Augustus must have contemplated the moment of his friend’s death numerous times, but now it was fact. It was a devastating personal loss.1 He was suddenly without the man who had been his greatest champion and closest confidant for over thirty years. For the moment he would have to see through his own grief and console himself by playing the lead role in making the arrangements for Agrippa’s funeral. It would be traditional in format but provide Augustus with the opportunity to establish the standard for funerals of members of his family for years to come.2 Custom required that a death mask be made.3 Then the corpse had to be prepared for the journey to Rome. This required the body to be washed with warm water, anointed with unguents and a form of embalming to be undertaken.4 The body was dressed in Agrippa’s best clothes, which could either be his purple-bordered toga praetexta since he was still a senator of Rome, or his military armour and paludamentum since he had recently been on campaign. A coin was slipped under his tongue to pay Charon the ferryman who would transport his spirit by boat across the River Styx to Elysium for an eternal afterlife. Flowers, garlands and wreaths were strewn over the body while candles or oil lamps bathed the beloved friend of Augustus in subdued light.
The sources do not say how the body was conveyed to Rome – whether by road or ship – only that it was taken there.5 If transported by road it was likely met by the civic leaders of each city it passed through and placed in the basilica or its most important temple overnight, as was later done for Augustus.6 Accompanying the body on the journey went his twelve lictors – men who had travelled the world with him – with their fasces turned upside down as a mark of respect.7 When it reached the city, the cortège wound its way solemnly through the streets crowded with onlookers. Recognizing his lifetime of service, Agrippa’s body was laid in state in the Forum Romanum.8 When the date and time of the funeral were decided, a herald announced it to the people of Rome in a customary form of words referring to ‘the famous M. Agrippa, citizen, deceased’.9
On the day of the funeral, as the body was prepared, laments were recited and dirges sung. Iulia – now at the end of the second trimester of her latest pregnancy – and her family and friends in mourning were dressed in dark clothes (vestes pullae). Likely attending were 8-year-old Caius and his brother Lucius, now 5. They took part in a solemn private ritual in which Iulia would have called out Agrippa’s name three times to the accompaniment of horns in a fanfare of death, concluding with the words conclamatio est!10 Each member present then said their final farewells (extremum vale) to him. Attention then turned to the public proceedings. For Augustus’ late partner in power, this was to be a funeral (funera dictiva) of the grandest kind.11 Augustus, the immediate and extended family of Agrippa assembled and took their places. They were joined by actors wearing the masks of Agrippa’s male ancestors of gens Vipsania and probably those too of gens Iulia into which he had married. Adding to the general throng were clientes from his entourage, hired mourners and musicians. The line of the great and good from all levels of Roman society formed along the road. Laying on a bier (lectus funebris), Agrippa’s body was carried by pallbearers to the head of the column. On cue, the musicians struck up their dirge, the mourners wailed and the line of people moved forward slowly around the Forum. At the Temple of Divus Iulius, located at the eastern end, the procession (pompa) halted and the funeral bed was carefully lifted on to the rostra (rostra ad Aedem Divii Iulii).12 A curtain was then drawn in front of it. In a poignant irony custom required that, as Augustus was pontifex maximus, he was not permitted to look upon the corpse.13 As his friend and father-in-law Augustus stood before the crowd in his pontifical garb and gave the eulogy (laudatio funebris). Remarkably part of it survives in a fragment of papyrus – most likely from Fayum in Egypt – and which is nowadays known as ‘P. Köln VI 249’ or ‘Inv. Nr. 4701+4722 Recto’.14 Measuring 10.3cm×10.5cm (4.1in×4.1in) it is handwritten in Greek and is a translation of the speech originally delivered in Latin.15 Partially restored, it reads:
The tribunician power was given to you for a period of five years by decree of the Senate in the consulship of the two Lentuli, and it was given to you again, for another lustrum, in the consulship of Tiberius Nero and Quinctilius Varus, your relations by marriage. Moreover, it was sanctioned by a law that no one, in any of the provinces into which the common affairs of the Roman people should call you, would have greater imperium than you. You were raised to the highest position with our support and through your own virtues by the agreement of all men.16
