The house of Augustus’s sister, Octavia, and that of her neighbour (and sister-in-law), Empress Livia, were effectively orphanages for the royal waifs and strays of the ancient Mediterranean world. Among their charges were Octavia’s children by her first husband, her two daughters by her husband Mark Antony, Antony’s son by his first marriage, no fewer than eight sons of King Herod the Great of Judaea, as well as a North African prince and princess whose blue-blood pedigree would make them an imposing power couple in the early empire.

This pair – Juba, destined to become king of Mauretania, and his future wife, Cleopatra Selene – are the subject of Andrew Kenrick’s Rex Juba, a virtuoso recovery of two of antiquity’s most intriguing and little-known characters. Quarrying his material from busts, headless statues, coins and gemstones – a palette of sources selected to compensate for the paucity of more conventional historical references – the author treats readers to a study of identity and power, leavened with sharp insights into the messiness and expediency that underlay the marble facade of Augustus’s power.

It isn’t easy to construct the biographies of ancient figures, especially when the sources refuse to yield a conventional linear narrative. Rex Juba is therefore of necessity episodic – the clue is in the subtitle, ‘15 Glimpses of an African King’. But these sightings, and the artefacts around which each