the god, desisted, saying that he had hidden himself among the
Muses. The tradition is that the daughters of Minyas, king of
Orchomenus, having despised the rites of the god, were seized
with frenzy and ate the flesh of one of their children. At this
festival it was originally the custom for the priest of the god
to pursue a woman of the Minyan family with a drawn sword and
kill her. (Plutarch, Quaest. Rom. 102, Quaest. Graecae 38.)
AGRIPPA, a sceptical philosopher, whose date cannot
be accurately determined. He must have lived later than
Aenesidemus, who is generally said to have been a contemporary of
Cicero. To him are ascribed the five tropes pente tropoi
which, according to Sextus Empiricus, summarize the attitude
of the later ancient sceptics. The first trope emphasizes
the disagreement of philosophers on all fundamental points;
knowledge comes either from the senses or from reason. Some
thinkers hold that nothing is known but the things of sense;
others that the things of reason alone are known; and so
on. It follows that the only wise course is to be content
with an attitude of indifference, neither to affirm nor to
deny. The second trope deals with the validity of proof;
the proof of one so-called fact depends on another fact which
itself needs demonstration, and so on ad infinitum. The
third points out that the data of sense are relative to the
sentient being, those of reason to the intelligent mind; that in
different conditions things themselves are seen or thought to be
different. Where, then, is the absolute criterion? Fourthly,
if we examine things fairly, we see that in point of fact all
knowledge depends on certain hypotheses, or facts taken for
granted. Such knowledge is fundamentally hypothetical,
and might well be accepted as such without the labour of a
demonstration which is logically invalid. The fifth trope
points out the impossibility of proving the sensible by
the intelligible inasmuch as it remains to establish the
intelligible in its turn by the sensible. Such a process is
a vicious circle and has no logical validity. A comparison
of these tropes with the ten tropes enumerated in the article
AENESIDEMUS shows that scepticism has made an advance into
the more abtruse questions of metaphysics. The first and the
third include all the ideas expressed in the ten tropes, and
the other three systematize the more profound difficulties
which new thinkers had developed. Aenesidemus was content
to attack the validity of sense-given knowledge; Agrippa goes
further and impugns the possibility of all truth whatever.
His reasons are those of modern scepticism, the reasons
which by their very nature are not susceptible of disproof.
See Diogenes Laertius x. 88, and Zeller's Greek
Philosophy. Also the articles SCEPTICISM; AENESIDEMUS.
AGRIPPA, HEROD, I. (c. 10 B.C.-A.D. 44), king of Judea,
the son of Aristobulus and Berenice, and grandson of Herod the
Great, was born about 10 B.C. His original name was Marcus
Julius Agrippa. Josephus informs us that, after the murder
of his father, Herod the Great sent him to Rome to the court
of Tiberius, who conceived a great affection for him, and
placed him near his son Drusus, whose favour he very soon
won. On the death of Drusus, Agrippa, who had been recklessly
extravagant, was obliged to leave Rome, overwhelmed with
debt. After a brief seclusion, Herod the Tetrarch, his uncle,
who had married Herodias, his sister, made him Agoranomos
(Overseer of Markets) of Tiberias, and presented him with
a large sum of money; but his uncle being unwilling to
continue his support, Agrippa left Judea for Antioch and soon
after returned to Rome, where he was welcomed by Tiberius
and became the constant campanion of the emperor Gaius
(Caligula), then a popular favourite. Agrippa being one
day overheard by Eutyches, a slave whom he had made free,
to express a wish for Tiberius' death and the advancement of
Gaius, was betrayed to the emperor and cast into prison.
In A.D. 37 Caligula, having ascended the throne, heaped
wealth and favours upon Agrippa, set a royal diadem upon his
head and gave him the tetrarchy of Batanaea and Trachonitis,
which Philip, the son of Herod the Great, had formerly
possessed. To this he added that held by Lysanias; and Agrippa
returned very soon into Judea to take possession of his new
kingdom. In A.D. 39 he returned to Rome and brought
about the banishment of Herod Antipas, to whose tetrarchy he
succeeded. On the assassination of Caligula (A.D. 41)
Agrippa contributed much by his advice to maintain Claudius
in possession of the imperial dignity, while he made a show
of being in the interest of the senate. The emperor, in
acknowledgment, gave him the government of Judea, while the
kingdom of Chalcis in Lebanon was at his request given to
his brother Herod. Thus Agrippa became one of the greatest
princes of the east, the territory he possessed equalling in
extent that held by Herod the Great. He returned to Judea
and governed it to the great satisfaction of the Jews. His
zeal, private and public, for Judaism is celebrated by
Josephus and the rabbis; and the narrative of Acts xii. gives
a typical example of it. About the feast of the Passover
A.D. 44, James the elder, the son of Zebedee and brother
of John the evangelist, was seized by his order and put to
death. He proceeded also to lay hands on Peter and imprisoned
him. After the Passover he went to Caesarea, where he had
games performed in honour of Claudius, and the inhabitants of
Tyre and Sidon waited on him to sue for peace.. According to
the story in Acts xii., Agrippa, gorgeously arrayed, received
them in the theatre, and addressed them from a throne, while
the audience cried out that his was the voice of a god. But
``the angel of the Lord smote him,'' and shortly afterwards
he died ``eaten of worms.'' The story in Acts differs slightly
from that in Josephus, who describes how in the midst of
his elation he saw an owl perched over his head. During his
confinement by Tiberius a like omen had been interpreted as
portending his speedy release, with the warning that should
he behold the same sight again he would die within' five
days. He was immediately smitten with violent pains, and
after a few days died. Josephus says nothing of his being
``eaten of worms,'' but the discrepancies between the two
stories are of slight moment. A third account omits all the
apocryphal elements in the story and says that Agrippa was
assassinated by the Romans, who objected to his growing power.
