Sports and Color #1 _ Chariot Racing

Sports and Color #1

Hello, everyone.

This marks the start of a new series, "Sports and Color."

In the world of sports, color does far more than add visual flair. There are the colors of uniforms, colors that tell competitors apart, colors used in officiating, colors that signal victory and defeat, and colors that sweep across the stands. Within the framework of competition, color has played many roles across many settings, sometimes as a rule and sometimes as the emblem of a team. In "Sports and Color," I'd like to explore these connections between sport and color one by one.

For this first installment, we'll look at one of the oldest examples on record: chariot racing, one of the most popular spectacles of ancient Rome.

What Was Chariot Racing?

Chariot racing was a contest of speed in which a charioteer drove a chariot pulled by two or four horses around a racetrack known as a circus. Its origins are unknown, but pottery from the Mycenaean civilization (one of the Aegean civilizations, c. 1600–1100 BCE; Mycenae was an ancient Greek city) depicts the sport, suggesting it was already being practiced by the 13th century BCE. It is a sport of astonishing antiquity.

In Greece, only the wealthiest aristocrats could afford to own horses and chariots. Most of the drivers who actually held the reins were hired slaves, yet the glory of victory went to the owner. In that sense, these races were held for the benefit of the horse owners, offering a lavish spectacle while raising their own prestige through victory.

The Chariot Race, c.1882  Alexander von Wagner

Once chariot racing reached Rome, its character changed considerably. According to tradition, Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome, held the first race, and by the Republican period the sport appears to have become widely popular. In Rome, the winner was considered to be the charioteer himself. Most charioteers were slaves, but by winning race after race and accumulating prize money, some were able to buy their freedom, and a few became famous throughout the empire. The sport had shifted from an arena for the owners' honor to something like a professional sports business, with the charioteers as its stars.

Chariot racing also grew beyond mere entertainment, becoming a stage on which those in power sought the support of the people. In Rome itself, emperors sponsored the races to win popular favor, while in the provinces, governors took on that role.

When people hear "chariot racing," many may think of the film Ben-Hur. Released in 1959, it is an enduring epic that won 11 Academy Awards. Emperor Shōwa and Empress Kōjun were invited to a charity screening of Ben-Hur, making it the first film screening in Japan to be attended by the Emperor.

Here is the chariot race scene from Ben-Hur.



In this footage, the man giving the starting signal from the stands is Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judaea, known from the New Testament as the man who presided over the trial of Jesus.



Chariot Racing and Color

As the races grew in scale, patrons and staff became organized around the individual stables that bred and supplied the racehorses. With the stands growing larger, spectators far from the track needed a way to tell the competitors apart, and so a practical solution emerged: each stable was assigned its own color. This was the starting point of a system of factions defined by color.

Later, in the 1st century CE under Emperor Nero, this system was consolidated into four colors, green, red, blue, and white, and expanded further with imperial support. Each color is said to have symbolized a season: green for spring, red for summer, blue for autumn, and white for winter. According to the records, there were originally only two factions, red and white, with green and blue added later to make four. In other words, the original two-team system was red versus white, just like the teams at a Japanese school sports day.

Color was more than a symbol. Charioteers raced around the track wearing a tunica, a garment something like a long T-shirt, dyed in the color of their faction. In Ben-Hur, mentioned earlier, the nine charioteers each wear different outfits, with no sign of team colors. This is because the story is set not in Rome but in Jerusalem, which was under Roman rule. There, it seems, there were no factions; individual employers owned the chariots and charioteers. The atmosphere in the provinces must have been quite different.

When people think of the Romans, they probably picture something like Figure A below. The cloth wrapped around the body is called a toga, and the garment worn underneath is the tunica. Long sleeves were seen as effeminate, and it seems they were rarely worn until around the 3rd century. Figure B shows a typical charioteer's outfit; I suspect their tunicas were often sleeveless.

A	B

The stadium was apparently packed, but from the distant seats, the horses and chariots must have looked as small as peas. Spectators probably relied on the color of the tunicas to follow where their favorite color was running at any given moment. As far as I've been able to find, these faction costumes may well be the world's first sports uniforms.

In time, the four factions were consolidated into two. Red and white gradually lost strength and were absorbed into green and blue, respectively. Since securing funds and top charioteers was all-important, it was probably a natural progression for two major factions to emerge.

These were, so to speak, the Blues and the Greens. By the time of the Eastern Roman Empire, it was not unusual for emperors to favor a particular faction. Emperor Justinian in the 6th century (reigned 527–565) was known as a partisan of the Blues. There is also a theory that the Blues supported Orthodox Church doctrine while the Greens supported a different doctrine, but nothing seems to be known for certain. Either way, it was no longer just about cheering on a team: political ambitions and allegiances came to be layered onto two colors, blue and green. It was practically a two-party system.

This is how it all unfolded.

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ニカの乱

The emperors themselves seem to have been passionate about the races. The Hippodrome of Constantinople, in the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, stood right next to the imperial palace, and it became a place where the emperor and the people came face to face on a regular basis. Over time, this circus became a place where ordinary people brought their petitions and protests.

In the 6th century, Emperor Justin I had no heir, so he adopted Justinian, his sister's son. Seeking to secure support for his succession to his uncle, Justinian threw his weight behind the Blues, allowing them to get away with breaking the law without punishment. Once on the throne, however, he abruptly switched to a strict policy. His former supporters felt betrayed, while the Greens never forgot how the Blues had been favored.

