A Day at the Circus Maximus: Rome’s Races and Rivalries

Marcus Valerius

You smell the Circus before you see it. Hot chickpeas, frying sausage, wine heating in clay pots, and underneath all of it, a hundred thousand people's worth of sweat that hasn't even arrived yet. It's still dark, friend. I've left my wife asleep and my brother in law cursing in his bed, because he's a Blue and I'm a Green, and in my house that is a serious matter. Stay close. The crowd is already moving.

Marcus Valerius

Now look up. Emperor Trajan rebuilt this place in stone and concrete and white marble after the fires, and as the sun comes over the Palatine the whole valley glows. Three tiers of seating, climbing between the Palatine and the Aventine. Pliny the Younger wrote that Trajan made it rival the beauty of temples, and I won't argue with a man who writes that well. How many does it hold? The scholars of later days guess anywhere from one hundred fifty thousand to two hundred fifty thousand. I only know that when it fills, it feels like half of Rome is sitting beside me.

Marcus Valerius

But we don't go up yet. We go under. Beneath the seats runs a ring of arches, and in those arches the real Rome wakes up. Here's Quintus, my sausage man. Quintus! Two, with the pepper. He's been feeding me before races since I had my first beard. He tells me his cousin swears the Greens will sweep the early heats, and he says it with such confidence that I know it's a guess, but I smile and pay him anyway. That's how this works.

Marcus Valerius

Walk a little deeper and the air changes. Damp stone, lamp smoke, women leaning in doorways in the shadows. The tavern keepers pour something hot and murky that I would not give to a dog. And over there, shouting numbers, the bookmakers, the numerarii. Odds on every chariot in every race. I lay a small bet, never a big one. A wise man keeps his wagers smaller than his pride.

Marcus Valerius

And then there are the astrologers. Chaldaean diviners, they call themselves, with beards that look suspiciously well combed. They'll tell you which team the stars favor for a few coins, and I have never once seen one of them poor. There's a darker trade too. People whisper that stable hands and desperate fans pay for little sheets of lead, scratched with prayers to the spirits below, begging them to blind the rival driver, to snap the horses' legs. And they say those lead sheets get buried near the turning posts, or in tombs nearby. I can't swear to it. I only know what's whispered, and I know nobody here laughs about it.

Marcus Valerius

Up the stairs, into the light, and there it is. The track, long and pale with sand, and down its middle the spina, the long barrier. Augustus's obelisk from Egypt stands on it, red and tall, with little shrines to the old harvest gods Consus and Murcia beside it. Seven bronze dolphins at one end, seven great eggs at the other, and each time the chariots finish a lap, one is lowered or turned, so even a drunk man can count to seven.

Marcus Valerius

Now the seats. In the Colosseum, everyone is sorted: by rank, by status, by sex. Not here. Senators sit on the lowest benches by the track, the equites just behind them, and everyone else, citizen, freedman, slave, woman, man, is packed together on the benches above. The poet Ovid actually advises young men to come here for it. He says the benches are so tight that you must press against the woman beside you, and if some dust lands on her dress, you brush it off. If she has no cushion, offer yours. Today, beside me sits Pomponia, a baker's widow with elbows like iron and a Green scarf. No romance, I promise. She'd flatten me.

Marcus Valerius

And here's what the philosophers never mention. In a crowd this size, nobody can find the man who shouted. So when the emperor's seat, the pulvinar, is right there beside the palace, and grain is dear, people shout. Prices, taxes, grievances, all flung toward the throne by thousands at once. An emperor is expected to come, to appear to enjoy himself, and to listen. This is the one place a baker's widow can lecture the ruler of the world.

Marcus Valerius

Trumpets. Twelve arched stalls at the far end, the carceres, set along a curve so every driver has the same distance to run. The magistrate leans out and drops a white cloth, the mappa. The gates clatter open all together, and the chariots explode out, four horses each, down to the white chalk line, before which no one may leave his lane. After that, anything goes. Twenty four races today, each lasting about eight or nine minutes, seven laps, close to three miles.

Marcus Valerius

Understand how fragile it all is. The chariot is a wicker and wood basket on two wheels. The two middle horses pull the pole. The outer two run on traces, and the inside one on the left, the funalis, is the hero. He steers the whole team around the turning posts, hugging that stone, taking every blow. And the driver has the reins wrapped around his waist, so he steers with his own body. Think what that means in a wreck. He cannot let go. So every driver carries a curved knife in the straps across his chest, to cut himself free before the horses drag him across the sand.

Marcus Valerius

There. The Blue and the Green, going into the far turn. They cut across each other, a wheel clips the stone, and the whole chariot folds into splinters. We call it a shipwreck, a naufragium. Horses screaming, wood flying. The driver's knife flashes. He's free, he's crawling. Pomponia is on her feet, screaming at the Blues' cheating, and half the crowd screams with her.

Marcus Valerius

Here's the strange part. Those men are infames. Disgraced, in the eyes of the law, like gladiators and actors, mostly slaves and freedmen, barred from civic honors. And yet a winning driver can earn fifteen to thirty thousand sesterces, sometimes sixty thousand, for a single victory. Juvenal grumbles that a charioteer can make a hundred times what a lawyer earns. Their faces are on our cups. Disgraced, and adored.

Marcus Valerius

Pliny the Younger wrote in a letter that he can't understand it. Thousands of grown men, he says, so childishly eager over horses and chariots, and not even for the skill. They love the rag, he says. Pannum amant. Change the colors in mid race, and the crowd would switch sides. Maybe he's right about the cloth. But he's never sat here, sticky with sausage grease, shoulder to shoulder with Pomponia, shouting my lungs out. It isn't the rag. It's that for one afternoon, in the greatest city in the world, nobody here is above me. And I can scream at the emperor.