Chariot racing

• 1. Introduction

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  Chariot racing drew crowds of a quarter million people into Rome's Circus Maximus at its peak, yet most of the men at the center of that spectacle were slaves. They drove at lethal speeds, wrapped their reins around their waists, and carried curved knives on their bodies in case they needed to cut themselves free from a crash. The crashes themselves had a name: naufragia, meaning shipwreck. The sport ran from at least the thirteenth century BC in Mycenaean Greece through to the sixth century AD in Rome and even longer in Byzantium. It shaped mythology, funded empires, sparked riots that killed thousands, and produced at least one man who earned more than most senators ever would. What made chariot racing so central to so many different civilizations for so long? And who were the people risking their lives to make it happen?

• 2. Gods, Funerals, and the First Races

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  Homer's Iliad contains the earliest literary reference to a chariot race, written around the eighth century BC. The race it describes was held as part of the funeral games for Patroclus, a warrior of the Trojan War. The competitors were no ordinary men: Diomedes of Argos, the poet Eumelus, the Achaean prince Antilochus, King Menelaus of Sparta, and the hero Meriones all took part. The course was a single lap around the stump of a tree, and Diomedes won a slave woman and a cauldron as his prize.

  Images on pottery confirm chariot racing was already practiced in thirteenth century BC Mycenaean Greece, so Homer was drawing on a tradition that stretched back centuries before his time. Mythology wound itself tightly around the sport. According to Pindar, the Olympic Games themselves were founded because King Oenomaus challenged any man who wished to marry his daughter Hippodamia to a chariot race. Oenomaus lost to Pelops, who then founded the Games in honor of his victory.

  The religious dimension was genuine and persistent. Greek chariot racing was embedded in the festivals of city-states across the Mediterranean. Prizes at these events were not trophies but practical valuables: 140 amphorae of olive oil went to the winner of the four-horse chariot race at the Panathenaic Games in Athens, corn was given at Eleusis, bronze shields at Argos, silver vessels at Marathon. The sport carried the honor of entire cities on the axles of its chariots.

• 3. Owners, Slaves, and the Xystis

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  In 416 BC, the Athenian general Alcibiades entered seven chariots in a race and came first, second, and fourth. He was plainly not driving all seven himself. This reveals one of the defining features of Greek chariot racing: the owner and the driver were almost always different people, and only the owner received public credit for a win.

  Ownership was expensive. Horses and chariots cost far more than most people could afford, and only the wealthiest aristocrats fielded teams. Philip II of Macedon, who had conquered most of the Greek states, entered horse and chariot teams in major pan-Hellenic events and celebrated his wins by having his coins stamped with images of his racing victories, treating them as divine confirmation of his right to rule.

  The Spartan Cynisca, daughter of Archidamus II, entered and won the Olympic chariot race twice as owner and trainer. Women were otherwise banned from Olympic competition and even from watching as spectators if they were married, supposedly on pain of death, though no consistent record of that penalty being enforced survives.

  The actual drivers were a different world entirely. Most were slaves or hired professionals. They wore a garment called a xystis: a sleeved robe falling to the ankles, fastened high at the waist with a plain belt, with two straps crossing at the upper back to keep it from billowing in the wind. Drivers stood throughout the race on a chariot whose body rested directly on its axle, meaning every bump on the track traveled straight through their legs. The most dangerous moments came at the turns, where chariots could overturn or be crushed by rivals wheeling around the same post at high speed. Driving into an opponent to cause a crash was technically illegal. Most crashes were not deliberate. They happened anyway.

• 4. The Circus and Its Architecture

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  Rome's Circus Maximus occupied a valley between the Palatine Hill and the Aventine Hill. Julius Caesar rebuilt it around 50 BC to roughly 650 meters long and 125 meters wide. Its seating capacity was extraordinary; one estimate puts the figure at 250,000 under Trajan, though the historian Humphrey considered even 150,000 a more defensible upper bound. Either way, nothing in the ancient world held more people in one place for a sporting event.

  The start was managed by a mechanism borrowed from the Greeks. In Greece, portable gates called hyspleges dropped forward on a cord to release the chariots. In Rome, starting cells called carceres held the chariots behind spring-loaded gates staggered to account for the median barrier, known first as the euripus and later as the spina. When the starting official, usually a high-status magistrate, dropped a white cloth, all the gates opened simultaneously. Races ran counter-clockwise, with starting positions drawn by lottery.

  Running down the center of the track, the spina was not simply a divider. It carried lap-counters in the shape of eggs and dolphins; the eggs symbolized the divine twins Castor and Pollux, said to have been born from an egg, while the dolphins represented Neptune, god of horses. Over time the spina accumulated temples, statues, obelisks, and water features, eventually becoming so cluttered that it blocked the sightlines of spectators in the lower, trackside seats.

  At each end of the spina stood a turning post called a meta, built from three large gilded columns. These were the most dangerous points on the course. The straights gave chariots room to reach high speeds; the metas took them away in an instant, demanding a sharp turn that could send a chariot sideways into the stone post, into rivals, or both.

