An African king in the Roman empire

Prince Juba's extraordinary life

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1:57In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Andrew Kenrick, author of Rex Juba, Fifteen Glimpses of an African King, unravels his amazing life in conversation with David Musgrove.

The Roman triumph of 46 BC

2:09I am joined by Dr. Andrew Kenrick, who is author of Rex Juba, Fifteen Glimpses of an African King. And we're going to be talking about a very interesting character called Juba. But your book, Andrew, starts with a really evocative description of a Roman triumph of 46 BC, which Juba was involved in. Can you describe the Roman triumph of 46 BC for me, please? Of course. So, I mean, when you say the triumph of 46 BC, 46 BC was unusual because it had four triumphs, not just one triumph in the April.

And that's because Julius Caesar returned triumphant after the Roman civil war and declared victory over not one, but four different enemies. And as a result, threw himself four separate triumphs. And just to put this in context, I guess, a triumph, I always describe it as it's kind of the highest accolade a Roman general could have. I always describe it as like the homecoming for a football team.

3:05When a football team parades through the city on top of a double-decker bus, cheered on by their supporters. And like I said, this is the highest accolade that a Roman general could have. And Julius Caesar had four in very quick succession. And the one that I opened my book with is what's called his African triumph, which was technically a triumph celebrated over his archenemy Pompey, but was officially celebrated over this character called Juba I of Numidia. And with these triumphs, the Roman generals tried to try and outdo each other. And there were amazing spectacles. So great opportunities for one-upmanship. And so we start with this triumph. And it was this noisy, exciting for the Romans, certainly, affair. So it would have involved this huge parade where all the booty from the campaign was paraded through Rome on great wagons.

3:51So they're piled high with gold and treasure and things that have been looted, effectively, from North Africa in this case. There would have also been exotic plants paraded through, carried through on the back of these wagons. And animals, all sorts of exotic animals that the Romans had captured and brought back to show the people of Rome. The Romans were particularly obsessed with elephants. They were really interested in elephants. So Juba I, the king of Numidia, he had an army with a great many elephants in it. So Julius Caesar brought 64 of those back to Rome. And there was this parade of 64 elephants.

4:23And somehow they'd been coerced, if you believe the writers, to carry torches in their upheld trunks as they kind of paraded through the city. There was all sorts of other kind of quirks. So there were placards that had paintings depicting famous moments from the battle. So the point at which Juba I dies in kind of in the aftermath of one of the battles, for example, would have been shown. The points where Cato and Pompey die would also have been painted and carried aloft. And then there would have been a parade of all the captives. So loads of slaves that would have been taken would be paraded through in chains or kind of manacles through the city streets.

4:55And amongst those would have also included any defeated leaders, so kings and queens and their families that would have been captured. They would be paraded as well. And that's how our main character of our story, Juba II, that's how he enters Rome, because he's just a toddler at that point. He's two years old. He's the eldest son of Juba I of Numidia. And he's been captured and he gets brought to the city as a toddler. Presumably he'd have had to be carried. You know, he's this, I don't know, many two-year-olds that can be paraded through the streets of any city, let alone in a triumph. So he would have been pretty carried through the streets.

5:27And it must have been a really terrifying affair for him. You know, this would have been a really kind of noisy, smelly kind of situation. There would have been, like I said, boisterous soldiers singing as they paraded through the streets. There would be huge amounts of cheering crowds. There'd be presumably weeping captives. And then all these animals kind of making all their various noises and including not just the exotic animals, but cattle, goats and sheep who are kind of destined for the sacrifice and then later for the feast. So it must have been this incredibly visceral affair for such a small child. And the whole route would have been lined by our onlookers.

5:59We can still trace, the triumphs always followed the same route. So we can, we could still trace it. Actually, you can still follow, broadly speaking, the route through Rome. It started outside the city in the Campus Martius and then kind of paraded around the outskirts and then through into the city near the Circus Maximus, which should have obviously been, those of you familiar with, very famous moment from movies, but where the chariot races were. But during the triumphs would have been absolutely full of spectators, just wanting a glimpse of, well, all sorts of exciting things, you know, not only the victorious general, but the treasure that he'd got, the animals he'd found.

