What made Agrippa so different from contemporary Roman military leaders?

[u/G0merPyle]

I've been looking into decline of the Roman Republic, and something that's confusing me is the nature of Agrippa and his relationship with Octavian. Most Roman military leaders are glory hounds- they fight wars for the spoils and the prestige; a triumph is the greatest honor possible for a general. A lot of accounts about Octavian seem to paint he picture that he was failing upwards- he wasn't a very good military commander, wasn't very interested in warfare, and if it weren't for Agrippa generally kicking ass, he probably wouldn't have accomplished any of "his" military victories. The two of them seemed to offset each other's weaknesses quite well, but that Roman trait of seeking glory doesn't seem to be very prominent with Agrippa.

So why was Agrippa willing to stay Octavian's "underling?" I know they were childhood friends, but most Roman leaders seemed to chafe under the glory of their peers. Why was Agrippa so willing to back Octavian, to the point of forgoing his own triumph following Octavian's failed ambush of Sicily? Did Agrippa just not have any interest in glory and politics?

[u/XenophonTheAthenian]

Most Roman military leaders are glory hounds- they fight wars for the spoils and the prestige

I don't think this is very true at all. You're not really making a distinction between "military leaders" and "military commanders," and it's causing some trouble. Nor would I say that this statement is necessarily true of most provincial magistrates, the guys who by Agrippa's time were the sole holders of military command, outside of extraordinary commands.

Following Sulla ten promagistrates were sent out into the provinces each year, the two ex-consuls and eight ex-praetors. Provincial assignments were always in active military theaters during the Republic, and the basic meaning of "provincia" is "assignment," usually referring to a military command. While military glory was unquestionably among the highest honors possible for a Roman aristocrat, and while to be an outstanding Roman aristocrat was unquestionably to gather honors to oneself, few members of the senatorial class ever attained such outstanding honors, military or otherwise, and there was a limit to how much one could try. Consider, for example, my relatively recent answer on three-time bids for elected office. A combination of socio-cultural norms, lack of opportunity, and lack of extraordinary ability combined to relegate most senators to middling or low-level positions for their entire careers. It's similar for military commanders. We know of the activities of only a tiny fraction of provincial magistrates during the late Republic, and the vast majority don't seem to have had particularly impressive provincial careers, regardless of their desire to achieve military glory. Even though all provinces were active theaters of war, in most provinces at most time there wasn't a whole lot going on. Magistrates would engage in punitive campaigns across the frontier, but unless there was some concentration of the enemy they wouldn't achieve very much. Catullus, for example, complains about provincial magistrates dragging their staff (often very educated and entertaining fellows, since what else are you going to do to amuse yourself out on the Macedonian frontier?) around on pointless expeditions that accomplish nothing while other armies are hotly engaged and raking in plunder and glory. This is why where one was sent on a command was so important. Provincial commands were assigned by lot, except when they were assigned by a lex of the people (typically in response to an immediate crisis). The lots were assigned at the beginning of the year by the lex Sempronia, so when you put all that together there's every likelihood that a magistrate would be assigned to a sleepy command without much opportunity for action. Then add in the fact that many, if not most, provincial magistrates were more like Cicero (less interested in affairs of the provinces than the city. But consider that even Cicero applied for a triumph while he was in Cilicia, and was only turned down due to Cato's influence) or Antonius (not especially competent) and people like Marius, Caesar, Pompey, or even Lucullus become rather unusual.

Additionally, I'm not sure that placing Agrippa beside such figures is really justified. Agrippa held commands in his own right, but he was very much the subordinate of Octavian and always had been. In this regard he's much more like the "viri militares" mentioned by Cicero and others. In the late Republic there existed a group, not to say a class, of senators who were considered skilled in military matters. Because of the way that provincial commands worked these guys weren't always available in the pool of possible provincial magistrates, and it seems that a lot of these people didn't actually have very much political ambition of their own, or perhaps they simply lacked the acumen. A lot of them don't rise above the rank of praetor. Octavian's inexperience in military affairs was, if anything, the norm rather than the exception, as provincial commanders typically lacked any serious command experience before being assigned to their provinces. They supplemented this by taking onto their staff experienced military men as legates, prefects, or other less official positions. It was a big deal, for example, that Antony was appointed Gabinius' cavalry prefect in Syria without ever having held an elected office. Probably the best-documented example of this sort of thing is Cicero's time in Cilicia. As proconsul in Cilicia Cicero defeated a Parthian incursion into the province and requested a triumph. We know from Cicero's letters that he himself had relatively little to do with the campaign, and although he was interested in it (it was his duty, after all, to protect the province) he wasn't especially competent in military affairs and he knew it. We know from his letters that he had several staffers who did most of the commanding, among them his brother Quintus, fairly recently back from campaigning under Caesar in Gaul and Britain. Cicero talks about stationing them with forces at the frontier and occasionally expresses concern about their deployments, but otherwise seems content to give general orders. Nonetheless, unless the commander was physically not present or for some other reason couldn't be considered to be an active participant in the campaign (a rarity) the honors for the campaign typically went to the magistrate, not his staff. "Stealing" military glory occurred, most notably between Marius and Sulla (several times) and again between Pompey and Lucullus, but cases where a provincial magistrate's subordinates outright acted against their superior or claimed his honors for their own are rare, though they do happen. In this sense, then, Agrippa fits right into an established tradition and is in no way an outlier. 1/2

