Jugurtha was a grandson of Massinissa, raised at the Numidian court of his uncle Micipsa and trained in the Roman manner during a long campaign at Numantia in Iberia under Scipio Aemilianus. On Micipsa's death in 118 BCE the kingdom was divided between Jugurtha and his cousins Adherbal and Hiempsal; Jugurtha eliminated Hiempsal in 117 and Adherbal at Cirta in 112, provoking direct Roman intervention.
The war that followed — the Bellum Iugurthinum of 112 to 105 BCE — was the principal subject of Sallust's monograph of the same name and a defining episode in the late Roman Republic. Sallust's Jugurtha is a figure of striking ability whose corruption of the Roman senatorial class — "Romae omnia venalia esse," "at Rome everything is for sale" — is the moral occasion of the war. Roman commanders Metellus and then Marius pursued Jugurtha across the Numidian highlands and into the deserts beyond.
Jugurtha was finally betrayed in 105 BCE by his Mauretanian father-in-law Bocchus, surrendered to Sulla, and brought to Rome as a captive. He died in the Tullianum prison in 104 BCE; Marius's triumph took place the same year. The Numidian kingdom was reduced to a shrunken client state.
Jugurtha is a foundational figure of modern Amazigh political memory, treated alongside Massinissa and the Kahina as the leading representative of pre-Islamic indigenous resistance. His name persists in modern Algerian onomastics; the contemporary writer Mouloud Mammeri's essay on Jugurtha (1942) is among the formative texts of the Berber cultural movement.