Caesarea in Mauretania

Although his father was once an ally of Pompey, Juba had lived in Rome under the tutelage of Julius Caesar, learning to read and write Greek and Latin.

Juba and Cleopatra did not just rename their new capital, but rebuilt the town as a typical Graeco-Roman city in fine Roman style on a large, lavish and expensive scale, complete with street grids, a theatre, an art collection and a lighthouse similar to the one at Alexandria.

The construction and sculptural projects in Caesarea and throughout the kingdom were built in a rich mixture of ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman architectural styles.

The seaport capital and its kingdom flourished during this period with most of the population being of Greek and Phoenician origin with a minority of Berbers[citation needed].

It remained a significant power center with a Greco-Roman civilization as a veneer, until 40 AD, when its last monarch Ptolemy of Mauretania was murdered on a visit to Rome.

In 44 AD after a four-year bloody revolt, the capital was captured and Roman Emperor Claudius divided the Mauretanian kingdom into two provinces.

As with many other cities throughout the empire, he and his successors further Romanized the area, building monuments, enlarging the bath houses, adding an amphitheatre, and improving the aqueducts.

The Roman and the semi-Romanised Vandal population held a stratified position over the growing numbers of Berbers it allowed to settle in return for cheap labor.

[5] This reduced the economic status of small freeholders and urban dwellers, especially what remained of the Vandal population, who comprised most of the local military forces.

By the 8th century, the city and surrounding area had neither a strong urban middle class of free citizens, nor a rural population of freehold farmers, nor a crack military aristocracy of Vandal warriors and their retinue.

The latter was one of over 120 cities in the Roman province of Numidia important enough to become suffragan bishoprics of the Metropolitan of Carthage, but would fade away, plausibly at the seventh century advent of Islam.

Its only historically documented incumbent, Dominicus, was among the Catholic bishops convoked to a Council of Carthage in 484 by king Huneric of the Vandal Kingdom and like most of them (unlike the Donatist schismatics) was exiled, in his case to Corsica.