Jugurtha's Horsemen

Jugurtha was a grandson of Masinissa, the Numidian king who had helped Rome defeat Hannibal. He served with distinction under Scipio Aemilianus at Numantia, then seized the throne of Numidia by doing away with both of his rivals. When his men killed Italian traders at Cirta in 112 BC, Rome declared war. Sallust, who wrote the history of the conflict, says Jugurtha bribed Roman envoys and commanders so freely that he called Rome a city for sale, doomed to fall as soon as it found a buyer.

His strength in the field was his cavalry. Numidian horsemen rode without saddles, and ancient writers say they guided their small, quick horses without bits. They fought with javelins: attack, wheel away, return. At the Muthul River in 109 BC, as Sallust tells it, they harried the army of the consul Quintus Caecilius Metellus across a scrub-covered plain for most of a day. The war dragged on until Gaius Marius took command, and in 105 BC Jugurtha's father-in-law, King Bocchus of Mauretania, betrayed him to Marius' quaestor, Lucius Cornelius Sulla. He was led in Marius' triumph and died in prison in Rome.