Marcus Agrippa: Right-hand Man of Caesar Augustus (20 page)

Visitors to the leading city of the western world in the late first century BCE were often shocked by the shapeless sprawl of its streets, the ugliness of its towering
tenement buildings and the state of neglect of many of its temples.
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Its filthy streets were often unsafe and its rickety buildings were frequently dangerous.
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Damage from floods of the Tiber and fire added to the general sense of decay. Out of view below ground, the network of sewers, constructed centuries before when Rome was a small town, was in a poor state for lack of regular maintenance. Romans looked to their more affluent citizens to invest some part of their wealth in new infrastructure for the benefit of all in return for which they received the gratitude of the public and the recognition accruing from the publicity of having buildings and roads named after them. Euergetism was a hallmark of Roman society. Following Iulius Caesar’s assassination the proscriptions had eliminated many of Rome’s rich benefactors, and the civil war had drained resources away from Rome to far away battlefields leaving the fabric of the city dilapidated and in urgent need of repair. The heir to Caesar’s legacy and his closest friend saw this as an opportunity to to sway the voting public to their side by positioning themselves as benefactors to their city. It would prove to be a pivotal development in their political fortunes.

In the Roman political system, the maintenance of public works was the responsibility of a team of elected officials called aediles.
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The name derived from the Latin word for temple (
aedes
) underscoring the importance Romans placed in maintaining the goodwill of the gods in public life at all times. There were six aediles: two pairs of Plebeian Aediles and
Cereales
– responsible for the corn supply – elected by the Popular Assembly, and a pair of Curule Aediles (
aediles curules
) elected by the Tribal Assembly. Aediles were elected in July, and took up office on the first day of January. In 34 Agrippa was likely elected to one of the Plebeian Aedile positions because by the end of the year he had already initiated work on one of the most important structures in the city.
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The distribution of potable water was the lynchpin to managing Rome. Fresh water, noted for its coolness and purity from the Anio Valley some 91km (56 miles) away, was transported directly into the city over aqueducts. The longest of these in Agrippa’s day was the
Aqua Marcia
. It had been erected between the years 144–140 BCE by the then
praetor
Q. Marcius Rex and followed the route of the
Via Tiburtina
. Marcius had paid for it largely from the war spoils from sacking Carthage at the end of the Third Punic War.
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It was a high profile structure which touched the lives of many citizens but ‘which had almost worn out’.
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Restoring it to proper working order and providing new conduits from it to widen the distribution to more parts of the city to share its bounty with more people was an inspired choice of starting point for the new aedile.
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When completed, the renovated
Aqua Marcia
(
plate 15
) supplied water to the Viminalis Hill in the north of Rome, and from there to the Caelian, Aventine, Palatine, and Capitoline regions of the city. New fountains, from which seemingly limitless pure cold water poured, began appearing in the city to the delight of its thirsty population.
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So many were installed and so important had they become to life in Rome that after Agrippa’s death, the Senate issued a decree that the number ‘shall be neither increased nor diminished’ and the commissioners responsible for
them ‘shall take pains that the public fountains may deliver water as continuously as possible for the use of the people day and night’.
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The following year – the year of Caesar’s second consulship – Agrippa was elected aedile again and he immediately embarked on an even more ambitious programme of repairing other large urban infrastructure. Among them were the
Aqua Appia
and
Aqua Vetus
, which were now in urgent need of attention.
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But one important project was a new build, the
Aqua Iulia
. There is no suggestion that Agrippa was the architect. More likely, Agrippa applied his talent for assessing a problem, determining the solution, bringing together the required resources and then getting the work done. Writing in his technical treatise on aqueducts over a century later Sex. Iulius Frontinus explains that Agrippa:

The choice of official name was deliberate. Once again Agrippa acknowledged the ascendency of the
gens Iulia
as he had done at Lake Avernus.
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It was suitably massive in scale:

Agrippa paid great attention to the source of potable water to ensure it flowed evenly and without interruption, but with due regard to the needs of local people:

Frontinus recalls that when he became Commissioner of Aqueducts (
curator aquarum
) at Rome in 95 CE under the Emperor Nerva, he regretted that his own engineers did not show the same care and attention to detail as under its original management:

The
Aqua Iulia
was a brilliantly conceived and executed example of Roman hydraulic engineering design. A tall span of three great arches of the aqueduct and the encased channel above stands today near Tivoli.

Water quenched Rome’s thirsty mouths but it also could be used to improve standards of public hygiene in the congested city. Pliny notes that ‘in the work which he has written in commemoration of his aedileship, he also informs us that 170 gratuitous bathhouses were opened’.
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There certainly were places in the city for bathing during the first century BCE – they were used by the élites, such as Cicero who listed bathing as one of the ‘necessities for life and health’ – but most of the squalid high-rise apartments that were homes to Rome’s lowest classes lacked the most basic sanitation.
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Agrippa’s building programme revolutionized public hygiene by making bathing accessible to large numbers of poor urban people, both men and women, on a daily basis and free of charge.
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His generosity may have actually spurred on the widespread adoption of bathing as a standard ritual of everyday life over the next century as Pliny writes that the number of bathhouses at Rome ‘has increased to an infinite extent since his time’.
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It was a theme Agrippa would return to later in his career. The enormous volume of water flowing from the fountains and baths would stress Rome’s drains and many were crumbling and needed repair. These too received Agrippa’s attention, and not content to take his surveyors’ word at face value he even ‘sailed through them underground into the Tiber’ to inspect the work himself (fig. 2).
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Dio writes that by the end of 33 BCE Agrippa had ‘repaired all the public buildings and all the streets, cleaned out the sewers’.
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Probably by design, he had overseen the largest social welfare improvement programme since the building of the city’s first great sewer, the
Cloaca Maxima
, which according to tradition was constructed under the orders of the king of Rome, Tarquinius Priscus, around 600 BCE.
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Improvements to the city’s wellbeing extended to the visual aspects too. Agrippa was driven by a design ethos that public works for the benefit of the people must also look beautiful. Pliny the Elder wrote with admiration of how:

Remarkable too was the fact that he completed these projects without any public funding.
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Financially, Agrippa was by now a very wealthy man in his own right and could afford the expense from proceeds of confiscations under the proscriptions and the estates in Sicily and Illyricum, but additional funds were probably provided by Caesar. Administratively, Agrippa’s unique systems approach to the provision, distribution and drainage of water set a new standard in city management. Frontinus notes:

Figure 2. As aedile Agrippa undertook essential repairs to Rome’s main sewer, the
Cloaca Maxima
. It was closely studied by eighteenth century artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi for his book on Roman antiquities, and is still in operation today.

As ‘curators of the city’ – in Cicero’s words – the duties of the aediles extended to maintaining public order, regulating public games and managing provisions.
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The measures Agrippa implemented in this respect were clearly intended to be populist. Among many initiatives, he ‘drove the astrologers and charlatans from the city’, ‘distributed olive-oil and salt to all’, and during festivals, such as the equestrian Trojan Games (
Ludus Troiae
) ‘he hired the barbers, so that no one should be at any expense for their services’.
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Perhaps dating to this time are the warehouses (
Horrea Agrippiana
) he established between the
Vicus Tuscus
and the
Circus Victoriae
to receive and store staple goods.
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Agrippa made improvements to the
Circus Maximus
– recently expanded and improved to accommodate 260,000 seated spectators by Iulius Caesar.
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Chariot racing was a national passion. Like today’s Formula 1 or NASCAR its appeal was watching vehicles racing at high speed and the chance of witnessing spectacular crashes. Four-horse chariots (
quadrigae
) rushed out from cells at one end of the long course, raced anti-clockwise along the wall (
spina
) – which divided the space into an elongated oval sand-covered, one-way track – turned around at the other end and drove back down the other side; the winner was the first to complete seven laps.
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Gambling on who would win was an essential part of a day at the races. Disputes often occurred when the number of laps was miscounted – an important matter when betting. Agrippa found a simple and ingenious solution. ‘Seeing that in the circus men made mistakes about the number of laps completed,’ writes Dio, ‘he set up the dolphins and egg-shaped objects [upon the
spina
], so that by their aid the number of times the course had been circled might be clearly shown.’
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