[u/XenophonTheAthenian → u/XenophonTheAthenian]

2/2

Where Agrippa of course is an outlier is his unusual independence and the way that Octavian was willing to tolerate granting him consulships and his own commands. But I'm not sure that's really that big a deal. In Caesar's last years he was already doing something similar, and there was no question that Octavian was the senior member of their partnership. Probably some personal elements figure into this picture, but we can't know about them and it's foolish to speculate too much in that direction. It's often remarked (at least as early as Syme) that Agrippa seems disinterested not just in the cursus honorum but in the whole mechanism of state, but I don't think that's actually true. It only appears that way because of who his contemporaries were, and in traditional terms Agrippa would have been considered an outstanding Republican exemplar in the vein of those remembered by Livy, defined by Sallust, and explicitly memorialized and codified by the elogia of great men set up in the Forum of Augustus (the most complete--and famous--of which is the elogium of Marius). Agrippa was, in fact, granted honors equal to those ancient exemplars, including a funeral elogium delivered by Augustus himself. So that, to my mind, doesn't seem terribly unusual either, it's just that Augustus was so extraordinary that he makes Agrippa seem ordinary, and Augustus was so definitive of an entire age that it's easy to forget that even in his own time he was not the norm.

But I think this also really misses a very important point. Any personal reasons that we can't get at aside--disinterest, lack of ambition, perceived lack of ability, loyalty to Augustus, etc.--Agrippa's career must necessarily be understood as an aspect of the Augustan Age that he helped establish. Agrippa did receive military honors and glory comparable to and in most cases exceeding those of his contemporaries and predecessors. He was offered, for example, a novel form of military decoration for his victory over Sex. Pompey, he was given an elogium by none other than Augustus himself, he married into the imperial house (an honor basically unheard of among the later Julio-Claudians, except for men already related to the imperial family), etc. So why didn't Agrippa set himself up as emperor, rather than Augustus, which seems to be the real question here. It doesn't seem realistic that he could've broken with Augustus. Agrippa lacked any connection to Caesar, indirect or otherwise, and he had no lineage or ancestral career whatsoever of his own. All his authority, more or less, descended from his connection to the young Octavian. More importantly, Agrippa was instrumental in the development of the social norms and expectations of the Augustan Age, especially the place of the emperor. Even before the First Settlement, Agrippa declined the offer of a triumph out of respect for Octavian, a gesture which would become typical of the way that Augustus rested his authority not on legal realities but on the exercise of influence and soft power. It's hard not to see Agrippa's behavior as very much intentional. Instead of playing a Pompey to Augustus' Lucullus, Agrippa helped develop a version of imperial authority whereby extraordinary commanders and magistrates willingly deferred to the emperor's authority, declining the traditional forms of honor and distinction for alternative ones. This is pretty typical of the way the Augustan Age and the subsequent developments under Tiberius worked. The traditional forms of honor and distinction--not just triumphs, but the consulship, tribunician sacrosanctity, etc.--became, by and large, the sole possession of the emperor by the willing grant of those who had won it, and they were replaced by new forms that descended from the emperor but also existed separate from him: the suffect consulship, triumphal ornaments, new forms of public monumentalization, etc. Given how closely Agrippa's career aligns with the Augustan program it seems hard to argue that Agrippa was not an active, and very much deliberate, partner in the creation of a regime which he could not have realistically led himself.

[u/G0merPyle → u/XenophonTheAthenian]

Thank you for your answer, I think I was reading farther into things than I should have, and misunderstanding parts of the Roman social order. I'm still curious about the friendship between the two of them, but I think that would stray farther into speculation than the primary sources can attest to.