Gaius Marius and his son flee from Rome to Africa after the triumph of Lucius Cornelius Sulla in 88 BCE.

Hiempsal II of Numidia receives them with apparent friendliness, his real intention being to detain them as prisoners.

Marius discovers this intention in time and makes good his escape with the assistance of the king's daughter.

Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus had taken the side of Marius in latter's civil war with Sulla.

Proscribed when Sulla obtained the supreme power in 82 BCE, Ahenobarbus had fled to Africa, where he was joined by many who were in the same condition as himself.

He has collected an army ith the assistance of the Numidian king, Hiarbas, but is defeated near Utica by Pompey, whom Sulla had sent against him, and is afterwards killed in the storming of his camp, in 81 BCE.

According to some accounts, he was executed after the battle on the orders of Pompey.

Hiempsal is driven from his throne in 81 BCE by the Numidians themselves, or by Hiarbas, ruler of part of the kingdom, supported by Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, the leader of the Marian party in Africa.

Soon afterwards.

Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus is sent to Africa by Sulla to reinstate Hiempsal, whose territory is subsequently increased by the addition of some land on the coast in accordance with a treaty concluded with Lucius Aurelius Cotta.

The lands that had been originally assigned to the Roman people by Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, but were subsequently acquired by Numidia as part of the treaty with Rome, are expressly exempted from sale when the tribune Publius Servilius Rullus introduced his agrarian law in 63 BCE.

This had roused the indignation of Cicero (De lege agraria, i.4, ii.22).

From Suetonius (Caesar, 71) it is evident that Hiempsal II, king of Numidia, was alive in 62 BCE.

Hiempsal had in 81 BCE been driven from his throne; Pompey had been sent to Africa by Sulla soon afterwards to reinstate Hiempsal as king in Numidia.

Because of this, Hiempsal and later his son Juba, who succeeds Hiempsal in 60 BCE, had become Pompey’s allies.

According to Sallust (Jugurtha, 17), Hiempsal was the author of an historical work in the Punic language.