6:30And then it eventually would have kind of paraded through and up through the Forum and then ended at the Temple of Jupiter where these sacrifices were made. The general would be kind of lauded. And Caesar would be as part of this triumph as well. He'd be further near the back in his chariot. The general would have his face painted red and there would be a slave behind him holding this gold crown above his head. And then alongside would be his friends and family, riding horses, walking on foot, kind of part of this parade. Again, something that the onlookers would want to see this famous, you know, this famous general in his family.

7:01And then behind him, all of his loyal soldiers would have, would kind of follow behind. And their singings, they'd be increasingly drunk as the day's gone on. Again, very rowdy, like football fans, singing songs. They recorded to sing some very rude songs about Caesar, but he took it in very good spirits. And yeah, so that's kind of, like I said, the high point of Caesar's career, I suppose, is this final, one of the fourth triumphs where, you know, he's celebrating his great victory.

The kingdom of Numidia

7:27Sure. Okay.

The kingdom of Numidia

7:28So before we talk about this poor toddler being carted through the streets to presumably baying crowds and all these elephants and such like, let's just backtrack a little bit. Juba I and Numidia. Where's Numidia and who was Juba I? That's a good question. And so Juba I is the king of Numidia. He's one of Rome's most loyal allies. He's a very close ally with Pompey, who, as I said, is Caesar's enemy during the Civil War, but for a long time has been a solid ally of Rome. And Rome at this point controls a good chunk of the Mediterranean,

8:00most of the Mediterranean coast, but not all of it. And Rome has these what we call client kings who are kind of allies, close allies who control the kingdoms just beyond Rome's borders. Very much ruling at the kind of permission of Rome, effectively. Rome is more than capable of toppling them when they don't like them. And Juba I is one of these. He's seen as a very strong ally, not least because he has a very large kingdom, a very wealthy kingdom. And that's Numidia. And Numidia now is kind of the east of Algeria and the kind of west of Tunisia and extends from the coast there, very fertile coast.

8:34And it extends south to the Atlas Mountains and then beyond just to the edge of the Sahara. So this huge, huge amount of land, huge kingdom, very varied population, lots of different tribes, different ethnic makeups in this area. Numidia comes about, without going too much into the ancient, ancient history, in the aftermath of the Punit Wars. So the founder of the kind of Numidian kingdom is Massanissa, who was during the wars against Hannibal, was Scipio. And the Romans, very loyal ally, kind of switches sides from the Carthaginians to the Romans. And as a result, is rewarded with this kind of extended kingdom.

9:07The Romans take Carthage, which becomes the province of, I call it in the book, the province of Africa. It has a various number of names that I won't get into here. And Juba I is rewarded with this extended kingdom of Numidia. And it's an incredibly varied cultural landscape. It's Hellenized, so the North African kingdoms kind of look to Greece. So there's lots of kind of Greek influences there. I think Greek is one of the languages they speak at court. They have all this amazing kind of Greek artwork imported from Greece. And it's fabulously wealthy, fabulously powerful. And as a result, Juba I is kind of this loyal ally.

9:40Unlike some of the other allies, the other kingdoms, you know, the kingdom of Egypt is very fractious, is very wealthy, but constantly devolving into civil war of its own, which Cleopatra kind of ends up as the victor in that. And I imagine she'll come up later in this conversation as well. But Juba I is this very solid ally. But he finds himself on the wrong side of the civil war. He's an ally of Pompey, not of Caesar. He has this kind of longstanding rivalry with Caesar. So there's a point where he, when he's younger, before he becomes king, he gets sent to the Senate by his father, previous king of Numidia, as an envoy.

