Located atop two ridges with a narrow valley between them and surrounded by a thick forest, the Romans erected a circumvallation around Metulus and settled in for a long siege. The resourceful defenders – some 3,000 in number – were prepared, even armed with Roman artillery they had captured from earlier encounters with D. Iunius Brutus.144 As the Romans raised an earthen mound the Metulians launched raids by day and night to interrupt the work of the engineers. When the they finally broke through their circuit wall, the Romans found that the Metulians had responded by erecting a secondary wall inside. Caesar’s men now erected two mounds of earth and stones and from these constructed four gangways or bridges leading to the top of this second wall. Caesar himself ascended a siege tower from where he observed the unfolding battle. To create a diversion, he sent units to attack the town from the rear while the main force moved over the bridges. The Metulians along the top of the wall rebuffed the assault with missiles and then raced on to the gangway to engage in close hand-to-hand combat, while others unseen by the Romans worked below to undermine the footings of the bridges.145 The defenders were greatly encouraged when one of the bridges fell and the adjacent structure collapsed on top of it.146 When the third bridge fell, the Romans began to panic. The men hesitated to step foot on the fourth bridge anticipating that it too would collapse. Enraged by what he saw, Caesar himself jumped down from the tower and remonstrated with the legionaries; but his strong words did not stir them to action (plate 7). Grabbing a shield he jogged on to the bridge, exposing himself to great danger. His deputies quickly followed:
Agrippa and Hiero, two of the generals, and one of his bodyguard, Lucius, and Volas ran with him, only these four with a few armour-bearers. He had almost crossed the bridge when the soldiers, overcome by shame, rushed after him in crowds. Then this bridge, being overweighted, fell also, and the men on it went down in a heap. Some were killed and others were carried away with broken bones. Caesar was injured in the right leg and in both arms.147
Caesar was pulled back to the safety of his tower and stood up to show himself to the troops. His men were heartened by the sight, but the Metulians were astonished to see him still alive and were now consumed with terror. The next day defenders parleyed and offered hostages.148 Rather than face capture, however, the town’s inhabitants burned down Metulus and many took their own lives, including women and children.149 Geminus, meantime, took Siscia.150
Caesar then turned his attention against the Pannonii. He marched through the territory of the Segestani to reach them. Appian notes that:
Pannonia is a wooded country extending from the Iapodes to the Dardani. The inhabitants do not live in cities, but are scattered through the country or in villages according to relationship. They have no common council and no rulers over the whole nation.151
If Appian’s estimate is to be believed they numbered some 100,000 fighting men.152 There the local people evacuated their towns and villages. To induce them to surrender rather than resist, at first Caesar did not plunder and burn their property.153 However, when he approached Siscia and his army was subjected to constant harassment, Caesar decided a tougher response was needed. Scorched earth became the new tactic. Outlaying settlements and fields were plundered and razed. The Illyrians sought terms and handed over hostages, but quickly broke their word and slammed shut the city gates of their stronghold.154 They gambled on the defense offered by the nearby Colops (Kulpa) and Sava rivers which they had fortified with palisades and ditches; Caesar had no choice now but to besiege Siscia and take it by force.155 The Romans assembled river craft from their allies on the Danube and towed them down the Sava to the Colops and used them to engage the Illyrians directly from the water.156 The defenders lost heart and surrendered. The campaign moved on to capture other key strongholds. As winter approached operations were wound up. On his way back Agrippa may have investigated the potential for commercial production of lead south of Sirmium.157
The Senate granted Imperator Caesar Divi filius a triumph for his victories in Illyricum, which he deferred to be celebrated another time.158 Instead, buoyed by his success in the Balkans, Caesar set off for Gaul with a notional plan for an invasion of the island of the Britons, intending to emulate his adoptive father, but that had to be abandoned when the Balkans erupted once again in revolt.159 His field commanders quickly responded to the uprising. Fufius Geminus, who had since been ousted from Siscia, managed to retake it and Pannonia too after several battles; Statilius Taurus waged war against the remaining nations in the Balkans; and Valerius Messalla took on and defeated the Salassi on the southwestern side of the Alps.160 Satisfied that the territories were firmly under Roman control and putting Geminus in charge with a small force, Caesar and Agrippa left the region at end of the year.161
In the spring of 34 BCE, Agrippa returned to the western Balkans and took the lead role against the Delmatae in the south sector of the combat zone, with Caesar joining him later.162 This may have been an entirely land-based operation, or it may have been combined with naval patrols – the sources omit the details. Ten years earlier the Delmatae had annihilated five cohorts under A. Gabinius and taken their signa.163 Recapturing those lost standards was a strong motivator to Roman commanders. Appian records that the Delmatae:
had upwards of 12,000 fighting men under a general named Versus. He occupied Promona, the city of the Liburni, and fortified it, although it was very strong by nature. It is a mountain stronghold surrounded on all sides by sharp-pointed hills like saw-teeth. The greater part of his forces were stationed in the town, but he placed guards on the hills and all of them looked down upon the Romans from elevated positions. Caesar in plain sight began to draw a wall around the whole, but secretly he sent his bravest men to seek a path to the highest of the hills. These, concealing themselves in the woods, fell upon the guards by night while they were asleep, slew them, and signalled to Caesar in the twilight. He led the bulk of the army to make an attempt upon the city, and sent another force to hold the height that had been taken, while the captors of it should get possession of the lower hills. Terror and confusion fell upon the barbarians everywhere, for they believed themselves to be attacked on all sides. Especially were those on the hills alarmed lest they should be cut off from their supply of water, for which reason they all fled to Promona.164
