Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Greens vs. Blues: Fanatical Chariot Fans in Ancient Rome

Episode Date: November 12, 2020

Professional sports have become a multibillion-dollar industry with millions of fans who will live and die based on their favorite team’s performance. Occasionally, soccer hooligans and Raiders fans will take their exuberance a bit too far. Rioting after a team wins a championship happens more often than not. However, nothing in the world of modern sports can compare to the levels of devotion and street violence which chariot racing commanded in ancient Rome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Professional sports have become multi-billion-dollar industries with millions of fans who will live and die based on their favorite team's performance. Occasionally, soccer hooligans and Raiders fans will take their exuberance a bit too far. Riding after a team wins a championship happens more often than not. However, nothing in the world of modern sports can compare to the levels of devotion and street violence, which chariot racing commanded in ancient Rome. Learn more about the greens and the blues and the havoc they caused on this episode. of everything everywhere daily. Fear is the virus is trending on TikTok.

Vaccines are poison. Then your yoga teacher says that sex traffic children are being sacrificed by satanic liberals, but it's all okay. The Great Awakening is coming. What is happening? Every week on Conspirality Podcast, we explore the fever dreams that suck friends,

family, and wellness gurus down the right-wing cult spiral in a search for salvation. This episode is sponsored by Skillshare. My guess is that there's something you would like to do, but just don't know how to do it. Maybe it's starting a podcast or a YouTube channel. Perhaps you want to learn more about music or graphic design. Skillshare has thousands of video-based courses to teach you the skills you want. With Skillshare premium, you have unlimited access to everything for as low as 825 per month.

Go to everything-dash-everywhere.com slash Skillshare to get a free two-week trial of Skillshare Premium membership, or just click on the link in the show notes. When you think of competitions in ancient Rome, you probably think of gladiators. To be sure, gladiators were very popular, and gladiatorial games had a lot of spectators, but it was nothing compared to the popularity of chariot racing. To put it into perspective, the Coliseum, where gladiatorial games were held in Rome, could seat between 50,000 to 80,000 people.

but the Circus Maximus, where the chariot races were held, could seat between 150 and 250,000 people. Granted, much of that is due to the fact that a racetrack just took up more space, but chariot racing was the closest thing in Rome to the professional sports teams of today. Chariot racing wasn't originally a Roman activity, as with many Roman cultural traits, it was staken from someone else. The Greek said chariot racing at the Ancient Olympic Games, and the Etruscans, which came before the Romans on the Italian peninsula,

also had races as well. The Circus Maximus was a huge facility. It dates back to the earliest periods of Rome, but it was rebuilt during the reign of Julius Caesar. It was so important that the emperor had the ancient equivalent of a luxury box that was connected to the imperial villas. The length of the track of the circus maximus was 621 meters or 2,37 feet long, so a completed lap of the track would be over 1.2 kilometers. A race would consist of seven laps around the track, with 24 races taking place on a normal race day. The number of laps was later reduced to five, so they could fit in more races. Most Roman races were run by a four-horse team called a Quadriga. A given race would have between six and 12 teams. Chariot racing was extremely dangerous. Most of the charioteers were

either slaves or ex-slaves. A charioteer would be lucky to live to the age of 30. Unlike Greeks or other cultures, Roman charioteers would tie the reins of the horse around their waist, meaning if they were thrown from their chariot, they would be dragged along by their horses and probably killed. Here is where I'll give you all a homework assignment. Go to YouTube and watch the chariot race scene from the 1959 version of Ben Hur. It really is an incredible depiction of Roman chariot racing, and it was shot without CGI. It holds up very well over time. For those of you who want some extra credit, you can watch the original 1925.

silent version of Ben Hur's chariot scene. And for those who really want to suck up to the teacher, you can watch the scene from the 2016 movie. All of the clips are about four to five minutes and won't take up too much of your time. Now, as dangerous as chariot racing was, it was also potentially extremely profitable. There were massive amounts of betting which went on with each race, and the very best charioteers were some of the wealthiest people in Rome.

Assuming you could survive, slaves could earn enough to buy their freedom. The charioteer Gaius Apolleus Diocles was one of the greatest athletes in Roman history, and on an inflation-indjusted basis, might have been the highest-paid athlete in human history. His lifetime winnings were 38,863,120 Sestertes, which some calculate as the equivalent of being $15 billion today. He completed in 4,257 4-horse Quadriga races, winning 1,462 of them, and placing in another 1,438.