It was a reminder to those who listened in the packed Forum that Agrippa had not achieved prominence by virtue of his family name, but through his deeds. Whether a second eulogy was given from the old Rostra in front of the Julian Senate House – as later happened at Augustus’ funeral – and who gave it is not recorded.17
With the formalities in the Forum concluded, the mourners re-assembled and proceeded up the Via Lata – ‘Broad Way’ – through the Campus Martius. To their left stood the grand buildings Agrippa had erected for the enjoyment of the public. It is unlikely his body was carried upon the shoulders of senators, as Augustus’ was.18 In the eyes blinded by prejudice of the descendants of the old Roman families Agrippa was always an upstart, a man who had risen out of his plebeian class, and despite having been accorded the status of a patrician in law, he was never accepted as one of their own.19
Cremation was the preferred method of burial at this time. Agrippa’s body taken to a walled enclosure (ustrinum) which Augustus had built beside his own tumulus-shaped Mausoleum, and where years ago Marcellus’ body had been burned.20 Strabo, who had seen it for himself when staying in Rome around 7 BCE, describes it:
In the centre of the Campus is the wall (this too of white marble) around his crematorium; the wall is surrounded by a circular iron fence and the space within the wall is planted with black poplars.21
Within this secluded area, Agrippa’s body was raised up on a funeral pyre (rogus). Augustus may have spoken again, though it is not recorded that he did. Perhaps he shared his thoughts only with his immediate family – his daughter and adopted sons – for whom the occasion had tragic significance. The family members moved a safe distance away. Then the pyre was lit and flames soon engulfed the corpse. The hours passed, the fire burned out and the body was reduced to ashes. Gathered up and drenched in oil or honey, the remains were carefully placed in an urn, which was handed to Augustus.22 Although years before Agrippa had built a sepulchral monument in the Campus Martius in which he intended his remains to be deposited, his friend decided instead to place the urn in his own mausoleum (fig. 12).23 It was a final mark of the deep affection and high esteem he felt for the man who had been such an intrinsic part of his life (fig. 13).
In the days which followed omens and portents were seen across the city. With a chronicler’s attention to the minutiae of the absurd, Dio writes:
The death of Agrippa, far from being merely a private loss to his own household, was at any rate such a public loss to all the Romans that portents occurred on this occasion in such numbers as usually happen to them before the greatest calamities. Owls kept flitting about the city, and lightning struck the house on the Alban Mount where the consuls lodge during the sacred rites.24
More ominously, months after Agrippa’s death,
The star called the comet hung for several days over the city and was finally dissolved into flashes resembling torches. Many buildings in the city were destroyed by fire, among them the Hut of Romulus, which was set ablaze by crows that dropped upon it burning meat from some altar.25
Accepting them uncritically as facts, he adds ‘these were the events connected with Agrippa’s death’.26
A few days after the funeral, attention turned to the matter of Agrippa’s will and the disbursement of his estate. By the standards of his time – indeed of any age – Agrippa had been fabulously wealthy. The vast park he had created in the Campus Martius and the baths which bore his name he bequeathed to the Roman people.27 To generate income to pay for continued free public access to them and for their upkeep, Agrippa passed most of his private estates – in Egypt and Sicily, including the entire Thracian Chersonese – to Augustus.28 This would continue the policy borne of his firm belief in the epithet ‘sound mind in sound body’. Augustus, however, promptly made his inheritance public land (ager publicus) and distributed to each citizen 400 sestertii, making it known that Agrippa had ordered the distribution of cash.29 Augustus also inherited his friend’s household familia of slaves – men like Acastus, Castor, Cozmus, Philargrus, Philotimus, Servius and Zoilus – who assumed the cognomen Agrippianus and, on being freed by the princeps, could pass on the name to their children.30 The large company of slaves, which Agrippa had set up and organized to operate and maintain the public water works, such as the Aqua Virgo and the urban fountains, was also inherited by Augustus, who now made them property of the state.31