Numidia

An exile at Scipio's camp

formationDrafted from Smith, Carthage and the Carthaginians (1878)

Massinissa had spent years fighting for Carthage in Spain, doing the Carthaginians good service even while, sensing which way fortune was turning, he opened a secret understanding with the Roman general Publius Scipio. Syphax, ruler of the neighboring Massaesylian Numidians and a far more powerful chief than Massinissa's own family had ever been, was bound to Carthage by a similar treaty - one the Carthaginians knew he would break the moment it suited him.

Two generals, one African court

Scipio and his Carthaginian counterpart Hasdrubal, unknown to each other, had both abandoned their armies in Spain and crossed to Africa on the same errand: to win Syphax's friendship in person. They met at his court without open hostility, each pursuing his own object. Scipio's charm won Syphax's promise of alliance easily enough - until Hasdrubal's own daughter, Sophonisba, arrived. Her beauty made a deeper impression on Syphax than any Roman envoy had, and on the promise of marrying her he threw over his new friendship with Rome and renewed his old one with Carthage.

Driven out for a woman he never touched

Syphax's change of heart cost Massinissa everything. His new father-in-law drove him out of his own hereditary kingdom outright, and when Massinissa finally reached Scipio's camp near the Fair Promontory, it was not as an ally bringing useful strength but as an outlaw at the head of a handful of horsemen - aid that might, Scipio feared, cost the Romans more than it was worth. It was a bitter disappointment after the alliance he had been counting on, and it seemed to augur badly for the whole African campaign about to begin.

A bride for a single day

formationDrafted from Smith, Carthage and the Carthaginians (1878)

Fortune turned. After Scipio burned the Carthaginian and Numidian camps in a single night attack, and won a further victory at the Great Plains, the task of hunting down Syphax fell to the man Syphax had exiled. Massinissa's pursuit was as fast as it was thorough: the Massaesylians were broken, and Syphax himself, along with his beautiful wife Sophonisba and his capital at Cirta - a city built in the most romantic and impregnable of situations - fell into the conqueror's hands.

Smith, Carthage and the Carthaginians (1878) · Rachid Hamatou · CC BY-SA 4.0

An old love, briefly answered

Massinissa's own heart, so the story went, had been touched by Sophonisba's charms years before fortune threw her to his rival instead. Now his turn had come. He married her at Cirta without delay

• and when Scipio, alarmed at the political complications a Carthaginian bride might create, ordered him to give her up, Massinissa sent her a cup of poison instead, the only wedding gift, he said, a bridegroom in his position could still offer. Sophonisba drank it without hesitation, remarking only that her death would have suited her better had it come less immediately after her wedding.

Cleveland Museum of Art · Smith, Carthage and the Carthaginians (1878) · Pierre-Narcisse Guérin · CC0

A title no foreign king had held before

Massinissa's Roman patrons rebuked him gently for atoning for one rash act with another, then consoled him with what Rome had never before granted anyone who was not a Roman citizen: the royal title, and Roman robes bestowed on him in person by Scipio. Syphax's whole former kingdom was his by that same reward, joined now to the hereditary Massylian throne he had been driven from years earlier - two rival Numidian peoples united, for the first time, under a single king whose power rested on a Roman alliance he had gambled everything to secure.

Fifty years as a thorn

peakDrafted from Smith, Carthage and the Carthaginians (1878)

The peace that ended the war with Hannibal had barely been signed before Massinissa began justifying the position Rome had handed him. He encroached first on the Emporia, the richest Phoenician territory in Africa, land Carthage had held for three centuries; when the Carthaginians appealed to Rome under the terms of their own treaty, Scipio himself came to judge the dispute and decided nothing at all, leaving Massinissa in possession of his plunder. Fresh encroachments followed along the Bagradas river on the other side of Carthaginian territory, each provoking a new Roman commission, and each commission ending exactly the way the last one had.

