ABSTRACT
The infant son of Juba I was thus saved to grow up in Rome. Twenty years later he would be named king of Mauretania, a territory that he had never seen and over which he had at most a weak claim, if any at all. Why this happened – and why this was a reasonable decision for Augustus – is due to the history of the Roman relationship with the district of northwest Africa that was loosely called Mauretania.1 This was a vast, undefined area, over 1,000 miles in extent, stretching from the western limit of Roman territory to the Atlantic.2 The term “Mauretania” originally applied to the western half of this region, beyond the Muluccha River,3 but acquisitions by the Mauretanian kings, especially in the late second century BC,
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