AGRIPPA, Herod, II., son of the preceding, born about 27 a.d., was made king of Chalcis on the death of his uncle Herod, 48 a.d. ; but three or four years after he was deprived of that kingdom by Claudius, who gave him other provinces instead of it. In the war which Vespasian carried on against the Jews Herod sent him a succour of 2000 men, by which it appears that, though a Jew in religion, he was yet entirely devoted to the Romans, whose assistance indeed he required to secure the peace of his own kingdom. He died at Rome in the third year of Trajan, 100 a.d. He was the seventh and last king of the family of Herod the Great. It was before him and Berenice, his sister, that St Paul pleaded his cause at Caesarea (Acts xxvi.)

AGRIPPA, MarcusVipsanius, according to Tacitus, was born of humble parents about 63 b.c. At the age of eighteen he was the chosen companion of Octavius (afterwards Octavianus), the nephew and successor of Julius Caesar, many of whose successes were mainly due to the courage and military talents of Agrippa. On the assassination of Caesar, 44 b.c., Agrippa accompanied his friend to Italy, and rendered essential service in the conduct of the first war against M. Antonius, which terminated in the capture of Perusia in 40 b.c. Three years after this Agrippa was made consul, and had the command in Gaul, when he defeated the Aquitani, and led the Roman eagles beyond the Rhine to punish the aggressions of the Germans on his province. But Agrippa was soon summoned to Italy by the critical state of the affairs of Octavianus, the whole coast being commanded by the superior fleets of Sex. Pompeius. His first care was the formation of a secure harbour for the ships of Octavianus, and this he accomplished by uniting the Lucrine lake with the sea. He made an inner haven also by joining the lake Avemus to the Lucrine. In these secure ports the fleet was equipped, and 20,000 manumitted slaves were sedulously trained in rowing and naval manoeuvres until they were able to cope with the seamen of Pompeius. Agrippa was thus enabled in the following year to defeat Pompeius in the naval action of Mylae; and soon after won a more signal victory near Naulochus. These victories gave Octavianus the empire of the Mediterranean, and secured to him Sicily, the granary of Rome, after an easy triumph over his feeble colleague Lepidus; and they prepared the way for the overthrow of the power of M. Antonius, the other triumvir. The merit of all these successes was very much due to the skill, resolution, and sagacity of Agrippa.

Agrippa was chosen aedile 33 b.c., and signalised his tenure of office by great improvements in the city of Rome, in the repair and construction of aqueducts and fountains neglected or injured during the civil wars, and in the enlargement and repair of the sewers. He appears also to have introduced an effectual mode of flushing the sewers by conducting into them the united waters of several different streams. From these useful labours Agrippa was again called away in 31 b.c. to command the Roman fleet, which, by the victory at Actium, fixed the empire of the world on Octavianus. The services of Agrippa made him a special favourite with Octavianus, who gave him his niece Marcella in marriage, 27 b.c., when he was consul for the third time. In the following year the servile senate bestowed on Octavianus the imperial title of Augustus. Agrippa, in commemoration of the naval victory of Actium, dedicated to Jupiter and all the other gods the Pantheon, now called La Rotonda. The inscription on its portico still remains, M. Agrippa L. F. Cos. Tertium Fecit. In 25 b.c. we find this eminent man employed in Spain, where he reduced the insurgent Cantabri, the ancestors of the present Biscayans.

The friendship of Augustus and Agrippa seems to have been clouded by the jealousy of Marcellus, which was probably fomented by the intrigues of Livia, the second wife of Augustus, in dread of his influence with her husband. The consequence was that Agrippa left Rome; and though, to cloak his retirement, he was appointed proconsul of Syria, he went no farther than Mytilene. Marcellus dying within a year, Agrippa was recalled to Rome, and being divorced from Marcella, became the husband of the widowed Julia, who was no less distinguished by her beauty and abilities than afterwards by her shameless profligacy.

In 19 b.c. Agrippa again led an army into Spain, where he subdued the Cantabri, who had been for two years in insurrection against the Romans. While in Gaul, where he also pacified the insurgent inhabitants, he constructed four great public roads, and the splendid aqueduct at Nemausus (now Nismes), the mins of which even yet excite admiration. On his return to Rome, 18 b.c., he was invested with the tribunician power, along with the emperor, for five years. After that he was a second time made governor of Syria, 17 b.c., where, by his just and wise administration, he obtained general commendation, especially from the Hebrew population of his province, of which Judea formed a part. This resulted from his having, at the request of Herod the Great, gone up to Jerusalem, and granted special privileges for their religious worship to the Jewish subjects of the empire. In this journey, too, he colonised Berytus (now Beyrout) as a military and commercial settlement.

The last military employment of Agrippa was in Pannonia, 13 b.c., where his character for equity was of itself sufficient to put down insurrection without bloodshed. Returning to Italy, he lived there in retirement, greatly honoured, and died at Campania, 12 b.c., two years before his imperial father-in-law. He was the greatest military commander of Rome since the days of Julius Caesar, and the most honest of Roman governors in any province.

Under the care of Agrippa, Julius Caesar’s design of having a complete survey of the empire made was carried out. He had a chart of the entire empire drawn up, and projected a great work on the geography of its provinces. His materials were placed in the public archives, where Pliny consulted them (Nat. Hist., iii.) Agrippa also wrote an account, now lost, of the transactions in which he had taken part.

