An empty cuirass?

What a fantastic subject for a film. Born a prince of Numidia in northern Africa, Juba saw his life capsized when he was barely more than a baby. His father, Juba I, was defeated by Julius Caesar and committed suicide. Little Juba was paraded through Rome in chains, then adopted by the merciful Caesar and brought up in his household. The biographer Plutarch summed up the tension in his circumstances when he called him “the most fortunate captive ever taken”.

Juba grew up to be a soldier, scholar and explorer. Having personally led an expedition into the Atlas mountains in search of the source of the Nile, he claimed to have found it. It sounds strange now, but there was then a widespread belief the Nile might originate somewhere in western Africa. Juba thought he found evidence in the form of a valley, with a lake where crocodiles lurked: a sure sign, Juba felt, that it was the start of the croc-infested river. Moreover, when it rained in those mountains, the Nile was said to rise.

By then the Emperor Augustus had appointed Juba king of Mauretania, a region combining parts of modern-day Morocco and Algeria. That meant Juba II had a practical motive for pushing a geographical link between Mauretania and Egypt. For his wife, Selene, was herself an Egyptian princess—the daughter of Cleopatra and Mark Antony, no less.

What more could a reader want? Well, a bit more, is the terrible truth. The big problem facing the author of this tantalising biography is that, once these facts have been rattled off, there’s little else we know about Juba for certain. Andrew Kenrick hints at this in his subtitle, which implies that, rather than a detailed character study, his debut can only be a series of glimpses. Smartly, he structures the book by lassoing each chapter to a particular artwork relevant to this theme: a concrete piece of evidence to be scrutinised.

So the Prologue is heralded by a wonderful bronze of Juba himself, which presents a sulky, arrogant demeanour. And Chapter 10 kicks off with another, even more lifelike, of Juba’s insolent-looking son Ptolemy. But the difficulty remains that so many of the key questions about the man’s life go unanswered. We’re not sure if his marriage to Selene was forced on him by Augustus or a love match. Nor of how he felt when Selene died in 5BC. Nor of what she died of, for that matter, although the author says she probably died in childbirth since that was the most common cause of death for young women. Most frustrating, none of Juba’s literary works has survived.

We know he wrote them because other authors tell us. But we don’t have one paragraph from his books on painting or theatre or archaeology. In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder includes a description of the Nile that could be a direct quote. If so, Juba’s prose was somewhat poetical: as when he says the river emerges from underground “when it senses mankind”.

Nevertheless, through no fault of Kenrick, there are times when his hero feels like an empty cuirass moving through this extraordinary time. To make up for it, we get some wonderful stories about the surrounding characters. For instance, we learn of Pliny the Elder’s compulsive work ethic. According to his nephew, Pliny the Younger, he only stopped to take a bath, and even then would dictate notes to his secretary while being rubbed dry. When in Rome, the elder Pliny never walked, but was carried everywhere in a chair, so he could keep working.

We read of the death of Juba II’s father. After defeat in battle, Juba I knew the game was up. So he and his comrade Petreius ate a hearty dinner before engaging in single combat. The hope was they might each inflict a mortal wound on the other. Unfortunately, the burly Juba slew Petreius, but himself emerged unscathed. So he had to order a slave to run him through.

We read of the death of Juba II’s son, too. Summoned to Lyons by the psychotic Emperor Caligula, Ptolemy turned up in an impressive purple cloak that he thought appropriate for the occasion. Alas, the sight of the cloak enraged Caligula, either because he envied Ptolemy’s wealth, or else because he thought the garment, sometimes worn by triumphant generals, was a gibe aimed at Caligula’s own lack of military distinction. He ordered Ptolemy’s execution and thus Juba’s line was wiped out.

By comparison with these, the death of Juba himself pales—as arguably does his life, for all the efforts of this scrupulous, smoothly written book. “In AD 23,” Kenrick tells us, “Juba II died at the age of seventy-two. It must have been a peaceful death, probably of old age, as the sources say nothing else about it.”