10:11And he ends up having this actual fist fight with Caesar on the floor of the Senate. Caesar grabs his beard. He stands out. Most of the Romans at this point are clean shaven. And Juba I, as a kind of a North African king, has got this big beard. And Caesar grabs this beard during this fight. It's quite an evocative scene, I imagine. And as a result, the two of them hate each other. So when it comes to kind of squaring up in this civil war, they're very much on opposing sides. I do think Julius Caesar sees it as something, as a moment of revenge. And the Numenian kingdom was a Berber kingdom. So the indigenous population of North Africa, call them the Amazek now, but the ancients would have called them the Berbers.

10:46So this kind of indigenous African kingdom, but that's become very Hellenized, become very, lots of influence on the Greeks. It's kind of picked up the legacy of the Carthaginians to some extent. So this kind of real interesting and powerful kingdom, very famous for its cavalry and its horse riders. And I think, as I mentioned earlier, it's elephants as well. So lots of North African kind of jungle elephants that form part of the armies. So yeah, that's kind of a flavour of, you know, Jubilee First's kingdom, which kind of comes crashing down when him and Pompey are defeated by Caesar. Yeah, an exciting and somewhat exotic place.

11:18Before we go on, just listeners to mark your cards. We mentioned Carthage there a couple of times. Obviously, we've got loads of podcasts in our archive relating to Roman history one, particularly Rome versus Carthage featuring Philip Freeman. So look out for that one if you want a bit more detail on the Carthage situation. But back to our story.

A toddler in Roman custody

11:36Okay, so we've got this toddler being carted through the streets. And you might imagine that as the captive son of a defeated enemy, he wouldn't be in line for a good life. He's either going to be executed or sold into slavery, which would make this podcast quite short. So that doesn't happen. No, it doesn't. That's the expected fate of a captive, right? So if you're a commoner, you're a regular person, you're probably going to be destined for a life of slavery. If you're someone kind of from the captured king, for example, you might be enslaved as well.

12:07You might well be executed. That's what happened to the king of the ghouls, the Vercingetorix. You might go into exile. So Cleopatra's sister, Arsinoe, she ends up in exile in Turkey as a result of Julius Caesar's conquest as well. But this doesn't happen to Juba. And we're not entirely sure why. So it's one of the kind of mysteries of the book, I suppose, is that he doesn't end up in slavery. What he ends up is, he ends up as effectively adopted into Caesar's household. Caesar takes him into his own household and raises him. And we're not entirely sure why he does that. It's not the first time this has happened.

12:38There's quite a history of kind of hostages and the children of foreign leaders that are raised in Rome. And when we get to Octavian and Augustus, his household is full of children of foreign kings, kind of sent to Rome for an education, but also partly to keep them in line. But Caesar doesn't owe that to Juba the First. Because Juba the First is dead. But for some reason, he takes this child and he brings him into his own household. Not for very long, because sadly, two years later, Julius Caesar gets assassinated. At which point, Juba the Second ends up in Octavia's household. So that's Julius Caesar's grandniece, which is the sister of Octavian, who later becomes the emperor of Augustus.

13:11And he gets raised in that household. I mean, it's all the more surprising, isn't it? Given what you just said earlier about Caesar's views on Juba's father and this fist fight, it's even more surprising that he chooses to take the son under his wing. Yeah, I don't know quite what stays at hand. I don't know if it's this ultimate act of revenge, the kind of like, you know, I'm going to take your child off you and raise him as a Roman. Or whether it's just, if something else, if it's kind of longer political plans, like I said, it's one of the things we're not entirely sure about.

Education in the imperial household

13:41Okay, so can we super briefly review Juba's childhood? As you said, kind of like Caesar exits the picture quite soon after this event, in dramatic and violent fashion. And then Juba's childhood encases lots of famous historical figures. So can you just try to encapsulate what happens to him as he grows up and whose charge he's under? Yeah, so I mean, Juba in general, he intersects with kind of a who's who of Roman history to some extent. Yeah, so he ends up in Octavia's household, which was, I suppose, what we would call now a blended family.

