Circus Flaminius

The Circus Flaminius was a broad open square in the southern Campus Martius, laid out in 221 BC on land the censor Gaius Flaminius Nepos gave to the Roman people, the prata Flaminia. Livy records the gift, and the name clung to the ground so firmly that it eventually marked an entire administrative zone, Regio IX. The word circus is misleading. Archaeologists have never turned up seating, a starting gate, or the central barrier that a racecourse required. T. P. Wiseman argued in a landmark 1974 study that the term pointed only to the square’s rounded outline, and the antiquarian Varro records a single recurring event on the grounds, the ludi Taurii, obscure games held every five years for the gods of the underworld and staged beyond the city walls because of that link.

The square worked as Rome’s great outdoor gathering hall. Merchants ran markets there, magistrates summoned public assemblies, and triumphing generals mustered their soldiers, prisoners, and plunder in the open ground before the procession climbed toward the Capitol. That military purpose shaped the skyline. The temples ringing the circus were overwhelmingly victory monuments, financed ex manubiis, from the spoils of war, by commanders keen to advertise their conquests. A recent study by Adam Jarych counts nine such booty-funded foundations, among them shrines to Mars, Bellona, Apollo, Neptune, and Hercules of the Muses. A Roman standing in the square was hemmed in by stone advertisements for the empire’s expansion.

The phrase in circo Flaminio surfaces in the ancient sources only in the age of Augustus, once those porticoes and temples had grown dense enough to give the open ground a recognizable edge. Fixing the square on a modern map took centuries of argument. Pirro Ligorio, working in the sixteenth century, wrongly matched the circus to ruins near today’s Via delle Botteghe Oscure, which proved instead to be part of the Theater of Balbus. Giuseppe Gatti reassigned it to a position below the Porticus Octaviae in 1960, and a fragment of the Severan Marble Plan reading CIR[CVS] FLAMI[NIVS] later clinched the case. The find fixed the location and forced scholars to reassign every temple once thought to stand beside it.

The square also saw Rome at its most violent and its most lavish. In 82 BC, while the Senate sat in the adjacent Temple of Bellona, Sulla had thousands of prisoners taken at the Colline Gate slaughtered in this quarter, their screams reaching the chamber. Augustus paved the ground and kept it for chosen occasions. In 2 BC, celebrating the dedication of his new forum, he flooded the circus and staged the hunting of thirty-six crocodiles in the water, a display Cassius Dio thought worth setting down. Within a few generations the same paved expanse had served as marketplace, parade route, execution ground, and artificial lake stocked with Nile predators for an afternoon’s show.

FURTHER READING

1. Wiseman, T. P. “The Circus Flaminius.” Papers of the British School at Rome, vol. 42, 1974, pp. 3–26. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40310726. Accessed 24 July 2026.
2. Wiseman, T. P. “Two Questions on the Circus Flaminius.” Papers of the British School at Rome, vol. 44, 1976, pp. 44–47. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40310737. Accessed 24 July 2026.
3. Tucci, P. L. “The Marble Plan Of The Via Anicia And The Temple Of Castor And Pollux In Circo Flaminio: The State Of The Question.” Papers of the British School at Rome, vol. 81, 2013, pp. 91–407. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/42706319. Accessed 24 July 2026.
4. Coleman, Kathleen. “Entertaining Rome.” Ancient Rome: The Archaeology of the Eternal City, edited by John Coulston and Hazel Dodge, Oxbow Books, 2000, pp. 210–58. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvh1dk0c.13. Accessed 24 July 2026.