Bibliothèque nationale de France · Smith, Carthage and the Carthaginians (1878) · Bibliothèque nationale de France · Public domain

A worm that finally turned

Decades of this wore even Carthaginian patience down. When the Carthaginians at last took up arms to defend what remained of their own land, they were decisively beaten, and their own failure to ask Rome's leave before defending themselves handed the Senate the exact pretext it had been waiting for. Massinissa lived to see the outcome he had spent fifty years provoking: the beginning of a third war between Rome and Carthage, one Rome had no intention this time of leaving a treaty behind to end.

Outlived by the war he started

Massinissa did not live to see how it finished. He died in 149 BC, the same year old Cato the Censor also died, after the destruction of Carthage had been resolved on but before the city itself had fallen - spared, in the one mercy left to him, the sight of the outcome he had worked his whole reign to bring about. He left his kingdom intact and unmatched in the region to his son Micipsa, its borders swollen by half a century of raids Rome had never once ruled against.

Smith, Carthage and the Carthaginians (1878) · Dan Sloan · CC BY-SA 2.0

Raised as a son, not made an heir

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

Micipsa succeeded his father Massinissa without contest - his two brothers had already died of disease - and raised his own two sons, Adherbal and Hiempsal, alongside a nephew he had taken into the palace on equal terms: Jugurtha, the illegitimate son of Micipsa's own dead brother Mastanabal, born too far outside the succession for Massinissa to have troubled with him. Jugurtha grew into a man powerful in frame and remarkable in ability, excelling at riding, marksmanship and the hunt while staying, unlike most young men of his rank, notably modest about his own achievements. Micipsa was delighted at first, certain his nephew's merit would add lustre to the throne.

Pollard), The Catiline and Jugurtha of Sallust, Translated into English (1882) · Monaam Ben Fredj · CC BY-SA 4.0

A general's letter changes everything

As Jugurtha's reputation grew and his own sons remained young, Micipsa's delight curdled into fear - not of any act Jugurtha had committed, but of what a man so admired by the Numidians might do once ambition caught up with opportunity. Unable to move against him without risking revolt, Micipsa sent him instead to a war he might not survive: command of a Numidian contingent serving Rome at Numantia in Spain. Jugurtha returned a hero. The Roman general Scipio Aemilianus, dismissing the allied troops, took him aside privately to warn him against buying Roman friendship rather than earning it - then sent him home with a letter praising his merits so highly that Micipsa, his plan for a quiet death in battle undone, adopted Jugurtha outright and named him joint heir with his own two sons.

A seat no one wanted to yield

Micipsa died worn out by age a few years later, having first summoned Jugurtha and his sons to his deathbed and adjured them, at length, to hold together as brothers rather than let ambition break what he had built. Jugurtha's private thoughts were already elsewhere. At the princes' first meeting after the funeral, Hiempsal - proud, headstrong, and openly contemptuous of Jugurtha's illegitimate birth - took the seat that would have forced Jugurtha into the middle, the place of honor among Numidians, and yielded it only with visible reluctance when Adherbal appealed to his own seniority. A later remark of Hiempsal's, needling Jugurtha's own recent claim to authority, sank deeper than anyone realized at the time.

A key copied, a hiding place found

Jugurtha's schemes against Hiempsal moved slowly at first, but his resolve never wavered. When the princes divided to oversee the partition of Micipsa's treasury, Hiempsal lodged in the town of Thermida, in a house belonging to one of Jugurtha's own longtime attendants. Jugurtha bribed the man to copy the house keys and pass them along, then struck at night with a body of soldiers who cut down Hiempsal's household as they slept, tore the building apart room by room, and finally found the young prince hiding in a slave woman's hut. His severed head was sent to Jugurtha as proof the deed was done.

A kingdom divided by bribery

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

News of Hiempsal's murder split Numidia in two: the larger faction followed Adherbal, the more warlike joined Jugurtha, who armed what forces he could and set about winning the kingdom's cities by force or consent as each case required. Adherbal, trusting his numbers, met him in open battle and lost, fleeing first into Roman territory and then to Rome itself to lay his brother's murder before the Senate in person.

A speech the money nearly buried

"Senators," Adherbal told them, "my father Micipsa charged me on his deathbed to account only the administration of the kingdom as my own, the real authority as belonging to you" - and asked why the grandson of Massinissa, a king only yesterday, should have to beg for what Rome had granted his family two generations before. Jugurtha answered the charge with silver. His envoys reached Rome first, loaded the king's old friends with gifts, and bought enough new ones among the Senate to turn a body inclined against him into one debating how loudly to defend him. A decree ordered the kingdom split between the two rivals by a commission of ten, headed by Lucius Opimius - a man Jugurtha had counted among his enemies, until gifts and promises taught him to prefer his own advantage to his reputation. The commissioners gave Jugurtha the richer, more populous half of Numidia and left Adherbal the coastline: harbors and public buildings that looked valuable without being it.

A siege the commission could not lift

Possession of half a kingdom only sharpened Jugurtha's appetite for the rest. Within a short time he was raiding Adherbal's own territory outright, certain now that, as friends in the Roman camp at Numantia had once told him, everything at Rome could be bought. He besieged Adherbal at Cirta itself, and when a fresh Roman commission arrived to order the siege lifted, met with them just long enough to avoid open defiance of the Senate before resuming the attack the moment they left.

A massacre that finally forced Rome's hand

Inside Cirta, the Italian traders who had helped defend the walls persuaded Adherbal that Rome's own greatness would protect him even in surrender, and to give himself and the city up on that single condition. Jugurtha's first act on taking the city was to have Adherbal tortured to death; his second was an indiscriminate massacre of every adult Numidian and every trader his soldiers could catch. It was the deaths of Roman citizens, more than the murder of a king Rome had already failed twice to protect, that finally moved a bribed Senate to declare the war it had spent years finding reasons to avoid.

A city for sale

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

Rome's declaration of war changed less than Jugurtha had feared. The consul Bestia, sent to prosecute it, took the king's bribes almost as readily as the Senate had, and the officers he left in Numidia followed his example without shame - some returning captured elephants for a price, others selling back deserters, still others simply plundering friendly territory. The corruption reached so far that a tribune named Gaius Memmius, no friend to the nobility that had profited from it, forced the Senate to summon Jugurtha to Rome under a public guarantee of safety, hoping his own testimony would expose the senators who had taken his money.

A king silenced by his own bribe

Jugurtha came to Rome looking anything but royal, and immediately bought a tribune of his own, Gaius Baebius, to shield him from the crowd's fury. When Memmius brought him before a public assembly and ordered him to name his accomplices, the mob shouted for him to be put in chains - and Baebius simply commanded the king to stay silent, facing down the crowd's rage with nothing but the shamelessness the bribe had bought him. It worked. The assembly broke up mocked and humiliated, and Jugurtha's confidence grew with every hour he remained unpunished.

A murder committed in the Senate's own city

A Numidian named Massiva, grandson of Massinissa through a different line, was in Rome at the time, and a consul eager to conduct the war persuaded him to petition the Senate for Numidia's throne on the strength of his own royal blood - reasoning that Jugurtha, already loaded with guilt and public hatred, could never withstand a rival claim. Jugurtha answered the threat the only way he knew: he ordered his most trusted attendant, Bomilcar, to have Massiva killed, secretly if possible. The assassin was caught in the act. Bomilcar was put on trial only through the personal insistence of the consul, since strict law offered no standing against a man traveling under Rome's own safe-conduct - and Jugurtha, seeing the case turn against him at last, smuggled Bomilcar out of the city before a verdict could fall, and left Italy himself soon after under Senate order.

The line he could not resist

Passing out through the city gates, Jugurtha is said to have looked back at Rome in silence more than once before speaking the words that outlived every treaty he ever bought: "A city for sale, soon to fall if once it find a buyer." The war he had spent so much silver avoiding resumed in earnest behind him.

Betrayed by the one ally left

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

Years of war wore down every advantage Jugurtha had once bought himself. Gaius Marius, elected consul and given command in Numidia, pressed the fighting harder than his predecessors had, and Jugurtha's last real hope narrowed to his own father-in-law, Bocchus, king of the Mauritanians next door - a man who, until this war, had scarcely known the Roman people by more than their name. Bocchus wavered between the two sides for months, at one point even sending a column to meet Marius's own quaestor Sulla with a show of horsemen that briefly convinced the Romans they were riding into an ambush, before insisting, with tears, that he had meant no treachery at all.

A plot Jugurtha suggested himself

Weary of a war that had already dragged past what any treaty could easily settle, Jugurtha proposed to Bocchus, through his own envoy, a plan to end it at a stroke: arrange a peace conference between all parties, then seize Sulla and hand him over as a hostage valuable enough to force Rome's hand. Bocchus deliberated for days, promised to carry it out, and set a time and place for the conference - treating Sulla's own envoy and Jugurtha's with equal courtesy and identical promises, so that both men left him certain of victory.

A king who changed his mind once, in the dark

On the night before the meeting, Bocchus is said to have summoned his friends, then dismissed them again, pacing alone for hours with his face betraying every turn of a decision he would not speak aloud. Before dawn he sent for Sulla instead, and turned Jugurtha's own scheme back against its author. When day came, Jugurtha approached the agreed hillock with most of his intimates, unarmed as the conference required. The signal was given, and his own ambush plan fell on him from every side: his companions were cut down where they stood, and Jugurtha himself was delivered in chains to Sulla, who marched him to Marius.

A death Sallust never bothered to describe

Sallust's own account ends here, with Jugurtha in bonds and the war declared over - he never troubled to record what became of either the king or his kingdom afterward. Other sources fill the gap: a few days after Marius's triumph in Rome, Jugurtha was thrown into the Tullianum, Rome's underground prison, and left there to be strangled or to die of cold and hunger. His kingdom passed to his half-brother Gauda, its western territory between Caesarea and the river Muluccha cut away and handed to Bocchus as the price of his own betrayal.

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

The kingdom Caesar ended

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

What happened to Numidia's own throne in the two generations after Jugurtha's death is not well documented: it passed first to his half-brother Gauda, and the line resurfaces clearly only with Juba I, found already reigning deep in Rome's own civil war between Caesar and Pompey. Juba had no love for Caesar, and after Pompey's defeat at Pharsalus in 48 BC his kingdom became a refuge for the losing side: Cato and Scipio arrived with what survivors they could gather, joining an army already commanded by Labienus, Petreius and Afranius, the provincial governor Attius Varus among them. Juba's own Mauretanian neighbors, Bocchus and Bogud, backed Caesar instead - the same split loyalty, on opposite sides, that had decided the war against Jugurtha two generations before.

Way), Caesar: Alexandrian, African and Spanish Wars (1955) · Derby Museums Trust · CC BY-SA 4.0

A town that shut its own gates

The war turned at Thapsus on 6 April 46 BC, where Caesar broke the combined Pompeian and Numidian forces outright. Juba's own defeat proved total and immediate: when he approached the town of Zama, the capital his ancestors had built their power around, hoping to gather what men and treasure he still could, the townsfolk refused to answer him at all and left him to retreat to a country estate with nothing but a handful of horsemen and his companion Petreius. Zama's own envoys, rather than wait for the king's return, sent word to Caesar at Utica asking for protection instead.

A duel meant to look like courage

Six days after Thapsus, Cato took his own life at Utica rather than accept Caesar's clemency. Juba, outlawed by every town in his own kingdom and with no path left to safety, chose to die by his own hand as well - but not alone. After dining together, he and Petreius fought each other with swords, so that both men's deaths might look like a soldier's rather than a fugitive's. Juba, the stronger of the two, killed Petreius easily; when he then tried to turn the blade on himself and found he could not finish the stroke, he asked a slave to do it for him, and the slave obliged.

A kingdom sold at auction

Caesar wasted no time settling what remained. At Zama he had the royal property auctioned off, confiscated the estates of every Roman citizen who had borne arms against the republic under Juba's banner, rewarded the town for having shut its own gates against its king, and organized the whole kingdom into a new Roman province, Africa Nova. He left it in the charge of a proconsul with full military authority: Gaius Sallustius, the same man who would go on to write the history of Jugurtha's own war against Rome a half-century earlier, now governing the very throne that war had first won for his ancestors.