14:12The Romans had a fairly free and easy approach to divorce. So Octavia's first husband had died, Marcella, the children with him, but she's also, around this time, ends up marrying Mark Antony. So he brings, Mark Antony brings the children from his first marriage with Fulvia, and they quickly have children of their own. So there's quite a large family made up of Mark Antony's family and Octavia's family that combine. And at this point, they're probably living on the Palatine Hill in Rome, kind of in the centre of Rome, near the Forum, what eventually becomes the kind of imperial palace, but it's quite far off from that yet.

14:43And living in quite close proximity to Octavian, Octavia's brother, and Livia, his wife, and their family as well. So he ends up in this quite a vibrant household, raised with impeccable education. The family of the Roman elites were very fond of education. They were strong believers in education, so that he'd have been taught a huge amount of different things, you know, history, languages, music, mathematics, all sorts of things, from some very prominent, at the time, academics and scholars brought from across the kind of Mediterranean to teach these households in the centre of Rome.

15:17And he kind of fades from view quite a lot of the time. That's the problem with the lives of any ancient character, but even the scions of kings, they kind of fade in and out of history. But he gets referred to as kind of after his death as Rex Literatissimus, which is the kind of the most scholarly of all kings. And he really takes that, you know, this education to heart. He ends up later in life as a really prolific scholar, which one of the great tragedies of the ancient world is none of it survives. But he starts writing books quite early on. I think as a teenager, he's writing books on Roman archaeology and all sorts of things.

15:47While he's in this household, he eventually becomes adopted by Augustus. You know, his formal name is Gaius Julius Juba. Gaius Julius Juba is his proper Roman name and probably goes on campaign with Augustus and Augustus' stepson, Tiberius, who becomes the second emperor later on. And kind of when he's in his late teens, this kind of extraordinary situation happens. Rome, which has been reasonably at peace for quite a while and becomes embroiled in another civil war, the kind of final civil war of the Republic. And this happens when Mark Antony, like I said, husband of Octavia, he's fallen in love with someone else.

16:18He's fallen in love with Cleopatra. He's been sent to the east. He's been given the kind of east half of the Mediterranean to administer. And while he's there, he meets Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt, and falls madly in love with her. Of course, those listeners familiar with Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra will know this story well. But he takes up this Egyptian queen and they have children together as well. While he's married with Octavia, causes a great scandal in Rome. And they have twins and then go on to have a third child. And he's still, at this point, back and forth between the east, between Egypt, between Turkey and Syria and Rome.

16:52And whenever he returns to Rome, he comes back to Octavia's family, leaves his children in the east with Cleopatra. And eventually, that kind of comes to the breaking point where his relationship with Octavian ruptures. He divorces Octavia. And this is the final straw for Augustus, who launches this war against him. Ostensibly a war against Cleopatra, but it's really a war against Mark Antony. And again, they're defeated. They're defeated at the Battle of Actium. Initially, they flee back to Alexandria, at which point Augustus lays siege to Alexandria. And they're defeated there. And they, again, made famous from the end of Antony and Cleopatra, they both commit suicide.

17:26Whether an asp is involved or not, I'll leave that out. But they commit suicide. And again, history seems to repeat itself because Augustus, rather than raising Alexandria, rather than killing all their family, he does notably kill the eldest sons. But he brings back the younger children to Rome. And he has an amazing triumph as well, even more fabulous than Julius Caesar's, although I won't repeat myself by describing another triumph. But as part of that, again, multiple days of triumphs, he parades Cleopatra and Antony's children through the streets of Rome again. They're not as young.

17:57The elder twins are probably 10. The youngest child may be more similar to Juba's age, I guess. And the twins are Cleopatra Selene and Alexander Helios, named for the sun and the moon gods, as well as the great scions of the Ptolemaic dynasties of Egypt, Alexander and Cleopatra. And they're paraded through the streets of Rome. And you're not going to believe this, but rather than, again, being sent into exile, being executed, they are also adopted into the imperial household. So Juba's aged 18 at this point. Quite possibly took part in this triumph as well, but probably as a member of the Roman imperial family.

