Jugurtha
Jugurtha was the illegitimate grandson of Masinissa who murdered his two cousins to have Numidia to himself, bribed enough of the Roman senate to get away with it twice, said of Rome as he left it that it was a city for sale and would perish the day it found a buyer, and fought a seven-year guerrilla war against the republic that made the careers of Marius and Sulla and ended with him starved to death in the Tullianum after Marius's triumph; Sallust's monograph on the war is the reason the story is told. He was born about 160 BC, the natural son of Masinissa's son Mastanabal, and was raised by his uncle Micipsa, who sent him with the Numidian contingent to Scipio Aemilianus at Numantia in 134, where he learned the Roman army and the Roman nobility's price. Micipsa adopted him and on his death in 118 left the kingdom to Jugurtha and his two sons jointly. Jugurtha had Hiempsal murdered within the year and beat Adherbal in the field, and when Adherbal appealed to Rome the senate's commission divided the kingdom and went home paid. He besieged Adherbal in Cirta in 112, took it despite two more embassies, and killed him and the Italian merchants who had defended him, which was the thing Rome could not overlook. The consul sent against him made a peace for money, a tribune had Jugurtha brought to Rome under safe-conduct to testify against the men he had bribed, and another tribune's veto silenced him. He had a rival cousin murdered in the city while there and was sent away. The war resumed in 110 with a Roman army sent under the yoke, and was fought properly only from 109 under Metellus and from 107 under Marius, Metellus's lieutenant, who took the command by a popular vote and the war by taking the desert forts one by one. Jugurtha fought from the country with the Gaetulian tribes and with his father-in-law Bocchus of Mauretania, until Sulla, Marius's quaestor, persuaded Bocchus in 105 to hand him over at a meeting he came to unarmed. He walked in Marius's triumph on 1 January 104 in chains, was thrown into the prison under the Capitol, and died there in six days, saying, the story goes, that the bath was cold.
- Lived: 160 BCE – 104 BCE
- Nationality: Numidian
- Roles: king, monarch
