceable part of civilisation with it.
The real history appears less dramatic and, perhaps, more instructive.
There were destructive fires and wars in Alexandria. Books certainly disappeared. But historians generally no longer believe in one single event in which the entire Great Library and the knowledge of antiquity suddenly vanished.
Institutions decline.
Funding disappears.
Political priorities change.
Scholars leave.
Manuscripts stop being copied.
Languages cease to be understood.
A work can survive for centuries in a handful of copies and then simply fail to be copied one more time.
Knowledge can disappear quietly.
That may be a more sobering thought than a burning library.
Which brings me back to Agrippa
Imagine the Mediterranean world in 12 BC, when Agrippa died.
Rome’s civil wars were ending.
Augustus was consolidating a new political order.
Greek philosophy and literature remained enormously influential.
Alexandria was one of the great intellectual centres of the Mediterranean.
Jewish communities flourished both in Judea and across a wide diaspora.
Farther east, Buddhist traditions and scholarship were travelling across the Indian subcontinent and towards Central Asia.
Agrippa had helped create an extraordinary period of Roman stability.
And somewhere, within a few years of his death, an otherwise unknown Jewish child would be born in a provincial corner of that empire.
No senator in Rome could possibly have regarded that birth as one of the great events of the age.
Actium mattered.
Augustus mattered.
Egypt mattered.
Armies, grain supplies, taxes, provinces and succession mattered.
Nobody could know that people two thousand years later would organise historical time itself around the approximate date of that child’s birth.
And perhaps that is what has stayed with me most strongly from this little journey through history.
People living through history don’t know what history is going to be.
They know what seems important to them.
Agrippa could not know that Christianity would transform the Roman world.
The earliest Christians could not know that their small communities would eventually stretch from Ethiopia to Britain and deep into Asia.
The scholars at Nalanda could not know which of their manuscripts would survive.
The custodians of Alexandria could not know which works humanity would lose.
And presumably the people living through our own extraordinary technological, political and social changes cannot know which parts of our world will seem decisive two thousand years from now.
We inherit history backwards.
That makes everything look more inevitable than it really was.
The people who lived it experienced it forwards — without knowing the ending.
Perhaps that is one reason historical fiction can be so powerful when it is done well. A writer like Robert Harris can take somebody whose life has become a collection of dates, battles and monuments and restore the one thing the history books inevitably take away:
uncertainty.
Agrippa did not know he was living at the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of an age.
He was simply living.
And perhaps that is the most interesting preparation of all for opening Robert Harris’s Agrippa.
AI-assisted creation
This article and its accompanying visual story were developed collaboratively by Alistair Fraser and ChatGPT. The experiences, perspectives, strategic direction and final editorial judgement are Alistair’s; AI was used as a thinking, drafting and visual-development partner.