18:30But then Cleopatra Selene and Alexander Helios are adopted into Octavia's household. They're, like I said, aged 10 or 11 at this point. And there, Cleopatra Selene meets Juba. I like to think it was something of eventually falling in love. I think it was probably more practically a match made by Octavia and Augustus. But yeah, so he, again, into his orbit, this other victim of a triumph, this prisoner gets brought to Rome and the two end up marrying eventually. I mean, that is a fascinating story. And thank you for sort of charting the intricacies of it there. So Juba kind of seems to sail through all this turbulence.

19:02There must have been something about him that sort of meant that people just continued to back him and think he was someone worth having involved in the royal family. Yeah, definitely. I think it's interesting because I think he must have been likable. I don't know how politically astute he was. There must have been something about him that stayed various people's hands. I mentioned he was an incredible scholar and he gets written about his material is referred, you know, his writing is referred to by Pliny, by Plutarch, by Strabo. And they write about him with a great deal of affection for his writing, a great deal of admiration. And there's events later in his life where, you know, he gets sent as a diplomat to the east.

19:34But yeah, he seems to, in a period where heirs to the imperial throne, fall by the wayside, there's all manner of political assassinations and killings and strife. He does seem to sail through it. And I don't know if that's just because he was very young when he came to Rome. So I think he, in his eyes, he was Roman. He was brought up as a Roman. That's all he really knew, even though he must have had some sort of affinity for North Africa. But he was brought up as a Roman. And also that proximity maybe to Augustus. He was very much in that imperial household. I don't think he was seen as a hostage. Like I said, he was adopted. So he was adopted by Augustus and the imperial family.

20:06So I think he was just seen as part of the family. I mean, this doesn't always protect the kind of Romans from meeting a sticky end. But he seems to, and throughout his life, until certainly towards the end, I guess, of his life. He's very loyal, I think, is the reason. He never turns his hand against Rome at all. Your work lives in scattered places. And it's not only your team searching for context, your AI agents need it too. Jira taps Atlassian's teamwork graph to bring that context together.

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Identity and Roman attitudes to race

22:02You mentioned that he thought of himself as a Roman. Can we talk a little bit about his identity and his ethnicity? What can we say about that and about attitudes to kind of race and nationality, if that was even a concept at the time? It's a really interesting subject, I think. It's quite often one of the questions that I get asked. And of course, the two things that I should say up front is that we don't really know how he thought of himself. You know, we don't know what he considers his identity. And we also don't know his, really, we don't know his ethnicity.

22:33Like I said, he was a Berber by birth. So, kind of indigenous North African. But we don't have any painted sculptures or statues or even paintings of him. So, we don't know what he looked like apart from the marble statues and bronze statues that have survived. But we can have a good guess at kind of how he might have identified. So, like I said, he was Berber by birth. He then went on to rule the North African kingdom. And there were certainly some of the statues that depict him maybe more in a kind of North African appearance. But he was also, he spoke Greek.

23:03He wrote, all of his scholarship was written in Greek. Like I said, Juba I's kingdom was very Greek orientated, very Hellenized. So, I think he might have had that kind of Greek identity. Of course, Egypt to this point, where his wife, Cleopatra Selene, comes from. That's a Greek kingdom, one of the successor kingdoms of Alexander the Great's conquests. But he was raised in Rome. He was raised in Rome as a two-year-old. So, you know, he was within the heart of the most powerful family in Rome. So, he was certainly elite. He was from a very wealthy upbringing, but very Roman outlook. You know, he would have spoken Latin as well as Greek.

23:35Greek had this impeccable Latin and Greek education. So, I think it's a really mixed identity. In terms of Roman attitudes to race, again, very complex and possibly quite surprising to listeners. I mean, Romans kind of took their views, their theories on race and culture from the Greeks. They had this theory called environmental determinism, and we call it now. And that is from Aristotle, from Hippocrates. And that's depending on where you live, where people are from in the world, their environment shapes what they look like and who they are and how they are affected.

