XFINALEBREAD & CIRCUSES
Oil painting: in a packed amphitheatre a gladiator in a crested gold helmet stands with his foot on a fallen fighter's throat and looks up at the stands, where women in white lean over the rail with their thumbs turned down.
Pollice Verso ("with a turned thumb"), Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1872. Jean-Léon Gérôme · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Rome · the crowd · the show

BREAD & CIRCUSES

“…duas tantum res anxius optat, panem et circenses.”

“…it anxiously wants two things only: bread and circuses.” The Roman poet Juvenal, Satires 10.81, around AD 100, on a people that had once handed out armies and offices and now asked only to be fed and entertained. Read the Latin.

This page is the two things: the grain Rome gave away, and the shows it put on, from the racetrack that held a quarter of a million people to the arena with a machine room under its floor. Then the night the fans nearly took a city.

The story, never the claim. What the sources say, and which source.

The bread

Rome fed its citizens from the state granary, and the hand that fed them collected the thanks.

Faded Roman wall painting: a man in a pale tunic behind a counter stacked with round loaves hands bread down to a cloaked man and a boy who reach up for it, while another man waits behind them.
Bread over the counter, a wall painting from Pompeii, before AD 79, now in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. Read as a baker's shop, or as a free hand-out by a man running for office; nobody knows which.† Tyler Bell · CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons

The races

The Circus Maximus, in the valley between the Palatine and Aventine hills, was the largest building for public entertainment in the ancient world: about 600 metres long and 140 wide, by the city of Rome's own tourism office.

Four-horse chariots ran seven laps around a central barrier with an Egyptian obelisk on it, brought to Rome by Augustus. The crashes had a name, naufragia, "shipwrecks".† The drivers were idols, and the crowd sat by the colour of its team.

Painting: four-horse chariots thunder around the turn of a vast racetrack, one overturned in the dust, under packed stands and a temple-lined skyline.
The Chariot Race, Alexander von Wagner, Manchester Art Gallery. Alexander von Wagner · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Roman floor mosaic in a braided border: starting gates at left, chariots and horses racing around a long central barrier, one team fallen in a heap.
The circus games mosaic, Lugdunum (Lyon), 2nd century AD, Lugdunum museum. A crash is in the bottom row. Carole Raddato · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons

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Pick your colour

Every Roman at the races was a fan of one of four teams, the factiones, and the green, blue, red and white split the stands.

Your faction

Pick one. Romans did.

The Blues (Veneti). One of the two great factions of the later empire. In Constantinople the Blues had the emperor Justinian's favour, which mattered when the city burned.† See the riot.

The Greens (Prasini). The Blues' great rivals. The emperors Caligula and Nero are said to have backed the Greens.† In 532 the Greens and the Blues did the one thing nobody expected: they joined up.

The Reds (Russati). One of the two older, smaller factions; by late antiquity the Reds ran with the Greens.† Rome's biggest-earning charioteer on record, Diocles, finished his career driving for the Reds.†

The Whites (Albati). The other junior faction, by late antiquity paired with the Blues.† The emperor Domitian once added a purple and a gold team; they did not outlast him.†

The arena

The Romans called it the Flavian Amphitheatre. "Colosseum" came in the Middle Ages, from a colossal statue that stood beside it. The Flavian emperors built it on land Nero had taken for his palace, and handed it back to the people as a gift. So says the archaeologist Bernard Frischer in Smarthistory's video.

Photograph: the outer wall of the Colosseum in Rome in daylight, tiers of stone arches rising four storeys, the taller intact side curving away against a blue sky.
The Colosseum, Rome, opened AD 80. Diliff · CC BY-SA 2.5 · Wikimedia Commons

A day at the games

The day as Bernard Frischer lays it out for Smarthistory.

The machine room

The arena floor was wooden planks with a trapdoor every few metres. Underneath, in the hypogeum, slaves worked lifts by hand to raise animals, scenery and props into the light. The floor is gone now, so you can look straight down into it.

Photograph looking down into the Colosseum's underground: a maze of roofless brick corridors and chambers in the arena floor, with the tiered walls rising behind.
The hypogeum, under the arena floor. Jouri de vylder · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons

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The thumb

Thumbs down means death: everybody knows that from the movies. The Latin only says pollice verso, "with a turned thumb", and Juvenal uses it of a crowd ordering a kill (Satires 3.36).† Which way the thumb turned, no Roman source says.† Gérôme painted it pointing down in 1872, and his painting is the one that stuck.

The other line everybody knows, "Hail, Caesar, those about to die salute you", has one ancient source. Suetonius puts it in the mouths of men about to fight a staged sea battle for the emperor Claudius, not in the arena.†

Oil painting: a line of armed gladiators raise their arms in salute toward the emperor's box in a vast sunlit amphitheatre, with bodies being dragged off the sand behind them.
Ave Caesar! Morituri te salutant, Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1859, Yale University Art Gallery. Jean-Léon Gérôme · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
△ AnalysisThe picture everyone carries of the arena was made in Paris in the 1870s, not in Rome. The thumb, the salute, the crowd of women baying from the rail: a painter's choices, copied by Hollywood, now remembered as history. The show outlived the facts.

Women in the arena

They fought. A stone relief from Halicarnassus, now in the British Museum, shows two women gladiators squared off. Their stage names are carved under their feet: Amazon and Achillia, one after the warrior women of myth, one after Achilles. The word above them says they were released, an honourable end to the bout for both.†

Worn stone relief: two figures in armour face each other behind tall shields; a line of Greek letters runs across the top, and the names AMAZON and ACHILLIA are carved along the base.
Amazon and Achillia, relief from Halicarnassus (Bodrum, Turkey), 1st–2nd century AD, British Museum. TimeTravelRome · CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Roman floor mosaic: armoured gladiators in crested helmets with shields and spears fight in pairs while a referee in a white tunic steps between them.
Gladiators with a referee, the Zliten mosaic, Libya, Roman period. Unknown Roman mosaicist · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
△ AnalysisEven in the arena the goddesses and heroines were the brand. Two women walked out under the names of the Amazons and of Achilles: the show sold the myth, and the myth sold the show. It is the same pull the Pantheon page follows.

The night the fans took the city

Constantinople, January 532. The Blues and the Greens ran more than the races. They were street organisations with their own seats, chants and muscle.† When the emperor Justinian would not pardon men from both factions, the two did the one thing nobody planned for. They united, shouted "Nika!" ("Win!" or "Conquer!"), and set the city on fire.†

The historian Procopius has Theodora refuse to flee: royalty, she says, makes a good burial shroud. The generals Belisarius and Mundus trapped the crowd inside the Hippodrome. The church burned in the riot was rebuilt as the Hagia Sophia.†

Nineteenth-century engraving: a crowned empress raises her hand in command while a bearded man charges past with a raised fist and armed men grapple on the floor before a curtained throne.
How Belisarius and Theodora rescued Justinian, a 19th-century book illustration of the Nika riot. L. Kretzschmar · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
△ AnalysisBread and circuses is supposed to keep a crowd quiet. The Nika riot is the case where the circus was the crowd's organisation: the fan clubs already had numbers, colours, chants and a place to meet. When the rivals stopped fighting each other, the show turned on the man paying for it.

The word today

"Circus" is on the Lexicon. Three tapes, three decades, three countries, and the same move every time. The person being questioned calls the room a circus.

△ AnalysisJuvenal used the circus to accuse the crowd. Now the word is used to accuse the room. Calling a hearing a circus says the questioners are performers and the audience is the point. The station logs that the word was said. It takes no side on whether any of those rooms was a show.

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