He had an unusually long career racing from the age of 18 to 42. The chariot teams were a major operation, not too much different from a modern-day version of a Formula One team. Wealthy men in Rome would sponsor teams. They hired trainers for horses, scouts to find horses and riders, and they had to have custom chariots built. However, there was a great deal of fame to be made for a successful team sponsor. which could help them get elected to political office.

Listen to my previous episode on the Curses Honorum. Now, all this is very interesting, but this is actually not an episode on chariot racing. This is an episode on chariot racing fans. The chariots were actually divided into teams. At one point, there were four major teams, the reds, the whites, the greens, and the blues. And those were literally their names.

Romans were not creative when it came to naming things. The teams would often run multiple chariots in each race, race. They would usually work as a team to block the other teams and ensure that a member of their team was the winner. The fans were fanatical about team loyalty in a way that dwarfs loyalty today. Fan fights were regular currents. One fan threw himself onto the funeral pyre of his favorite charioteer. Spectators would throw cursed nails onto the track, which wasn't considered legal. One such curse was found in an archaeological excavation. It reads, quote, I call upon you, O demon, whoever you are, to ask that from this hour, from this day, from this moment, you torture and kill the horses of the green and white factions, and that you kill and crush completely the drivers, Calatrix, Felix, primulus, and Romanus, and that you leave not a breath in their bodies, unquote. I think I might try that the next time the Packers play the Bears.

Emperors were fans as well. The Emperor Vatilius was a huge supporter of the Blues, and, and, I think I might try that the next time the Packers play the Bears. were fans as well. The Emperor Vatilius was a huge supporter of the Blues, and executed several spectators who insulted his team. Caligula was a big green supporter, and would often eat in the stables with them. The Emperor Diocletian tried to bring expansion into the world of chariot racing by introducing two new teams, the gold and the purple, but they didn't last very long and had almost no support. What we don't know is if there was any meaning to the team loyalty. Did people from certain neighborhoods root for certain teams, or perhaps it meant support for certain gods, or social standing, or political leanings. There's no evidence to support the idea that teams

were stand-ins for anything. As far as we know, colors were just colors. What we do know is that over time, two teams came to dominate, the greens and the blues. When the capital moved from Rome to Constantinople, the tradition of chariot racing came with them, as did the teams and the fanaticism. Here, I suggest you list. listen to my very first episode where I explained how the Byzantine Empire is really just the Roman Empire by another name. Over time, the team supporters became something more akin to gangs, and team support did start to mean something. They began to dress differently to distinguish themselves on the street. It started to bleed over into politics, and some suggest that team

loyalty even began to take on religious overtones, with the green supporting Christian monophytism and the blues supporting traditional orthodoxy. In the reign of Emperor Justinian I, things really came to a head. In late 531, after a particularly bad riot between the Greens and the Blues, where several people were killed, Justinian had both a Green and a Blue arrested for murder, and they were scheduled to be executed. On January 10, 532, the pair escaped from jail and ran to a church for sanctuary, a mob of Greens and Blues gathered outside the church and demanded that Justinian let them go. Justinian, not wanting to have domestic problems while he was trying to finish up a war of Persia, commuted their sentences to imprisonment and declared that another day of races would be

held. This did not satisfy the mob. They wanted the prisoners released. On January 13th, the special race was held. The crowd wasn't their usual self. They almost immediately began insulting Justinian, and instead of engaging in chants for their teams, they began chanting Nika, or victory. The Greens and the Blues had joined forces against the emperor. A mob surrounded the palace, and for five days, Constantinople burned, and the city was almost destroyed. During the mayhem, some senators thought it would be a good idea to replace the emperor with one of their own. They declared a new emperor, Hypatius. However, there was something here that changed the dynamic. Justinian was a well-known supporter of the Blues, and Hypatius was a supporter of the Greens. Justinian sent one of his

eunuchs with a very large bag full of gold to the Blues, to remind the Blues that despite whatever their problems with the emperor were, it was better to have a blue on the throne than a green. The next day in the Hippodrome, when the Senate was sent to crown Hypatius as the new emperor, all of the blues got up and left. When they were gone, the emperor's troops came in and began a massacre. When the dust settled, between the days of rioting and the slaughter in the hippodrome, an estimated 30,000 people in Constantinople were killed in the Nika riots. After the riots, support for chariot teams never reached this level again. Eventually, team support died out completely, as did the popularity of chariot racing. So the next time you hear about fanatical sports fans,

championship riots, or soccer hooligans, just remember that it is nowhere even close to the level of team fanaticism that was seen during the Nika riots. Executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is James McAle. Please remember to support the show over at patreon.com, where you can get exclusive merchandise, and to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Leave a five-star review to have your review read online.