A siege similar to that at Metulus followed.165 However, unlike the Metulians, the defenders at Promona received help from outside. The Dalmatian war chief Testimus arrived with troops. While some Roman troops were diverted to repel them, others finished the circumvallation. An attempt by the defenders to break through the circuit wall and ditch failed, enabling the Romans to enter the city and inflict terrible casualties on a third of the inhabitants. The rest retreated to the citadel. Caesar placed a cohort by the gateway to control it, but when the defenders sallied out, rather than holding their position, the Romans guarding the entrance fled. For abandoning their posts, Caesar ordered the unit be decimated: every tenth man chosen by lot was summarily executed. Among them were two centurions. The surviving troops were placed on barley rations instead of wheat.166 Promona finally fell, and soon the surrounding towns, including Sunodium and Setovia, were taken.167
The war had severely tried Imperator Caesar’s patience and to reduce the remaining tribes he delegated the mission to Statilius Taurus.168 Towards the end of 34 BCE he returned to Rome in readiness to take up the consulship for the new year. Once sworn in, he immediately resigned, appointing L. Autronius Paetus as his suffect before returning again to Illyricum. Having lost the previous summer to war fighting and faced with the almost certain fate of starvation, the Daelmatae finally offered their surrender. At Caesar’s insistence 700 children were handed over as hostages, the military signa taken from Gabinius were returned and the Delmatae promised to pay in full the tribute owing since the time of his adoptive father.169 One after the other nations soon followed in supplication and surrendered to the Romans. With hyperbole Appian sums up the achievement ‘thus Caesar subdued the whole Illyrian country, not only the parts that had revolted from the Romans, but those that had never before been under their rule’.170 In 33 BCE the region officially became province Illyricum administered by a senatorial proconsul.171 It had taken two years of unrelenting struggle, and Agrippa had successfully played his part. It would be a while before he took up arms again. He would stay in Rome for the remainder of 34 BCE and turn his attention to other pressing matters, which would test his talents in civilian organization and project management.
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.172 Its filthy streets were often unsafe and its rickety buildings were frequently dangerous.173 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.174 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.175
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.176 It was a high profile structure which touched the lives of many citizens but ‘which had almost worn out’.177 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.178 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.178 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’.180
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.181 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:
took another independent source of supply, at the twelfth milestone from the City on the Via Latina, on a crossroad two miles to the right as you proceed from Rome, and also tapped Tepula. The name Iulia was given to the new aqueduct by its builder, but since the waters were again divided for distribution, the name Tepula remained.182
The choice of official name was deliberate. Once again Agrippa acknowledged the ascendency of the gens Iulia as he had done at Lake Avernus.183 It was suitably massive in scale:
The conduit of Iulia has a length of 15,426½ paces; 7,000 paces on masonry above ground, of which 528 paces next the City, beginning at the seventh milestone, are on substructures, the other 6,472 paces being on arches.184
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:
Past the intake of Iulia flows a brook, which is called Crabra. Agrippa refrained from taking in this brook either because he had condemned it, or because he thought it ought to be left to the proprietors at Tusculum, for this is the water which all the estates of that district receive in turn, dealt out to them on regular days and in regular quantities.185
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:
But our water-men, failing to practise the same restraint, have always claimed a part of it to supplement Iulia, not, however, thus increasing the actual flow of Iulia, since they habitually exhausted it by diverting its waters for their own profit. I therefore shut off the Crabra brook and at the emperor’s command restored it entirely to the Tusculan proprietors, who now, possibly not without surprise, take its waters, without knowing to what cause to ascribe the unusual abundance. The Aqua Iulia, on the other hand, by reason of the destruction of the branch pipes through which it was secretly plundered, has maintained its normal quantity even in times of most extraordinary drought.186
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’.187 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.188 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.189 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’.190 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).191 Dio writes that by the end of 33 BCE Agrippa had ‘repaired all the public buildings and all the streets, cleaned out the sewers’.192 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.193
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:
He also formed 700 wells, in addition to 500 fountains, and 130 reservoirs, many of them magnificently adorned. Upon these works, too, he erected 300 statues of marble or bronze, and 400 marble columns – and all this in the space of a single year!194
Remarkable too was the fact that he completed these projects without any public funding.195 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: