King Juba in fragments

Rex Juba: 15 Glimpses of an African King, Andrew Kenrick, Torva, £25

Juba II ruled Mauretania, to the left of Numidia (roughly equivalent to modern Algeria). He was the son of the King of Numidia, Juba I, who sided with Pompey in the civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey. After Pompey’s defeat and death, Juba I died following a short conflict with Caesar in 47 BC and his son was paraded as a captive in Caesar’s triumph back in Rome a year later. Unusually, Juba II was adopted into Caesar’s family and after Caesar’s death was raised by his great-niece Octavia, sister of the future Emperor Augustus, receiving Roman citizenship in the process.

After service under Augustus in Spain, Juba received the client-kingship of Mauretania in 25 BC, rather than Numidia, which had been made a province of the Roman Empire. A client-kingdom was a region outside of the formal administration of the Roman state but with strong political, military and sometimes financial obligations from the ruler to the emperor. Juba married Cleopatra’s daughter, Selene, in 25 BC, after she and her twin Alexander Helios were brought to Rome as part of Augustus’ triple triumph in 29 BC, celebrating his victory over Antony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium. They ruled Mauretania together until Selene’s death in 5 BC, and, after Juba’s in 23 AD, their son Ptolemy ruled the region until his own death in 40 AD, when the kingdom was annexed by the Emperor Caligula as a province.

In Rex Juba, Andrew Kenrick makes a valiant attempt to write a biography of the extraordinary Juba, a king and a scholar to boot, but the effort is hampered by the fragmentary evidence of Juba’s life. The author attempts to capture, creatively, the culture of Juba’s family and the times he lived through. Such a book about Juba’s world exists in a more academic form thanks to Duane Roller; what makes Kenrick’s book novel is that it applies contemporary story-telling techniques, as befits a teacher of Creative Non-Fiction at the University of Cambridge, to Juba’s period, the late Republican and early Imperial history of North Africa.

Kenrick chooses 15 objects that tell a story about Juba’s world: coins, busts, statues, manuscripts of authors who used Juba’s scholarship, friezes, gemstones and inscriptions. This neat structure provides thought-provoking discussion of the period. Kenrick skilfully interweaves different narratives to coalesce around Juba, Selene or Ptolemy. The range of subjects, periods and figures discussed, however, makes the book feel disjointed.

Kenrick decodes the objects’ imagery or iconography, confidently concluding that Juba, Selene, or Ptolemy hold the answers to long-unresolved questions. For example, unidentified figures on a frieze of the Victory Monument of Nicopolis commemorating Augustus’ victory at Actium are argued to be Selene and her twin Alexander Helios. Such are the ‘glimpses’ promised by the book’s title. Claims like these are effective if they are occasional climaxes in bigger narratives, but if every chapter reveals that Juba and Selene are everywhere in Augustan material culture, the revelations lose their power.

One of Kenrick’s objects prompts the book’s title, a gold coin with REX IUBA on the obverse. This showed that he was a major player among client-kings and allies of the Roman empire, as Augustus did not allow just anyone to mint gold coins. Through the combination of Latin on the obverse and sheaves of corn, associated with the Egyptian goddess Isis, on the reverse, the coin commemorated his marriage to the Egyptian Selene. The combination of Roman and Egyptian iconography proudly stated that Juba and Selene were prominent darlings of a cosmopolitan Roman Empire, a couple who embraced many identities.

The book’s structure conjures the image of a Juba-museum curator giving a guided tour of its most stimulating pieces. This approach succeeds when reasonable conclusions about the objects add flesh to the bones of Juba’s life and legacy. Kenrick persuasively teases Juba’s scholarly influence out of Petrarch’s marginal comments on a manuscript of Pliny’s Natural History. The method is less successful when its conclusions are contestable and are more informative about wider context than anything unique to Juba: for example, his argument that a bust in the Cherchell Museum is definitely Selene rather than Cleopatra charts the differing cosmetics and hair-styles of contemporary Rome and Alexandria. While this is interesting in and of itself, Juba is out of focus.

The limited evidence means that informed guesswork is often needed. Detailed examination of the surrounding context underpins suggestions about Juba’s actions and feelings, but tantalising speculations about what Juba ‘might’ have said, done, or felt must always remain unconfirmed. What the sources do tell us is undeniably interesting. Juba was a key figure in Augustan and Tiberian foreign policy, particularly on expeditions to Armenia, Parthia and Judaea. His diverse scholarly output included works on botany, animals, North African and Near Eastern culture and history, etymology and theatre. It is a shame that we don’t have a complete text from his works. Strabo, Plutarch, Pliny and Athenaeus all clearly valued him as an authority. Kenrick says that the references to Juba’s writings total 104, but does not specify them beyond the occasional footnote.

