During years of travelling through North Africa, Barnaby Rogerson has encountered a handful of ancient stories so compelling and complicated that he could not place them into neat, tidy narratives. Offering a different take on African history, Rogerson profiles Carthage's Queen Dido, who was a sacrificial refugee; King Juba II, a Roman prisoner of war and collaborator; Septimius Severus, the African emperor of Rome; Augustine, an intellectual careerist who became a bishop and a saint; Hannibal, one of the greatest generals the world has ever known; and Masinissa, the man who eventually helped to defeat him. Together these six lives, clouded with as much myth as fact, represent classical North Africa, and as Rogerson suggests, bind the culture of this region with the wider world.