Justinian I

Justinian also cherished the ideal of restoring the ancient Roman Empire, and its costs fell on the shoulders of the citizens as taxes, regardless of whether they were Blue or Green. Of course, the citizens knew nothing of what dreams the emperor might be harboring. What city dwellers who had finally achieved a reasonably stable life wanted was surely not lost lands in the distant West, but peace in their daily lives. Corrupt officials imposing heavy taxes, ruthless collection from debtors: the citizens likely had doubts about every aspect of the emperor's rule. His favoritism toward the Blues makes it harder to see, but perhaps there was never a moment when the interests of the citizens and the emperor truly aligned. The same sort of thing happens in every country.

In 531 CE, a brawl between the Blues and the Greens after a chariot race left people dead. Members of both factions were arrested, and the following year, seven of those arrested were to be executed. At the execution site, however, the gallows broke (whether by accident or not is unknown), and two of the condemned, one Blue and one Green, escaped death. Monks came to their aid, and the two took refuge in a church.

Three days later, during a chariot race, the citizens kept shouting for the pardon of the two men who had been rescued. Their cries continued all the way to the 22nd race, yet there was no response from the emperor. Finally, the Blues and the Greens, usually bitter rivals, united under the cry of "Nika!" and unleashed their pent-up discontent. "Nika" means "Win!" or "Conquer!" in Greek, and was originally a cheer to spur on the charioteers. From that day on, the word became the rallying cry of the revolt.

The riot spread in an instant, and much of the city was burned to the ground. In the end, the rebel citizens gathered in the Hippodrome were crushed by the army, and the death toll is said to have reached as many as 30,000. This is known as the Nika riots.

Color itself did not directly cause the revolt. Even so, the simple act of choosing a color clearly had the power to bind people together. Color went beyond mere identification to carry people's very allegiances, and in the end took on a weight great enough to decide matters of life and death.

Opinions on Justinian have been divided since ancient times. Pursuing his ideal of restoring the ancient Roman Empire, he succeeded in reclaiming North Africa, Italy, and southern Spain. However, the long years of war left the land devastated, and a great plague that broke out in 541 dealt a further blow. The economy was exhausted, and military manpower ran dry. In 568, just three years after his death, Italy was invaded by the Lombards, and most of the peninsula was lost. Spain, too, was abandoned in less than a century and never returned to imperial hands.



The Later History of Chariot Racing

The Circus Maximus, Rome's largest racetrack, is said to have held well over 100,000 spectators, drawing even larger crowds than the gladiatorial games at the Colosseum. However, economic and political crises led to the decline of chariot racing in Rome by the mid-6th century.

Reconstruction of the Circus Maximus

Sadly, almost nothing remains of the magnificent structures of the Circus Maximus, and the site has since been turned into a park.

The Circus Maximus


The Palatine Hill, seen across the Circus Maximus

Some of the neighboring structures do survive. The hill across from the circus is called the Palatine Hill, where the ruins of temples and baths (thermae) still stand. Together with the ruins of the heart of ancient Rome (the Roman Forum) and the Flavian Amphitheater (the Colosseum), these ruins on the hill form a vast open-air museum.


The Hippodrome of Constantinople, where the Nika riots took place, is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site "Historic Areas of Istanbul" and is one of Turkey's popular tourist attractions. Here, too, the stadium itself no longer stands, but two obelisks that once adorned the central barrier of the track still stand today.

Hippodrome of Constantinople

As other racetracks were abandoned, chariot racing survived only at the Hippodrome of Constantinople, where it gradually became more ceremonial than truly competitive. The Hippodrome continued to serve as a place of entertainment through the 10th and 11th centuries, and the last recorded chariot race was held in 1200.

Meanwhile, chariot racing in Greece, where it all began, continued as a major event of the Olympic festival, a religious festival dedicated to Zeus. Given that such a dangerous sport was adopted for a religious festival, perhaps it had carried something like a divinatory meaning or religious character since Mycenaean times. The Olympic festival began in 776 BCE and was held for over 1,000 years, but Greece became a Roman province in 146 BCE, so the festival ultimately came to be held under Roman rule.

Emperor Nero, who reigned in the era when all four color factions had come together, himself competed in the chariot race at the Olympic festival. Instead of the usual four-horse team, he raced with ten horses, and although he fell from his chariot partway through and never finished, he was declared the winner. The forced logic seems to have been that he would have won had he finished. After Nero's death, the Greeks struck this victory from the records.

It is unclear how long chariot racing continued at the various racetracks around Greece, but I suspect it died out at roughly the same time as it did in Rome itself.

The winner of a chariot race at the ancient Olympic Games receives the victor's crown.

From 'El Mundo Ilustrado', published Barcelona, 1880

Summary

Roman chariot racing was something like a prototype of modern sports entertainment. Crowds of well over 100,000 went wild over a sport that put lives at risk. Because a charioteer who fell would be dragged along by his chariot, drivers raced with a curved knife at their waist for cutting the reins. Like the gladiatorial fights, it was a spectacle tinged with cruelty, but that was probably part of its appeal, and the more dangerous the race, the greater the value of victory. Partly thanks to the film Gladiator, gladiatorial combat at the Colosseum may be better known today, but it seems that the Romans of the time were even more passionate about chariot racing.

Color-coding arose for the practical purpose of visibility, but people eventually came to find their own color in it and to pin their hopes on it. It is a curious phenomenon: a device for telling competitors apart from a distance ended up creating a sense of belonging.

Incidentally, the Japanese term "team color" refers not only to the color of a team's uniform but also to the team's character or tactical style. The English "team colors," by contrast, has no such second meaning. In English, "colors" means the colors actually worn, and to "wear the colors" means to belong to that team. Color moving beyond the visual to express a group's character may be a phenomenon peculiar to Japanese. Yet the process by which a simple identifying color comes to carry a group's character is one that Rome's Blues and Greens had already gone through.

Even today, we sometimes feel "fervor" or "pressure" from the colorful uniforms and flags filling a stadium, and its origins go back nearly 2,000 years.