CIRCUS FLAMINIUS:* built by C. Flaminius Nepos while censor in 221 B.C. It was in the prata Flaminia (q.v.; Liv. iii. 54. 15), in the southern part of the campus Martius (Liv. ep. 20; Fest. 89; Cassiod. Chron. ad a. 534), and was named after its builder, although Varro says (LL v. 154) that it took its name from a CAMPUS FLAMINIUS (q.v.). In it were celebrated the ludi plebeii (Val. Max. i. 7. 4), the Taurii (Varro v. 154), and other games, e.g. the ludi saeculares in 158 B.C. (Liv. xl. 52. 4); and assemblies of the people were frequently held here (Cic. ad Att. i. 14. 1; pro Sestio 33; post red. in sen. 13, 17; Plut. Marcell. 27; Liv. xxvii. 21. 1). It was also a market-place (Cic. ad Att. i. 14. 1), and within it part of the ceremony of the triumph took place (Liv. xxxix. 5; Plut. Lucull. 37) In 9 B.C. Augustus delivered the laudatio of Drusus here (Cass. Dio lv. 2. 2); and in 2 B.C. water was brought into the circus and thirty-six crocodiles butchered immediately after the dedication of the forum of Augustus (ib. 10. 8). If P. Meyer (Straboniana, ii. 20) and A. W. Van Buren (Ann. Brit. Sch. Athens, 1916-18, 48-50) are correct, Strabo (v. 3. 8) mentions it between the circus Maximus and the forum Romanum. 

Extant literature furnishes no information concerning the construction of the building, its restorations or its contents, except that contained in the statement of Vitruvius (ix. 9. 1: plinthium sive lacunar quod etiam in circo Flaminio est positum Scopinas Syracusius (dicitur invenisse)). This circus was so conspicuous a building and so important a centre that it soon gave its name to the immediate vicinity, and other buildings were described as ad circum Flaminium (Plin. NH xxxiv. 13) or in circo Flaminio (Liv. xl. 52. 2; Plin. NH xxxvi. 26, and very frequently; cf. Mart. xii. 74. 2: accipe de circo pocula Flaminio). In the Regionary Catalogue it is the official name of Region IX. It is marked on a fragment (27) of the Marble Plan (cf. FUR 21-22). Money changers appear to have had their stations in its arcades (CIL vi. 9713). In the Einsiedeln Itinerary (1. 2; 2. 2; 8. 3) the name is wrongly applied to the Stadium, though some think the Ordo Benedicti has the name correctly (Mon. L. i. 521; cf. BC 1901, 57, 58), while others think the circus is the basilica Iovis. 

At the close of the twelfth century a considerable part of the circus, called castellum aureum, was still standing (a bull of Celestin III of 1192 mentioning the churches of S. Lorenzo and S. Maria in Castello aureo ’or de castro aureo (Domnae Rosae; Bullar. Vat. i. 74; Caetani-Lovatelli, Passeggiate nella Roma antica, Rome 1909, 108-128; HCh 284-285, 331)). Its ruins were described by Biondo (Roma instaurata iii. 109) in the fifteenth century, but almost entirely removed in the sixteenth to make room for the Mattei palace, and the whole site then gradually covered by modern buildings. Some remains of the curved end lie in and beneath the Palazzo Caetani in the Piazza Paganica (Ill. 14) and of the long sides in various cellars, especially those of the Palazzo Longhi Mattei Paganica. The construction is of concrete faced with opus reticulatum, but the pillars are built of large squared blocks of tufa and travertine. None of these remains can belong to the original date of erection. 

The major axis of the circus ran almost due east and west. On the east (the carceres end) the limits of the circus seem to be set by the discovery of private houses and the pavement of an ancient street just east of the Piazza Margana (Bull. d. Inst. 1870, 48 ff.; cf. Fulvius, Antiquitates urbis p. l(x)v; LR 453; LS ; ii. 64-66). If so, the length of the circus was about 260 metres, and its width about 100.

The few remains (cf. Canina, Edifizi iv. pls. 186, 187) and drawings of the sixteenth century architects (LR 454-456; HJ 551, n. 122 JRS 1919, 187) show that this circus was built on the general plan adopted in later structures of a similar character, and that its lower story opened outwards through a series of travertine arcades, between which were Doric half-columns. In the Middle Ages the arcades on the north side were converted into dark shops, and gave the name to the street on that side, the Via delle Botteghe oscure; cf. the churches of S. Lucia de calcarario or de apothecis obscuris (HCh 300-301; cf. 306, and v. DOMUS ANICIORUM, 2) and of S. Salvator in Pensulis (ib. 449); and the memory of the rope makers who plied their trade in the arena is preserved in the Via dei Funari and the churches of S. Nicola and S. Caterina dei Funari (HCh 399; Arm. 551-568). See HJ 548-551; RE vi. 2580-2581; Marchetti-Longhi in Mem. L 5. xvi. 621-770.