Circus General

Chariot racing gave Rome its largest buildings. A circus was a long track with a low barrier down the middle, banked seating along both sides and around one curved end, and a row of starting stalls across the other. Racing was its main business, though the same arena held beast hunts, athletic contests and the processions that opened the games. The first and always the largest was the Circus Maximus at Rome, in the valley between the Palatine and the Aventine, which grew piece by piece over five centuries. Races were run there long before anything permanent stood on the site, and the earliest fixed element was the row of starting stalls, which Livy dates to 329 BCE.

Twelve chariots ran at a time, three from each of the four stables that supplied the teams and gave spectators their loyalties: Reds, Whites, Greens and Blues. Rope barriers strung on small posts closed the stalls and dropped together when the presiding magistrate let fall a white cloth (the mappa), and the chariots took seven laps counterclockwise around the spina (the central dividing barrier), turning at each end around three gilded bronze cones. Rome solved the problem of counting the laps twice over: the censors of 174 BCE set up seven large wooden eggs to be lowered one by one, and in 33 BCE Agrippa added seven bronze dolphins with water pouring from their mouths.

Provincial cities built to the same plan, at Mérida, Tarragona, Vienne, Carthage, Leptis Magna, Tyre and Antioch, usually on flat ground outside the walls where a track of the necessary length could be laid out. From the late third century the form acquired a new function: emperors ruling from Milan, Trier, Thessalonica, Sirmium and Constantinople each built a circus directly against the palace, with a private passage linking the imperial apartments to the viewing box, so that the ruler could appear before an assembled city without crossing it.

Maxentius followed that pattern outside Rome, laying out a circus beside his villa on the Via Appia between 306 and 312 CE. The only races recorded there were the inaugural ones, probably funeral games for his son Romulus, who died in 309. Two towers still stand at the western end, housing the machinery that raised the stalls, and the full length of the track can be walked; no other Roman circus survives so completely. The identification rests on an inscription to the deified Romulus found on the site in 1825, before which the ruins were attributed to Caracalla.

Little survives of the Circus Maximus itself beyond the shape of the valley, its track lying some nine meters below the modern surface. What does survive was dispersed by later popes: Sixtus V had both obelisks from the spina dug out and re-erected in the late 1580s, Augustus‘s in the Piazza del Popolo and that of Constantius II outside San Giovanni in Laterano. The obelisk from Maxentius‘s circus, carved for Domitian and moved to the Via Appia in the fourth century, was raised on Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona in 1651.

FURTHER READING

1. Humphrey, John H. Roman circuses: arenas for chariot racing. Univ of California Press, 1986.
2. Cameron, Alan. Circus factions: blues and greens at Rome and Byzantium. Oxford University Press, 1976.
3. Bell, Sinclair. “Roman Chariot Racing.” A Companion to Sport and Spectacle in Greek and Roman Antiquity, edited by Paul Christesen and Donald G. Kyle, Wiley-Blackwell, 2014, pp. XX–XX. Wiley Online Library, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118609965.ch33.
4. Vogel, Lise. “Circus Race Scenes in the Early Roman Empire.” The Art Bulletin, vol. 51, no. 2, 1969, pp. 155–60. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3048607. Accessed 2 Aug. 2026.
5. Popkin, Maggie L. “Representing the Circus Maximus Outside Italy: Images between Popular Culture and Politics.” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, vol. 69, 2024, pp. 300–53. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/27345525. Accessed 2 Aug. 2026.