Oxyntas was a son of King Jughurta of Numidia

Numidia

Numidia was an ancient Berber kingdom in part of present-day Eastern Algeria and Western Tunisia in North Africa. It is known today as the Chawi-land, the land of the Chawi people , the direct descendants of the historical Numidians or the Massyles The kingdom began as a sovereign state and later...

, in the Maghreb of North Africa.

He walked with his brother Iampsas in Roman Gaius Marius

Gaius Marius

Gaius Marius was a Roman general and statesman. He was elected consul an unprecedented seven times during his career. He was also noted for his dramatic reforms of Roman armies, authorizing recruitment of landless citizens, eliminating the manipular military formations, and reorganizing the...

' triumphal parade

Roman triumph

The Roman triumph was a civil ceremony and religious rite of ancient Rome, held to publicly celebrate and sanctify the military achievement of an army commander who had won great military successes, or originally and traditionally, one who had successfully completed a foreign war. In Republican...

 of 104 BCE. His father died soon afterward, but Oxyntas was sent to the town of Venusia, in the Southern Italian region of Basilicata

Basilicata

Basilicata , also known as Lucania, is a region in the south of Italy, bordering on Campania to the west, Apulia to the north and east, and Calabria to the south, having one short southwestern coastline on the Tyrrhenian Sea between Campania in the northwest and Calabria in the southwest, and a...

, where he remained until 89 BCE.

It is not known what happened to Oxyntas after the Marsic War (91–88 BCE) in Italy.