You might not have heard of Juba II or Volubilis, but this over life-sized bronze portrait somehow sums up the man’s impossible life – a mix of early tragedy, power, and making things work in a tight spot.
Juba was born as the prince of Numidia and was only a toddler when his father committed suicide in the wake of his ally Pompey’s disastrous defeat at Thapsus. The little orphan was plucked away from his crumbling court and featured in Caesar’s splashy triumph in Rome (can’t have been a pleasant thing to endure…). He was then placed in the household of Octavia (the sister of the soon to be Augustus) with her three children and raised with all the aristocratic perks, later made citizen and bearing the name of his protector-captor: Gaius Julius Juba.
This portrait shows him as a young man in the Hellenistic style, likely dating to the time when Augustus installed him as the ruler of Mauretania (a province stretching over North Africa, from Morocco midway through Algeria). Juba went on to marry Kleopatra Selene (the daughter of Kleopatra of Egypt and Marc Antony, who had a similar upbringing to Juba’s in the household of Octavia) and create a culturally thriving court, while remaining a vassal state of Rome.
The young king is diademed and objectively beautiful, with a killer pout, wonderfully expressive brow and slight flare to the nostrils that seem to (if you are prone to romanticizing and reading too much into ‘psychological’ portraits, as I am) speak to his early years and the uneasy truce he found himself living within.