24:08So, for example, you know, the further north you are, the colder climates you are, it made you stupider, but it also made you braver. So, the Germans, for example, were seen as having kind of frosty white skin and blonde hair, but were seen as courageous, but a bit stupid. Whereas the Ethiopians, which was a term used for specifically the area, is now Ethiopia, but was used for kind of all sub-Saharan Africans. They were dark-skinned because of the sun, the sun seemed to have burnt their skin, and they were seen to be cowardly because of that, because of the heat, but also much more clever.

24:41Rome, as it would happen, is right in the middle of those two kind of extremes, so was seen as the perfect, it's the perfect blend of the area. So, therefore, the Romans were both courageous and clever, and were therefore the kind of rightful rulers of the empire. Go figure. Exactly. I mean, rather paradoxically, that gets, when we come to kind of the 18th, 19th centuries, these kind of theories get taken up by European imperialists, and they kind of substitute Britain and France in for that, which doesn't quite work as well as when you think of the Mediterranean climate, but it still happens.

25:12So, the Romans had a keen approach to race in that regard, and they could certainly recognize racial differences. There's quite a lot of the Roman writers, Virgil included, using some quite shocking stereotypes and descriptions that we would recognize today, sadly. And they described black people, but they also described white people, and they very much did not, this is the, I think, one of the interesting points, they very much did not think of themselves as white. The Romans would have been horrified to think of themselves as white, because pale skin was seen, as well as a mark of a northern barbarian, was also seen as being effeminate. If you were, you know, if you were a woman who stayed indoors all day, so if you had white skin, you went out in the fields, you went out in battle, you went kind of in the arena getting tanned.

25:49So, the Romans had put themselves as kind of apart from both people of black or white ethnicity, they saw themselves as Roman and Greek. And so, that's their kind of approach to race. I mean, these are very sweeping generalizations, I should say. You know, Cicero, Strabo, Caesar all wrote about this separately. They had very different views on it and thought maybe it was more about your, you know, your social upbringing that informed your personality rather than where you were born. And kind of far more recognizable theories that we would maybe adhere to today. But then to a Roman, though, this is one of the other interesting points is that actually your kind of ethnicity, your race didn't really affect your status in Rome.

26:22You've got to remember at this point, this is quite often forgotten, Rome is an incredibly multicultural empire and an incredibly multicultural city as a result. You know, it stretches from, at its max, at its peak in the early kind of first, second centuries AD, it stretches from Britain in the north to the edge of the Sahara in the south and from Spain in the west as far as the edge of the Middle East, Syria and Arabia to the east. So, it's an incredibly broad empire. The most wealthy provinces are in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. And of course, that results in Rome itself being quite a melting pot of cultures.

26:54As far as I can tell, Juba himself would have been one of probably many North Africans in Rome and, importantly, one of many North African Romans in Rome because they were far more interested in whether you were Roman or not Roman. It didn't really matter where you were from. It was more to do with whether you were a Roman citizen. So, in the same way, I guess you kind of get modern hyphenated cultural identities you'd have had. You know, you might have been Romano-Egyptian or you might have been Romano-British or you might have been Romano-African. And that was far more important and was part of Rome's kind of policy, really, in terms of how they could expand their empire and keep their empire expanding.

27:25So, as Rome develops, they increasingly broaden out their definition of who gets to be a Roman until very late in the empire where pretty much anyone born within the Roman Empire became a Roman citizen. But certainly, at this point, it's kind of the late 1st century BC, early 1st century AD. It's a little bit more restrictive. But you can still, you know, so long as you are a Roman citizen, you are considered a Roman citizen. So, it didn't matter if you were, say, a Roman citizen from Egypt or a Roman citizen from North Africa. You could still be, you were still treated as a Roman. And that reaches its ultimate example in the 2nd century with Septimius Severus, who's one of the Roman emperors, and he's from North Africa.

