Mauretania

A treaty Rome's greed refused

formationDrafted from Pollard), The Catiline and Jugurtha of Sallust, Translated into English (1882)

Bocchus ruled all the Mauritanians, the westernmost of Africa's peoples, a king who knew the Roman name and nothing more of Rome itself until Jugurtha's own war brought the two into contact. At the very outset of that war, Bocchus had sent an embassy to Rome asking for a treaty of friendship - an alliance that would have served Rome's own interest in the war then just beginning. It came to nothing. The same senators whose greed had already sold Jugurtha half a kingdom and a king's own silence let the offer die rather than trouble themselves over a distant ruler with nothing yet to offer them.

Pollard), The Catiline and Jugurtha of Sallust, Translated into English (1882) · Louis Charrier · Public domain

A marriage that meant less than it looked

Bocchus had also, some time before, married one of Jugurtha's own daughters - a tie the text notes was held cheaply among both Numidians and Mauritanians, where kings kept as many wives as they could afford and no single marriage carried the weight it might elsewhere. It was a slight bond, but it was there when Jugurtha, cast off by Rome's rejected friendship and needing every ally he could still find, came to Bocchus with an offer of his own.

A speech about a hunger that never stops

The two kings met with their armies at an agreed place, exchanged pledges, and Jugurtha made his case in a single speech: the Romans were unjust and boundlessly greedy, the common enemy of every people, and had no more real quarrel with Bocchus than they had once had with Carthage, or with King Perses of Macedon after that - each simply the richest victim within reach at the time. Whoever they had not yet attacked would be attacked eventually; it was only a matter of whose turn came next. Persuaded, Bocchus took up arms against Rome alongside his new son-in-law, marching with him toward the Roman spoils gathered at Cirta.

A king who played both sides

peakDrafted from Pollard), The Catiline and Jugurtha of Sallust, Translated into English (1882)

Alliance with Jugurtha did not stop Bocchus from testing the other side. As the Roman general Metellus pressed the war, he sent envoys urging Bocchus to abandon a doomed son-in-law before his own kingdom shared Jugurtha's ruin - warning him that a war easy to begin was hard to end, and that only the victor, not the man who started it, got to choose when it stopped. Bocchus answered warmly, professing he wanted peace but pitied Jugurtha's misfortune, and would treat if Jugurtha were offered the same terms. Messages went back and forth for months without a decision either way.

A third of a kingdom, offered twice

When the Roman consul Marius pushed Jugurtha out of Capsa and a string of other strongholds, Jugurtha sent for Bocchus again, this time with a concrete bribe attached: a third of Numidia itself, once the war was won or settled on terms that left Bocchus's own lands untouched. Bribery had worked on Bocchus's own courtiers before it worked on the king, but it worked. Bocchus led his army into Numidia and joined Jugurtha in a night attack on Marius's own column, catching the Romans before they could form ranks or receive orders - a chaotic, close-run fight that felt, by the Roman survivors' own account, more like a brawl with bandits than a battle between armies.

A ruin he chose not to share

The fighting that followed wore Bocchus down rather than Marius. Months of further reverses convinced him that Jugurtha's cause, and not Rome's, was the one about to fail - and when Jugurtha himself proposed one final scheme, a peace conference at which Bocchus would seize the Roman quaestor Sulla and hand him over as a hostage, Bocchus turned the plan back on the man who had suggested it. An ambush laid for Sulla caught Jugurtha instead, and Bocchus delivered his own son-in-law to Rome in chains rather than let a losing war cost him his own throne.

Pollard), The Catiline and Jugurtha of Sallust, Translated into English (1882) · Classical Numismatic Group · CC BY-SA 2.5

A kingdom split in two

contractionDrafted from Way), Caesar: Alexandrian, African and Spanish Wars (1955)

By the time Rome's own civil war reached Africa, six decades after Bocchus handed Jugurtha to Sulla in chains, the single Mauretanian throne he had ruled no longer existed. Two kings, both named in the record only as Bocchus and Bogud, now held the country between them - and both, unlike their Numidian neighbor Juba I, backed Julius Caesar rather than the Pompeians who had made Africa their own refuge after Pharsalus.

Way), Caesar: Alexandrian, African and Spanish Wars (1955) · Classical Numismatic Group · CC BY-SA 3.0

The safer bet, twice over

The choice made sense on its own terms. Juba's Numidia could field four legions and cavalry beyond counting, resources the two smaller Mauretanian kingdoms could not match alone - but Caesar's own cause in Africa was reinforced by Sittius, a Roman adventurer who had spent years already operating in the region with a private army of his own, giving Bocchus and Bogud a patron whose interests ran alongside theirs rather than a neighbor whose ambitions, like Jugurtha's before him, might eventually reach for their own thrones next. Where a Mauretanian king had once married into Numidia's royal house and fought Rome at its side, his successors now stood against Numidia and beside Rome instead - the same calculation of self-interest, running in the opposite direction.