Agrippa left several children: by his first wife he had Pomponia Vipsania, who became the first wife of Tiberius, and was the mother of Drusus; and by Julia he was the father of Caius and Lucius Caesar, who were adopted by Augustus: of Julia, married to Lepidus; of Agrippina the elder; and of Agrippa Posthumus. (See Dio Cassius; Appianus; Suetonius; Velleius Paterculus; Fergusson’s Rom. Rep.; Merivale’s Romans under the Empire.)

AGRIPPA, Henry Cornelius (von Nettesheim), knight, doctor, and by common reputation a magician, was born of a noble family at Cologne on the 14th Sept. 1486. Educated at the university of Cologne, he entered when still very young into the service of the Emperor Maximilian, who sent him on a diplomatic mission to Paris in 1506.

During the next three years he was engaged in a military expedition to Catalonia, and then in the formation of a secret society of theosophists, the first of those alternations between the career of the knight and the career of the student in which his whole life was passed. In 1509 he went by invitation to the university of Dole in Burgundy, and read lectures on Reuchlin’s De Verbo Mirifico, which gained for him the degree of doctor of divinity and a stipend. It was these lectures that first stirred against him that malignant hatred of the monks which embittered his life and blackened his memory. He was denounced as an impious and heretical cabalist by an obscure monk named Catilinet, in lectures delivered at Ghent (1510) before Margaret of Burgundy, and his hopes of securing the patronage of that princess were thus for the time disappointed. To win her favour, he had composed (1509) and dedicated to her a treatise, De Nobilitate et Praecel- lentia Foeminei Sexus, the publication of which was delayed from motives of prudence until 1532. For the same reason the same course was followed in regard to his treatise De Occulta Philosophia, which, though completed in the spring of 1510, did not appear until 1531. In writing it he had the advice and assistance of the abbot Trithemius of Würzburg. Failing to receive encouragement as a man of letters, Agrippa was forced again to enter the diplomatic service. In 1510 the emperor sent him on a mission to London, where he became the guest of Dean Colet at Stepney. Soon after his return home he was summoned to follow his imperial master to the war in Italy, where he won his spurs—probably at the battle of Ravenna. In the autumn of 1511, on the invitation of the Cardinal de Santa Croce, he attended the schismatic council of Pisa as theologian, and by so doing still further provoked the hostility of the papal party. After a period spent in the service of the Marquis of Montferrat, during which he visited Switzerland, Agrippa was invited in 1515 to the university of Pavia, where he delivered lectures on the Pimander of Hermes Trismegistus, the first of which is preserved among his published works, and received a doctor’s degree in law and medicine. He was still doomed, however, to a harassed, unsettled life. Three years were spent in the service of the Marquis of Montferrat and the buke of Savoy. In 1518 he became syndic at Metz, where he was involved in disputes with the monks, and especially with the inquisitor Nicolas Savin, before whom he boldly and persistently defended a woman accused of witchcraft. He was, chiefly in consequence of this, compelled to resign his office, and quitted Metz for Cologne in January 1520. After two years spent in seclusion in bis native city, he went to Geneva, where he practised medicine for a short time. In 1523 he removed to Friburg, having been appointed town physician. In the following year he was induced to go to Lyons as court physician to the queen-mother, Louisa of Savoy, but the change did not better his condition, since, though he received several empty honours, his salary remained unpaid. It was probably amid the privations of poverty that he composed, in 1526, his De Incertitudine et Vanitate Scientiarum et Artium atque Excellentia Verbi Dei Declamatio, which was first published in 1530. The work is remarkable for the keenness of its satire on the existing state of science and the pretensions of the learned, and when published furnished fresh occasion for the malicious misrepresentation of his enemies. A quarrel with the queen compelled Agrippa to leave Lyons and betake himself to the Netherlands. In 1529 he was appointed historiographer to the Emperor Charles V., and in that capacity wrote a history of the emperor’s reign. The salary attached to the office was, however, left unpaid, and Agrippa was consequently imprisoned at Brussels, and afterwards banished from Cologne, for debt. He died at Grenoble in 1535.

The character of Agrippa has been very variously represented. The earlier accounts are grossly disfigured by the calumnies of the Dominicans, whose hatred, following him even to the grave, placed over it an inscription that is probably unique in its spiteful malignity. In later times full justice has been done to his memory. A Life of Agrippa by Henry Morley (London 1856) contains a detailed analysis of his more important works. A complete edition of his writings appeared in two volumes at Leyden in 1550, and has been several times republished.

son of the former Agrippa, was at Rome with the emperor Claudius when his father died. The emperor, we are told by Josephus, was inclined to give him all the dominions that had been possessed by his father, but was dissuaded from it, Agrippa being only seventeen years of age; and he kept him therefore at his court four years. Three years after this, Herod, king of Chalcis, and uncle to young Agrippa, dying, the emperor gave his dominions to this prince, who, notwithstanding, did not go into Judea till four years after, A. D. 53; when, Claudius taking from him the kingdom of Chalcis, gave him the provinces of Gaulonitis, Trachonitis, Batanæa, Paneas, and Abylene, which formerly had been in the possession of Lysanias. After the death of Claudius, his successor, Nero, who had a great affection for Agrippa, to his other dominions added Julias in Peræa, and that part of Galilee to which Tarichæa and Tiberias belonged. Festus governor of Judea, coming to his government, A. D. 60, king Agrippa and Bernice, his sister, went as far as Cæsarea to salute him; and as they continued there for some time, Festus talked with the king concerning the affair of St. Paul, who had been seized in the temple about two years before, and within a few days previous to his visit had appealed to the emperor. Agrippa wishing to hear Paul, that Apostle delivered that noble address in his presence which is recorded, Acts xxvi.