Betting was also common among spectators at the circuses, and to try and have a hand in how things turned out fans would try to disrupt how the races unfolded. While in today’s stadiums, chanting and smoke grenades feature among the modern arsenal spectators use to distract their opposition, in the ancient world spectators would throw nail-studded curse tablets at the opposition as they passed by.
Not that the fans necessarily needed to get involved themselves. During a race it was pretty common for the three chariots representing each faction to team up with one another in their efforts to bring down a particularly strong or unpopular adversary. And when I say, “bring down”, I mean quite literally grind them into the dust on which they raced. But such violence most largely explain why the chariot races were so incredibly popular among all social strata of ancient Rome, and why the common but courageous men who raced in them earned such fierce respect for both themselves and for the factions they represented.
The Emperor Caligula (37 – 41 AD), for example, was an ardent fan of the Greens. According to his biographer Suetonius, he would constantly go to dine with them and would sometimes pass the night in their stables. He would also invite them to imperial banquets and, in keeping with tradition, would present them with gifts at the end of the meal. But in what was an ill-judged use of what was presumably public money, instead of small tokens Caligula rewarded his charioteers with vast sums of money—2 million sesterces in the case of one Eutychus.
One of his successors, the all-singing, all-dancing Emperor Nero (54 – 68 AD) loved charioteers so much that he essentially he decided to become one, much to the dismay of his regime’s advisors. Nero even competed in the Olympics of 67 AD at the head of a 10-horse team. In what must have been a spectacularly awkward scene, at one point the emperor was thrown from the chariot. He managed to make his way back in (the Latin doesn’t tell us how) but was unable to finish the race.
Not that this made any difference to the outcome. The judges still awarded Nero the crown (after all, who were they to deny him) and his body bruised but his ego massaged the emperor returned to Rome triumphant. In fact triumph is the perfect word here. For when Nero returned to Rome after his victory at the Olympics he did so in the midst of a triumphal procession—a ceremony reserved exclusively for military victories.
Gaius Appuleius Diocles never had the wealth of the Nero. We are, after all, talking about an emperor who decided to build his domus aurea (Golden House)—an enormous palace complex consisting of wild groves, an enormous lake, gold-encrusted walls, and revolving ceilings—right in the centre of the city, announcing upon its completion that he could “finally start living like a human being.” But Diocles did have some things that Nero didn’t—universal respect, an enviable sporting legacy, and the right to say at least he finished all the races that he won.