• 5. Factions and Fortune

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  Roman chariot racing was organized through four factions identified by color: Red, White, Blue, and Green. These were not merely team colors but functioning social and business organizations, each employing large staffs to support their drivers, manage their horses, and raise money through private betting. Senior managers, known as domini factionum, were typically from the equestrian class. Investors of higher social rank usually channeled their money through agents to avoid the disgrace, known as infamia, that Roman law attached to anyone who profited directly from the races.

  Tertullian claimed the original factions were just two: White and Red, associated with winter and summer. By his time there were four, each assigned a divine patron: Mars for the Reds, the Zephyrus wind for the Whites, Mother Earth for the Greens, and the sky and sea for the Blues. Emperor Domitian briefly added a Purple faction and a Gold one; both vanished from the record almost immediately after his death.

  The best drivers earned extraordinary sums. First place in a race could bring up to 60,000 sesterces in prize money alone. Gaius Appuleius Diocles won 1,462 out of 4,257 races across his career and retired at 42. His declared lifetime winnings stood at 35,863,120 sesterces. Even if his personal share was only a tenth of that amount, the scholar Vamplew calculates his annual income would still have averaged 150,000 sesterces, far outstripping the earnings of senators. Juvenal noted that the charioteer Lacerta earned a hundred times more than a lawyer's fee.

  Scorpus won over 2,000 races, then died in a collision at a turning post at roughly 27 years old. The charioteer Florus left a tomb inscription describing him as infans, meaning not yet an adult. The profession paid extraordinarily. It also killed.

• 6. Curses, Witchcraft, and Celebrity Horses

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  Some supporters buried curse tablets near the track, calling on spirits and deities of the underworld to bring victory to their team or disaster to rivals. This was standard Roman practice across many contexts, though it was strictly illegal and punishable by death. One charioteer, described during the reign of Valentinian I between 364 and 375 AD, was beheaded after arranging for his young son to be trained in witchcraft specifically to improve his race results. Another was burned at the stake for the same offense.

  Justinian I's reformed legal code explicitly prohibited charioteers from placing curses on opponents and offered them co-operation with authorities as the preferred alternative to vigilante retaliation. This suggests that whatever the law said, the practice remained widespread enough to require formal prohibition centuries into the Roman era.

  The horses themselves attracted the same obsessive attention as the drivers. Romans favored native breeds from Hispania and north Africa. One of Diocles' horses, named Cotynus, raced alongside him in various team configurations 445 times. A left-side trace horse was the one most likely to determine the outcome of a turn, as it ran closest to the spina. Other named performers in Diocles' record of more than 100 wins in a year include Pompeianus, Lucidus, and Galata.

  At Olympia, a peculiar round structure within the entrance to the track was known as the Taraxippus, meaning Horse-disturber. It terrified horses for no apparent reason when they ran past it. Pausanias records that charioteers offered sacrifice to it before each race and prayed that it would be kind to them. Whatever the Taraxippus actually was, its location marked what drivers and spectators alike recognized as the most dangerous section of the course.

• 7. Byzantium and the Nika Riots

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  Constantine I, who ruled from 306 to 337 AD, refounded the ancient Greek city of Byzantium as Constantinople and rebuilt its chariot-racing circuit, the hippodrome, which had first been provided by Septimius Severus. Constantine preferred funding chariot racing over gladiatorial contests, which he considered a pagan relic. The Olympic Games were eventually ended by Emperor Theodosius I in 393. Gladiator contests eventually died out too. Chariot racing outlasted both.

  In Constantinople the hippodrome served a political function that Roman circuses also performed, but with higher stakes. The structure allowed crowds to address the emperor directly. In 498, the crowd pelted the emperor Anastasius with stones from their seats in protest over his policies. In 512, during a near-revolutionary riot at the same venue, Anastasius publicly offered to abdicate; the crowd, moved by the gesture, shifted from hostility to support.

  The Nika riots of 532 AD began against the backdrop of scheduled chariot races on the Ides of January. The Blues and Greens, normally rivals, united in opposition to what they saw as political corruption and mismanagement under Justinian I. They came close to overthrowing the emperor. The Byzantine military killed thousands in retribution, including many ordinary citizens caught up in the unrest. Procopius, writing about the aftermath, blamed the emperor and his officials for mismanaging both their troops and their governance.

  After the riots, the factions grew less antagonistic toward imperial authority as their ceremonial roles were expanded. The number of races per race day dropped sharply to eight by the tenth century. The iconoclast emperor Constantine V, ruling from 741 to 775, deployed Blue and Green supporters in campaigns against monasteries, using them to stage public humiliations of monks and nuns. The racing factions continued in reduced form until the imperial court relocated to Blachernae during the twelfth century. The last known race at the Circus Maximus had been held in 549 AD, staged by the Ostrogothic king Totila, though whether that event was a formal chariot race or a display of horsemanship remains unknown.