See articles in Ency, Bibl. (W. J. Woodhouse),
Jewish Ency. (M. Brann), with further relerences; N.
S. Libowitz, Herod and Agrippa (New York, 2nd ed.,
1898); Gratz, Geschchte d. Juden, iii. 318-361.
AGRIPPA, HEROD, II. (27-100), son of the preceding, and
like him originally Marcus Julius Agrippa, was born about
A.D. 27, and received the tetrarchy of Chalcis and the
oversight of the Temple on the death of his uncle Herod,
A.D. 48. In A.D. 53 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 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,
A.D. 100. He was the seventh and last king of the family of
Herod the Great. It was before him and his sister Berenice
(q.v., B.2) that St Paul pleaded his cause at Caesarea (Acts
xxvi.). He supplied Josephus with information for his history.
AGRIPPA, MARCUS VIPSANIUS (63-12 P.C.), Roman statesman and
general, son-in-law and minister of the emperor Augustus,
was of humble origin. He was of the same age as Octavian
(as the emperor was then called), and was studying with him
at Apollonia when news of Julius Caesar's assassination (44)
arrived. By his advice Octavian at once set out for Rome.
Agrippa played a conspicuous part in the war against Lucius, .
brother of Mark Antony, which ended in the capture of Perusia
(40). Two years later he put down a rising of the Aquitallians
in Gaul, and crossed the Rhine to punish the aggressions of the
Germans. On his return he refused a triumph but accepted
the consulship (37). At this time Sextus Pompeius, with whom
war was imminent, had command of the sea on the coasts of
Italy. Agrippa's first care was to provide a safe harbour
for his ships, which he accomplished by cutting through the
strips of land which separated the Lacus Lucrinus from the
sea, thus forming an outer harbour; an inner one was also
made by joining the lake Avernus to the Lucrinus (Dio Cassius
xlviii. 49; Pliny, Nat. Hist. xxxvi. 24). About this time
Agrippa married Pomponia, daughter of Cicero's friend Pomponius
Atticus. Having been appointed naval commander-in-chief he
put his crews through a course of training, until he felt
in a position to meet the fleet of Pompeius. In 36 he was
victorious at Mylae and Naulochus, and received the honour
of a naval crown for his services. In 33 he was chosen
aedile and signalized his tenure of office by effecting great
improvements in the city of Rome, restoring and building
aqueducts, enlarging and cleansing the sewers, and constructing
baths and porticos, and laying out gardens. He also first
gave a stimulus to the public exhibition of works of art.
The emperor's boast that he had found the city of brick but
left it of marble (``marmoream se relinquere, quam latericiam
accepisset,'' Suet. Aug. 29) might with greater propriety
have been uttered by Agrippa. He was again called away to
take command of the fleet when the war with Antony broke
out. The victory at Actium (31), which gave the mastery of
Rome and the empire of the world to Octavian, was mainly due to
Agrippa. As a token of signal regard Octavian bestowed upon
him the hand of his niece Marcella (28). We must suppose
that his wife Pomponia was either dead or divorced. In 27
Agrippa was consul for the third time, and in the following
year the senate bestowed upon Octavian the emperial title of
Augustus. Probably in commemoration of the battle of Actium,
Agrippa built and dedicated the Pantheum still in existence as La
Rotonda. The inscription on the portico states that it was
erected by him during his third consulship. His friendship
with Augustus seems to have been clouded by the jealousy of
his father-in-law Marcellus, which was probably fomented by
the intrigues of Livia, the second wife of Augustus, who feared
his influence with her husband. The result was that Agrippa
left Rome, ostensibly to take over the governorship of Syria
--a sort of honourable exile; but as a matter of fact he only
sent his legate to the East, while he himself remained at
Lesbos. On the death of Marcellus, which took place within a
year, he was recalled to Rome by Augustus, who found he could
not dispense with his services. It is said that by the advice
of Maecenas he resolved to attach Agrippa still more closely
to him by making him his son-in-law. He accordingly induced
him to divorce Marcella and marry his daughter Julia (21),
the widow of Marcellus, equally celebrated for her beauty
and abilities and her shameless profligacy. In 19 Agrippa
was employed in putting down a rising of the Cantabrians in
Spain. He was appointed governor of Syria a second time
(17), where his just and prudent administration won him the
respect and good-will of the provincials, especially the Hebrew
population. His last public service was the bloodless
