Pliny wrote about an incident at the funeral of Felix, a Red charioteer, in 77 BC at which a supporter burned to death on the funeral pyre, though whether he jumped on purpose due to grief or fell accidentally as the result of intoxication is unclear. Certainly they were in already in existence during the Republic.
DID PEOPLE BID ON CHARIOT RACES DRIVERS
Each consortium was known by the colours under which it raced and their chariots, drivers and supporters would all proudly wear them on race day.Īccording to Tertullian the Reds and Whites were the oldest factions. The resources required to do this were too much for any one individual hence the need to form consortia. A typical day at the circus might involve as many as 750 horses, all of which had to be of good quality and in the peak of physical condition. Most were members of the equite or knight class of the Roman aristocracy. They had started out innocuously enough as groups of private individuals who hired out the horses and equipment necessary for chariot racing at the Circus Maximus. This could sometimes be used for the good of the empire as a whole, supporters could be mobilised in times of disaster to man city walls or fight fires, but more often than not the factionalism inspired by these groups turned out to be extremely destructive with outbreaks of violence inside arenas and occasional outburst of serious civil unrest outside.
They could command fanatical loyalty from their followers. They appear to have been founded quite early on in Rome’s history and were still going strong in medieval Byzantium. Their longevity was astonishing, perhaps nearly 2000 years.
DID PEOPLE BID ON CHARIOT RACES PROFESSIONAL
These organisations started as consortia of wealthy men supplying horses for the races but eventually morphed into something between modern professional sports clubs and political parties. It is impossible to understand Roman chariot racing without understating the role of the factions. Other theories have included the idea that the races were agrarian festivals linked to the goddess Ceres, the circular course representing the cyclical nature of the agricultural year. The Etruscans may have raced chariots in honour of Consus, their god of the underworld, and the original idea of racing in a circuit could be that they were circling the mouth of Hell. In much the same way that Etruscan gladiatorial combat was originally associated with religion in the form of the cult of Saturn, so too was their chariot racing. The Romans had inherited the idea of chariot racing in a circus from the Etruscans. However, by the time Rome had become great the importance of these races had declined and the focus of chariot racing had switched to the circus. Most Romans believed that these dated back to the time of Romulus himself and the foundation of Rome. The earliest chariot races in Rome were those held for two festivals, the Consualia and the Equirria, on the Campus Martius. Model of the Circus Maximus as it would have looked around 100 CE Religious and Cultural Origins On big race days we can imagine that many of the city’s streets and alleyways were deserted, their eerie quiet only occasionally disturbed by the distant roar of the crowd. It was an obsession for many, from the emperor right down to the poorest plebeian. They considered it one of their oldest traditions and something which was at the heart of their identity, occupying a similar place in the national psyche to football for modern Italians. This reflects the incredible popularity of the sport that went on there, for no sport was closer to the hearts of the Roman people than chariot racing. Nevertheless, it remains the case that the floor space of the arena at the Circus Maximus was approximately twelve times the size of that at the Colosseum. It is only fair to point out that this figure comes from Pliny but from a manuscript which many scholars consider to be corrupted with 150,000 often regarded as a more likely figure. In fact, the Colosseum wasn’t even the largest of these it was dwarfed by the Circus Maximus which perhaps held as many as 250,000 at its maximum capacity, roughly a quarter the population of the city. Largely intact, and standing in the centre of Rome its iconic image tends to focus our attention on the gruesome and gory events that took place there, sometimes to the exclusion of what was going on in the city’s other sporting venues. When we think of Roman sport today, chances are that the first image that springs to mind is the Colosseum.