28:02And his wife, the Empress Julia Domna, is from Syria. So, again, the Romans are a very relaxed approach to that, which I think quite often surprises us. When you think about even modern attitudes to race and racism, the Romans were incredibly racist at times and they were incredibly xenophobic. Like, if you weren't Roman, they thought very poorly of you. But they had a very broad definition of who got to be a Roman, which I think surprises us quite often. So, Juba was, you know, the fact he was Berber, the fact he was North African, didn't hold him back at all. That wouldn't have stopped him being at the very top of the Roman elite.

Ruling the kingdom of Mauritania

28:32Okay. Let's get back to Juba. He's married to Cleopatra Selene, and he ends up ruling a kingdom in Africa, but not the one that his father ruled. Yeah, definitely. So, he ends up as king of Mauritania, which, just to avoid confusion, is not the Mauritania that exists on maps today. It's effectively Morocco and Algeria, kind of the modern countries. And yeah, he ends up as king of Mauritania, which Numidia at this point is not an option. He can't become king of Numidia. Numidia is now a Roman province, and the Romans don't want to give that up. Egypt is now a Roman province, a very wealthy Roman province, so the Romans don't want to give that up either.

29:05But they have this prince and this princess, very well-educated, very loyal to Rome. What do they do with them? They can't just leave them to their own devices. They certainly can't marry them to other Romans. There's that danger that they'll kind of end up fomenting a rival faction to Augustus. So, what they do, and this is Octavia's plan, so Augustus's sister, they get married to one another, they're married to one another, and then they're sent to Mauritania, this kingdom to the far western corner of North Africa, which used to be a great rival of Numidia. But as luck would have it, the last king of Mauritania had recently died, and in his will, he left Mauritania to Augustus.

29:41And Augustus, not really sure what to do with it, Mauritania is an incredibly wealthy kingdom, and it has a lot of resources that Rome wants, but Rome isn't quite ready to just conquer it yet, or to annex it. So, instead, what he does is he gives Mauritania to Juba and Selene to rule, and they go there as rulers in about 25 BC and become king and queen. And how does that go? Do they rule well? It goes fantastically well, because it doesn't really get written about, which is usually a sign in the Roman world that everything's fine. So, they establish this kingdom very much along the lines of Rome. They rebuild the capital city, Aeol Caesarea, renamed after Caesar, and they build it in the image of Rome.

30:17It has bathhouses, it has theatres, but it has the first Italian theatre built outside of Rome. Juba is a huge theatre buff. And they import statues. They have Greek and Roman artists who come and build all their statuary out of marble. And so, they have this fantastic city and this fantastic art programme. And it kind of ticks along quite nicely. They don't fall victim to what a lot of the other client kings fall victim to, which is falling foul of Roman emperors. And I think because of this very close relationship, so Mauritania, you know, it's the breadbasket of Rome. North Africa is incredibly important for trade.

30:48And Juba is very well thought of. Like I said earlier, he gets sent to the east after King Herod's death, the King Herod from the Bible, to act as a diplomat. He goes with one of Augustus' heirs to kind of almost chaperone him, to teach him the ways of kingship. And the client kingdom, as far as we can tell, is quite successful. It falls foul in the end of the kind of multicultural, the multi-ethnic makeup of North Africa that was true in the kingdom of Numidia, Juba's father. It's also true in Mauritania. And eventually, this figure emerges, Tacfarinas, who's this former Roman auxilia, who's the chief of one of the tribes of North Africa.

31:23And he becomes this incredible rabba rouser. He instigates this huge rebellion in North Africa that takes, I think, four consecutive Roman governors to put down a huge number of legionaries. And it kind of taints the end of Juba's reign. Juba dies about a year before it's eventually put down. But one of the things that the Romans wanted their client kings to do is to kind of maintain security on the borders. And Juba has to keep going to Rome and has to keep asking for more legions to be sent there to help him against this kind of revolt. And I think as a result, it starts the clock ticking for the end of Mauritania.

