Circus Maximus

• 1. Introduction

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  The Circus Maximus once held more than 150,000 people in a single valley between Rome's Aventine and Palatine hills. At 621 meters long and 118 meters wide, it was the largest stadium the ancient world had ever seen, and it stood at the center of Roman public life for nearly a thousand years. On ordinary days, its long straight stretch of track served as practice ground for charioteers. On festival days, it roared with the spectacle of twelve four-horse teams launched simultaneously through spring-loaded gates. And in the gaps between everything, it drew fortune tellers, prostitutes, and jugglers to the shops beneath its stands. What kind of place was this, exactly? What gods did it serve, what disasters did it survive, and how did a chariot-racing circuit become the model for public entertainment across an entire empire? Those are the threads this documentary will follow, beginning with the raw valley before a single stone had been laid.

• 2. Festivals and Games

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  Ludi, the Roman word for public games, were not mere entertainment. They were acts of religion, sponsored by leading citizens or the Roman state on behalf of the gods and the people together. In Roman tradition, the earliest triumphal games at the Circus were vowed by Tarquin the Proud to Jupiter for a military victory over Pometia, placing the site's origins in the late Regal era of Rome. By the late Republic, ludi occupied 57 days of the calendar year. Eventually that number grew to 135 days annually.

  The range of what happened at the Circus was extraordinary. A venatio held there in 169 BC deployed 63 leopards, 40 bears, and elephants, with spectators presumably protected by a substantial barrier. Plays and recitals were staged on temporary platforms. Public executions took place during some events. In 167 BC, flute players, scenic artists, and dancers performed on a temporary stage erected between the two central seating banks.

  The games began with a parade called the pompa circensis, modeled on the triumphal procession. It announced the purpose of the games and introduced those who would compete. In the early Imperial era, the poet Ovid described the opening of the Cerealia festival in mid to late April with a horse race at the Circus, followed by the nighttime release of foxes into the stadium, their tails set ablaze with lighted torches. That strange ritual pointed toward how deeply the Circus was woven into Rome's religious calendar. As for what happened when the gates were shut and no festival was scheduled, a writer of the mid-first century BC described the site as a dusty open space with shops and booths, a colorful, crowded, disreputable area frequented by low-class performers and fortune tellers.

• 3. The Built Environment

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  Permanent wooden starting stalls were built in 329 BC, gated, brightly painted, and staggered to equalize distances from each start place to the central barrier. In theory they could have held up to 25 four-horse chariots abreast, but when team racing became the norm, the stalls were widened and their number reduced. By the late Republican or early Imperial era, twelve stalls remained, each fronted by herms that served as stops for spring-loaded gates. The various racing teams were identified by colors, with the Blues and the Greens as the main factions. Races ran for seven laps. From at least 174 BC, laps were counted off using large sculpted eggs. In 33 BC, a set of large bronze dolphin-shaped counters was added above the central dividing barrier, positioned for maximum visibility from the stands.

  Julius Caesar expanded the Circus around 50 BC, extending seating tiers to run almost the entire circuit of the track. The inner third of the seating was reserved for senators along the central straight and for equites immediately behind them. The outer two thirds were timber-built for Roman plebs and non-citizens, with wooden-framed shops and service buildings beneath. Pliny the Elder estimated 250,000 seats, but most scholars find that unlikely; a figure of around 150,000 is more probable. Those wooden bleachers suffered damage in a fire of 31 BC during or just after construction.

  The most significant architectural leap came under Trajan, who rebuilt the Circus entirely in stone. Pliny records that Trajan's rebuilding added a further 5,000 seats. Under Caracalla, the starting gate area was extensively and systematically rebuilt. Some renovations were not planned at all: a collapse of a seating section during Diocletian's reign killed some 13,000 people, forcing repairs on a scale the builders had not anticipated.

• 4. Gods, Shrines, and Symbols

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  The southeastern turn of the track ran between two shrines that may have predated the Circus itself. One was dedicated to the valley's eponymous goddess Murcia, an obscure deity associated with Venus, a sacred spring, and the lesser peak of the Aventine. The other was an underground shrine to Consus, a minor god of grain-stores connected to the grain-goddess Ceres and to the underworld. According to Roman tradition, Romulus discovered the shrine to Consus shortly after founding Rome. He used the Consualia festival as a pretext to gather his Sabine neighbors, and while they were distracted by horse-races and drinking, his men abducted the Sabine women as brides. The myth of the Rape of the Sabine women was thus set at the Circus and the Consualia.

