Who Are You? Africa and Africans 531to mark out difference and inferiority. Instead of denying the ethnic slurs, Apuleius
brazenly embraced them. Madauroswason the boundary between two worlds. It was
therefore actually a simple fact that he, Apuleius,washalf-Numidian and half-Gaetulian,
and proud of it. No different than the Persian king Cyrus who was half-Median and
half-Persian. No shame there. Whatever he was, he never thought of presenting himself
as “an African.” Much later, however, Augustine did, as when he casually remarked of
the rhetor from Madauros: “Apuleius, who for we Africans is a very well known African”
(Aug.Ep. 138.19; cf. Hunink 2003). Things had changed.
Just how much reality was there in these matters of honor and shame in which Apuleius’
identity was implicated? A lot. The town of Madauros, whatever its origins, had received
a settlement of veteran soldiers in the Flavian age when the city had been honored with
the rank of colony. As a matter of fact, Madauroswasright on the ecological boundary
between two worlds, which is probably why the soldiers were placed there. In defining
and embracing its liminality, however, Apuleius raised two more ethnic terms: Numidian
and Gaetulian. What did he understand by them? Both terms were widely used as gen-
eral and sweeping labels for large regions and widely dispersed populations. The words
were used to refer to peoples and lands in some of the earliest surviving Latin histor-
ical sources. There was a Numidia and there were Numidians. And there was also a
Gaetulia and Gaetulians. Who or what were they? The terms seem to have been used
as broad ecological identifiers. Numidians lived in the north, Gaetulians in the south.
Generally speaking, Numidians were seen to be settled people, farmers; Gaetulians were
seen as peoples who were less fixed, more mobile, pastoralists of various kinds (Vaglieri
1905). “Gaetulia” therefore became a general covering term that designated southern
arid lands where such itinerant peoples tended to live (Vycichl 1955; Desanges 1964).
Not unnaturally, these peoples were lumbered with the negative characteristics that were
generally believed (i.e., by literate settled peoples) to be shared by all less-fixed pastorists
(Shaw 1982–83).
Yet, not completely. Marius recruited heavily among “ethnic” peoples in Africa, and we
encounter cohorts of Gaetulians in the Roman army; they are well documented (Lassère
1994). The use of the ethnic name only raises further questions of identity and repre-
sentation. Take the case of a bilingual Latin–Libyan tombstone from Thullium, a town
directly north of Madauros. The Latin text tells us that deceased named in in the epitaph,
Caius Julius Gaetulus, was a much-decorated veteran of the Roman army who returned
to his hometown and received the high-ranking priesthood offlamen perpetuus(CIL
8.5209=ILAlg. 1.137; RIL 146). Gaetulus’ military decorations reveal him not only to
have been a Roman citizen, but also (probably) a centurion in the army. In the Libyan
text on the stone, however, this same man is called “KTI son of MSWLT, an ‘imperial
servant’ (‘soldier of the emperor’) from the people of the Misiciri, from the subunit of
the S’RMMI” (Rebuffat 2005: 203). So who was this Gaetulus? A high-ranking Roman
citizen, a centurion in the Roman army named Gaius Iulius Gaetulus—or was he Keti,
son of Masawalat, from the tribe of the Misicri? Probably both. This bifurcated identity
had been maintained for a number of generations, the original citizenship of Gaetulus’
remote male ancestor dating to the time of Julius Caesar. Hence, this Gaetulus, through
army service, was a Roman. As has been acutely remarked, he could hardly have been
more Roman (Rebuffat 2005: 208). And yet, he presented himself in his native lan-
guage as an African who belonged to an ethnic group, the Misiciri, indeed to a specific