31:56Juba dies before that happens. He dies about 23 AD. And his son takes over his son Ptolemy of Mauritania. He rules for a few decades more. He does get lauded for his generalship. So he's part of the alliance, I guess, that brings down Tacfarinas. But he eventually meets a sticky end at the hands of Caligula, who is one of the infamous, I should say, Roman emperors. But he's also Caligula's cousin. But by the accounts, Caligula kind of gets quite jealous of either Ptolemy's wealth, the wealth of Mauritania, or some other slight. And as a result, he has Ptolemy killed and then annexes Mauritania.

32:29And then Mauritania kind of passes into the hands of Rome for a good three or four centuries.

Evaluating Juba's historical legacy

32:34It's a really interesting life. And you've had to sort of summarise his actual kingship there quite quickly, I realise. But he's not very well known. I mean, I hadn't heard of him before I read your excellent book. But he did have this very interesting life. I presume it's quite difficult to construct his story and maybe the sources aren't what you would hope for. But should he be better known? What sort of position does he hold in the Roman story? And what is his legacy? Yeah, I think he should absolutely be better known. And I mean, we've possibly fallen down the trap that you always do with stories of Juba in this podcast,

33:06where we kind of focus on this, you know, that fantastically interesting early life. And then, of course, when he becomes king, there's huge gaps in the literary record. He appears in other people's biographies. So he'll often appear in a biography of Julius Caesar or Augustus. Sometimes, if you're lucky, in a biography of Cleopatra. So he'll crop up on the margins, but usually just as a footnote. And I think he leads such a fantastic life at such a fantastic point of, you know, a really interesting point of Roman history where kind of the republic is tipping into the empire. You know, Augustus is coming to power. I think he's a witness to a lot of those events.

33:37And I was kind of hampered in some respects because there's huge gaps in the literature. I think he wrote a biography of his own or an autobiography of his own, but of course that's been lost. He crops up in some of the chapters of Tacitus that have been lost as well. So I think there's gaps in the literature. So I ended up for the book writing about using artifacts and objects to tell the story. Because he was a king, he generated a huge amount of artifactual evidence. So there's a huge number of coins. There's these beautiful series of busts of him and loads of statues that he commissioned, as well as the archaeology of North Africa.

34:09And I think that I use that to some extent to fill in the gaps, use the kind of coin, pattern of coins, the events that he was celebrating on them to tell some other pieces of the story, such as his war with Tacvaranus. And I think he does deserve to be known, not just because of what I think is quite an interesting life, but also because he's an example of that multiculturalism of Rome. I think we quite often, especially in Europe, we focus on Rome, we focus on the provinces we live in. So, you know, Britannia, Gaul, where it's actually so much interesting history,

34:39so many interesting characters come from the south of the Mediterranean, come from North Africa, come from the east. And I think it's important to showcase some of those stories as well, I think. To kind of bring them into the light. I'm not sure what his legacy is, necessarily. I think he has this incredible scholarly legacy that, you know, like I said, we've lost. But it still is maintained through Pliny, through Putak, through Strabo, who are all impeccable references. So they cite him, they talk about, well, Juba says this, Juba says that. And a huge amount of literary archaeology has gone on to piece together what he might have written about.

35:09And I think that's quite important. Even if we can't see that directly, we can see that indirectly. And then also that laying the groundwork for, it's his success in Mauritania. It's his creating this thriving Roman-esque kingdom in North Africa that allows Rome effectively to take it over quite seamlessly. And it becomes an incredibly successful, important part of Rome for a very long time. And I think that's, again, down to his love for Roman and Greek worlds. His vision, to some extent, in building these kind of Roman structures in North Africa.

35:40And I think that eases the way for North Africa being a very important, integral part of the Roman Empire for centuries to come. That was Andrew Kenrick. His book, Rex Juba, 15 Glimpses of an African King, is on sale now. Your work lives in scattered places.

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