  The track's physical proportions may have been shaped by these sacred sites. Its width may have been determined by the distance between Murcia's and Consus' shrines at the southeastern end; its length by the distance between those shrines and the Ara Maxima of Hercules near the starting gates, a monument the Romans believed was older than Rome itself. Consus' altar was eventually incorporated into the fabric of the southeastern turning post itself.

  The symbols used to count laps were also laden with meaning. The sculpted eggs referenced Castor and Pollux, who were born from an egg and served as patrons of horses and horsemen. The dolphin-shaped counters linked the races to Neptune, god of earthquakes and horses; Romans believed dolphins to be the swiftest of all creatures. When Rome adopted the Phrygian Great Mother as an ancestral deity, a statue of her on lion-back was erected on the dividing barrier. The obelisk Augustus brought from Heliopolis in Egypt, Rome's first, was placed midway along the barrier. It had been sacred to Egyptian Sun-gods long before Rome existed, and its presence at the heart of the Circus was Augustus' permanent reminder of his victory over Egyptian allies in the civil wars. The Sun-god was patron of the Circus in the Imperial era, envisioned as the ultimate victorious charioteer driving his four-horse quadriga through the heavenly circuit from sunrise to sunset. His partner Luna drove a two-horse biga; together they represented the orderly movement of the cosmos, mirrored by the circuit of the track itself. Luna's temple burned in the Great Fire of 64 AD and was probably never rebuilt.

• 5. Fires, Floods, and Emperors

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  The valley that held the Circus Maximus was prone to flooding from the river Tiber and the stream that once divided it lengthwise. The site remained vulnerable until Claudius made improvements, probably including an extramural embankment against flooding through the starting gates. Fire was the greater danger. A fire in 36 AD appears to have started in a basket-maker's workshop beneath the Aventine stands; the emperor Tiberius compensated various small businesses for their losses. Then in 64 AD, during Nero's reign, fire broke out at the semi-circular end of the Circus, swept through the stands and shops, and destroyed much of the city. The Circus was rebuilt over several years to the same footprint and design.

  Each emperor left a mark on the structure. Augustus claimed credit only for an obelisk and a pulvinar, the elevated shrine from which he sometimes watched the games alongside the gods, occasionally joined by his family. Yet the Circus that Dionysius of Halicarnassus praised as one of the most beautiful and admirable structures in Rome, with entrances and ascents for spectators at every shop, was largely the one Augustus oversaw. Domitian built a multi-storey palace on the Palatine connected to the Circus and likely watched the games from high above, barely visible to those below. The risk of fire, combined with Domitian's fate at his assassins' hands, may have motivated Trajan to rebuild in permanent stone and to position the imperial pulvinar where the emperor could be seen alongside the community rather than above it.

  By the late third century, the emperor Probus staged a Circus show in which wild beasts were hunted through a veritable forest of trees on a specially constructed stage within the arena. With Christianity becoming the official religion of the empire, these spectacles gradually lost official support. The last known beast-hunt at the Circus Maximus took place in 523. The last known races there were held by Totila in 549.

• 6. Decay and Later Life

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  After the sixth century, the Circus fell out of use. The lower levels, always vulnerable to waterlogging, were buried under alluvial soil and accumulated debris until the original track lay six meters beneath the modern surface. By the eleventh century, the site had been replaced by dwellings rented out by the congregation of Saint-Guy. A drainage watercourse was dug in the twelfth century, and by the sixteenth century the area served as a market garden.

  During the Renaissance, the Circus was treated as a convenient quarry for quality building stone. In 1587, Pope Sixtus V removed two obelisks from the central barrier; one was re-sited at the Piazza del Popolo. In 1852, the Anglo-Italian Gas Society built a gas works on the site. It remained there until 1910, when it was relocated to the edge of Rome. Mid-nineteenth century excavations uncovered the lower parts of a seating tier and outer portico. Since then, further digs have exposed sections of seating, the curved turn, and portions of the central barrier, though the scale, depth, and waterlogging of the site have kept comprehensive excavation out of reach.

  The obelisk that Pope Sixtus V moved to the Piazza del Popolo still stands there today, the same stone that Augustus transported from Heliopolis and erected in the center of the ancient world's largest stadium.