The subtitle of my new book, Rex Juba, is ’15 Glimpses of an African King’ – but why glimpses at all? It’s a great question, but one that needs to pick away at the concept of writing biography. It’s almost impossible to write a complete biography of an ancient figure – even the most famous figures from the ancient world (Augustus, Cleopatra, Alexander) have gaps in their lives. The further you get from them, the larger those gaps become.

With Juba II – a king, and very famous in his own time as a scholar too – there are still huge gaps in the written record where we just don’t know what he’s up to. So I turned to the archaeological record – coins, statues etc – to fill in the gaps, but the book retains a somewhat episodic quality: it’s to that the 15 glimpses refer!