For those reasonably familiar with the story of Rome, this is not a problem. Likewise we find Byzantine emperors coping with aspects of the races on the same pages as the early Caesars, and enthusiasm for circus factions in the Roman east varies from rabid to muted within paragraphs. Then the structure becomes a derelict ruin a chapter later, before springing back to life in the following pages. The thematic approach means that the reader becomes accustomed to reading of a fully developed Circus Maximus a few pages before it is a primitive circuit. Instead the reader finds that the sequence of events is scattered all over the book and it is hard to put events into context. While the basic idea behind this is sound, it does not really work in practice.
![chariot races in rome facts chariot races in rome facts](https://www.worldhistory.org/img/r/p/500x600/7689.jpg)
The book is roughly organized by topic, for example, with one chapter on the Circus Maximus, another on the spectators and a third on the charioteers themselves. He describes chariots and chariot racing in the pre-classical world (though without discussing the theory that chariots pre-dated horse riding simply because it took centuries of selective breeding before horses became large enough to be mounted). Having given us a look at chariot racing when it is a full-blown phenomenon in chapter one, the author then goes back to the very beginnings of chariot racing.
#Chariot races in rome facts full#
but it is only after the reader has finished the rest of the book that the full significance of the riots becomes apparent. This makes for a colourful beginning, and it dramatically highlights some of the themes which the book will later be tackling in greater depth. The reader starts at chapter one with the Nika riots in Constantinople, when chariot racing was over a thousand years old. However, Meijer's book is more comprehensive in both its time span and range, in that it looks at all aspects of chariot racing, from start to finish, and in the process covers the venues, the supporters and the construction of the chariots themselves. The most recent book to address the topic before this was Cameron's Circus Factions in 1976 (though a 1991 paper by Elizabeth Rawson merits an honourable mention) Roman Circuses: Arenas for Chariot Racing by John Humphrey published in 1986, (second edition published in 1992).
![chariot races in rome facts chariot races in rome facts](https://www.italymagazine.com/sites/default/files/feature-story/leader/benhur.jpg)
So this book by Fik Meijer - Professor of Ancient History at the University of Amsterdam - is a very welcome contribution to the study of chariot racing. And even when gladiator fights became a thing of the past, chariot races continued to be an essential part of Roman and Byzantine culture for centuries more. One such fan even threw himself onto a funeral pyre so that he could perish along with the remains of the charioteer he worshipped. Charioteers were highly-paid superstars who had flocks of devoted followers. Yet gladiator shows only took place anywhere between ten and twenty days per year, and had a maximum audience of some 50,000 people at the Flavian Amphitheatre (Colosseum).Ĭhariot races happened regularly, and attracted some 150,000 people to the Circus Maximus. These days when we think of spectacle in ancient Rome, we immediately think of gladiators in the arena.