Juba’s scholarship was not sidelined when duty called. His expedition to Parthia (2 AD), mentoring Augustus’ grandson Gaius, demonstrated his skills as a ruler and diplomat, but also his ever-piqued curiosity, as he gathered first-hand accounts of the territory of Arabia for a treatise he then dedicated to Gaius. Kenrick handles this episode well, but does not tell us his source for the treatise’s dedication (Pliny, Natural History 6.141). These references are not common knowledge outside of academics who work on Juba, so guidance on his sources is imperative.

Kenrick’s more scintillating claims about his ‘glimpses’ lack healthy scepticism. A denarius coin minted in 49 BC by Julius Caesar has an elephant crushing a snake on one side. Kenrick states that the coin represents Caesar’s ambitions for victory over Africa, specifically Juba I. He deduces the ‘true meaning of the coin’ by appealing to tenuous etymological puns on their names, Caesar (< caesai, the Punic for elephant) and Juba (< iubatus, used by Latin poets to describe snakes as ‘crested’). Kenrick cites ‘a legend commonly known in Rome’ about Caesar’s name, but does not provide a reference to this common legend. The evidence for this etymology comes from the Historia Augusta and Servius’ commentary on Aeneid 1.286, both works from the fourth century AD. The credibility of the Historia Augusta is widely questioned, and the lack of parallel for either of these etymologies in any other Latin text is troubling. It would also be perplexing for Caesar to pun on his name in Punic: the coins were meant to be widely used by non-Punic-speaking Roman soldiers.

Other interpretations are too bold. In his narrative of Ptolemy’s execution at the hands of Caligula, he endorses the idea that Ptolemy may have been involved in a conspiracy with a senator called Gaetulicus to overthrow the emperor. His involvement is far from proven and not mentioned in the sources, and yet Kenrick presents it as the most likely explanation. Caligula imprisoned Ptolemy after he accepted an invitation to a theatrical performance in Lugdunum, modern Lyon, and attended dressed in a splendid purple cloak. Suetonius suggests that the cloak, which may have been worn to advertise his regal and military prowess, unwittingly challenged Caligula’s status and prompted his execution; Cassius Dio suggests that Caligula wanted Ptolemy’s wealth.

Kenrick labels both interpretations ‘implausible and outlandish’, but this may not be wholly fair. Caligula had spent all the surplus accrued by Tiberius by the end of his reign’s first year, which Dio and Suetonius both report. Suetonius’ psychological reading may be refutable, but any whiff of an affront to Caligula’s authority could plausibly have incensed him enough to execute Ptolemy. Dio later says that Caligula told the senate about these deaths as if he had discovered a great plot, and that he was always pretending to be in danger; this does not mean that Caligula had actually discovered one.

Jane Draycott’s recent biography of Selene appears to have encountered the same problems that confront biographies of Juba: the lack of evidence and the need to be over-creative with source material. However, she at least remains focused on Selene’s life, whereas Kenrick ranges widely in depicting Juba’s. Like Kenrick, Draycott tells the story of the early Augustan principate to fill in the gaps of her subject’s life, as Edith Hall in her review of Draycott’s book rightfully appreciates. Despite the occasional slip and the limitations of the evidence, it is useful to have a general introduction to Juba and Selene; but the reader must remember to approach Kenrick’s broader claims with caution. His style of bold, digressive story-telling is not foreign to historiography: digressions are a key stylistic feature of Herodotus and Thucydides, and derive ultimately from Homeric narrative sleight-of-hand. Crucially, however, Herodotus and Thucydides had much more available evidence about their main themes, the Persian Wars and Peloponnesian War. Coherent digressions are therefore not a fixation of the work but occur sparingly and tastefully to convey the temporal and geographical scale of the conflicts they cover.

As there are already gaps and mysteries about Juba’s life, the fragmentation in structure and narrative style in Kenrick’s book ultimately sacrifices coherence too much to maintain the reader’s excitement, and a certain feeling of randomness is hard to shake off. These narrative tricks guiding us back to Juba / Selene / Ptolemy after being transported off-topic in medias res are well-written and readable but suffer from the law of diminishing returns the more they are deployed.