The Jugurthine War: The History of the Roman Republic’s Controversial Conflict with the Numidians

Numida was the complete opposite of the North African stereotype of a desolate place - it was a land of plenty, the home of rich agricultural land that provided a good share of the Roman Empire’s food. Numidia was also home to the Numidian people, who were known for their horsemanship skills, bellicosity, and capriciousness when it came to their friends and allies. From the 3rd century BCE until the mid-1st century BCE, the Numidians ruled their land as independent kingdoms that dealt with their more powerful neighbors on a relatively equal footing. As was the case with most non-Hellenic peoples, the Numidians and their culture simultaneously intrigued and repulsed the Romans, but as with all the other peoples, the Numidians also eventually became part of the Roman Empire.

Their most famous conflict with the Romans was the Jugurthine War, even though the Romans do not appear to have officially declared war on Numidia. The Romans entered Numidia determined to defeat Jugurtha and his Numidian army in a very conventional way, but having fought alongside and against the Numidians in the Punic Wars, the Romans should have known better, as Jugurtha knew that he had little chance of defeating the Romans in head-to-head combat. Numidia was rich, but it was not as rich as Rome in resources or people, and although the Numidian military was among the best in the Mediterranean at the time, it was not equipped to defeat the Romans.

Jugurtha looked west for aid to the Moorish king, Bocchus, as the Romans elected a new consul, Gaius Marius, to take control of the Roman army in 107 BCE. As legate in the Jugurthine conflict, Marius was in effect Metellus’s right hand man and the de facto military commander. The military success Marius had in Africa gave him the impetus to make a serious run for the consulship in 108 BCE, but Metellus did not want him to leave the campaign in North Africa and did not sanction his return to Rome. Undeterred, Marius began campaigning, partly galvanized, according to Sallust, by a fortune teller who told him that the gods so favored him that he would inevitably succeed in all his endeavors.

It was also while on campaign in Africa that Marius honed his “common touch,” a trait that was to stand him in good stead in his political career. He ate with his troops and even undertook manual labor with them. Marius’s reputation as a military commander and the growing unrest at the length of time Metellus was taking to bring Jugurtha to heel all combined to ensure that he was elected consul for 107 BCE.

While Marius took responsibility for the infantry, the cavalry was placed under the command of his quaestor, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, but Jugurtha continued to avoid battles where he could. Consequently, the Numidians resorted to hit and run, guerrilla warfare tactics, and Marius soon found that the previous Roman tactics of gradually cutting off the Numidians’ supplies and reinforcements was not so ineffective after all.

The most significant aspect of the Jugurthine War was the rivalry that it produced between Marius and Sulla. As was tradition, the commander, Marius, received the credit for the victory, but Sulla resented that his own part was downplayed, in particular his personal success in taking Jugurtha into custody. His supporters spread the story of Jugurtha’s capture around Rome and sought to undermine Marius’s image by making certain that everyone knew it had been Sulla, not the consul, who was responsible for putting an end to the war in Numidia. So began the rivalry that would end in civil war several years later and establish Sulla as a temporary dictator, a course of events that would inspire Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar a generation later.