Two names outlasting one kingdom's memory

Whether Bocchus and Bogud divided a kingdom once ruled by a single line, or represented two houses with older claims of their own, goes unexplained in the war's own narrative. What that narrative shows plainly is a Mauretania no longer capable of acting as one power even when its interests aligned - two kings making the same choice separately, rather than one making it for both.

A kingdom of his fathers

contractionDrafted from Foster), Dio's Roman History, Volume VI: Books 51-55 (1955)

Not long after Actium, Augustus settled the fate of a boy who had been paraded through Rome as a child in his father's triumph and then raised at the emperor's own court. Juba, son of the Numidian king Juba I, was given both a bride and a throne: Cleopatra Selene, daughter of Antony and Cleopatra, and "the kingdom of his fathers" - Numidia, the realm his father had lost to Caesar's own conquest a generation before. It was restoration by favour rather than by right, granted to a man who had spent his whole life among the people who had destroyed his father's kingdom in the first place.

Cherchell Museum, Algeria · Foster), Dio's Roman History, Volume VI: Books 51-55 (1955) · Bernard Gagnon · CC BY 4.0

The arrangement did not last as first made. In 25 BC Augustus moved Juba again, trading his hereditary Numidian throne - by then already folded largely into Roman provincial territory - for Mauretania and the former domains of Bocchus and Bogud. For the first time since Caesar's civil war split the kingdom between two rival kings, Mauretania answered to one ruler alone, and that ruler owed the whole of his throne, twice over now, to Roman favour rather than Mauretanian succession.

A revolt Rome had to finish for him

Favour did not buy loyalty from the kingdom's own subjects. Around AD 6 the Gaetulians, a people within Juba's own territory, rose against him, unwilling to accept rule at one remove by a king who was himself little more than a Roman appointee. They ravaged the country bordering their own lands and killed a number of the Roman soldiers sent to help put them down, gaining enough ground that it took a dedicated Roman commander, Cornelius Cossus, to finish the campaign - a service substantial enough that Cossus returned to Rome with triumphal honours and a new title, Gaetulicus, taken from the very people he had subdued in another king's name.

Died lately

contractionDrafted from Falconer), The Geography of Strabo (1856)

A geographer writing in the last years of his own life, revising an account of the western world he had been building for decades, paused over Mauretania long enough to note what had become of the king who ruled it. Juba, he records, had held the kingdom "having received it from Augustus Caesar, in addition to his paternal dominions" - the same double grant of Numidia and then Mauretania that had defined the whole of his reign. And then, in the same breath, the geographer closes the account of him: Juba "died lately, and was succeeded by his son Ptolemy, whose mother was the daughter of Antony and Cleopatra."

Bibliothèque nationale de France · Falconer), The Geography of Strabo (1856) · Bibliothèque nationale de France · Public domain

Nothing in the geographer's own words marks the succession as contested, delayed, or violent. Ptolemy took his father's throne as plainly as the sentence that records it - the son of Cleopatra Selene inheriting a kingdom his grandmother had lost and his father had spent a lifetime being given back, piece by piece, at another empire's discretion.

Falconer), The Geography of Strabo (1856) · Bernard Gagnon · CC BY 4.0

A purple robe was the last straw

endDrafted from Forester), The Lives of the Twelve Caesars: Caligula (1855)

Three generations after Bocchus and Bogud backed Caesar's winning side, the Mauretanian throne belonged to Ptolemy, grandson of Mark Antony through his mother, Cleopatra Selene, and son of Juba, a king whom the emperor Caligula counted among his own cousins and invited to Rome with every mark of honor. The reception did not last. Caligula had the young king put to death for no greater offense, by the historian Suetonius's own account, than that Ptolemy had drawn every eye in the theatre at a public exhibition by the splendor of his own purple robe - a display of royal magnificence the emperor could not forgive in a client king who was supposed to owe his own position to Rome's favor.

Musée du Louvre, Paris · Forester), The Lives of the Twelve Caesars: Caligula (1855) · Marie-Lan Nguyen · Public domain

A death with an empire attached

Ptolemy's execution, probably in AD 40, left Mauretania without an heir Rome recognized, and the emperor who had ordered the killing simply absorbed the kingdom rather than name a successor. The Mauretanian throne Bocchus had first brought into the Roman historical record a century and a half earlier, through an embassy Rome's own corrupt senators had once refused to answer, ended the same way most of the ancient world's smaller kingdoms eventually did: annexed by an emperor who wanted the throne more than he wanted any reason to justify taking it.