The Legend of the Great Horse

I didn’t properly explain in my last post (The Charioteers: Evidence History Repeats?) why the existence of popular chariot racing stars in ancient Rome was history “repeating itself.”

In our modern society we have celebrity athletes of different sports, but this is not a continuation of historical tradition. It may seem so, but when it comes to history our “gut” feeling is often very wrong.

After the collapse of Rome, Europe endured a period of centuries known as the Dark or Middle Ages in which there were no celebrity athletes. It was not until the Industrial Age and the organization of modern sports that athletes began to again capture the popular imagination as celebrated stars.

This isn’t to say celebrity athletes are “bad,” only that they have returned to civilization after a long period of dormant centuries. What may merit attention is that the society that first grew athlete-superstars was Rome.

Rome is important because it was the first Republic and the grandfather of Western culture. It was a society that flourished as a “melting pot” of peoples with citizen representation in government—and corrupted into a tyranny that ended in the destruction of human consciousness. There were two Romes: the long period of growth during the Republic, and its shorter stagnation and decline as an Imperial power.

Celebrity charioteers were a feature of Imperial Rome, and it is Imperial Rome that holds the common imagination, not the Republic. Clearly there has been a reawakening in modern times of ancient forces, whether these forces are (or can be made) positive or not. The destructive element of Rome’s manic celebrity was the power of distraction. Chariot racing was the “circus” of Juvenal’s famous quote about “Bread and Circuses“:

…for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.

The question of whether celebrity athletes are “good” or “bad” for society isn’t the point—I have no idea—but rather that assuming history to be what we imagine IS bad because such forgetting has been observed to doom us to repeating mistakes.

Oh no! He’s taken the corner wide!
What are you doing? The next chariot is crowding you.
What are you doing, you idiot? You’re going to lose what my girl’s prayed for!
Pull, please, PULL left as hard as you can.
We are rooting for a bum.

- Ovid (43 BC – AD 17) Amores

The idea that human nature does not change has been debated at least since Aristotle’s disputable claim that “All men by nature desire knowledge.” Repetition of historical events across cultures—revolution, poverty, despots, war—seem to side with the idea of an immutable human nature.

Yet, new things DO occur under the sun, or at least emerge in forms unrecognizable to that which has gone before. Such is the case of the charioteer in Ancient Rome.

Top talent on the racing circuit of antiquity attracted throngs of followers, including dignitaries and high officials, wealthy sponsors and fanatics (fans) of all levels of society. The adulation of a sports figures is familiar in our televised age, but in Rome’s day it was something new.

In earlier Greek sport, charioteers were honored along with other athletes (and poets) but Rome twisted the premise.  Roman charioteers were professionals. Instead of glorifying the charioteer for achievement, Roman racing grew into a “win at all costs” spectacle that favored violent confrontation and cutthroat tactics. Ironically this escalation of conflict gave advantage to the lowest levels of society, who would take risks avoided by those of more privileged rank. (This gave no clue to the Roman elite.)

For their part, charioteers gradually developed an impunity to societal laws and accepted conduct. The profession became synonymous with thuggery, cheating, bribery and other “low” behavior, to the point Emperor Nero “forbade the revels of the charioteers, who had long assumed a license to stroll about, and established for themselves a kind of prescriptive right to cheat and thieve, making a jest of it.” [Suetonius, "The Lives of Twelve Caesars"]

Greek’s held the reins in their hands, but Roman charioteers tied them around their waists which (deliberately?) dramatically increased the danger and fatality of collisions as the pilot was subject to being dragged unless he cut his reins in time.  Whether the spectacle of chariot-racing was a symptom or a cause, Roman societal attitudes became increasingly fatalistic and competitive, and finally merciless and capricious. And then … nothing.

The Greek view of awarding athletes “honor and glory” was replaced in Rome with the material rewards of fame and wealth. We don’t know the names of many Greek chariot-racing heroes; we know more about the celebrated Roman charioteers. However, while Greek racing flourished and developed into a new form, there was no second act for the Roman Circus.

A city is gripped in mania: favored teams of pampered athletes from around the known world are meeting in no-holds-barred competition on the field of sport. Dignitaries and celebrities mingle with major sports figures as throngs chant the names of their favorites. Vast sums are wagered, details of the competition are endlessly debated. A deafening roar signals the start of competition, a scream punctuated with the crowd’s shrieks of pleasure and shock…

The scene is of antiquity’s sport of Roman chariot racing, the world’s first mass spectator sport, a spectacle that grew to shake the foundation of social custom and introduced a new kind of fanatic to the world. More than “mere” sport, the passions that chariot racing sparked were a discovery that changed civilization.

The frenzy of today’s mass media sports can be seen in primary colors in antiquity’s great “spectacle of horses.” The star celebrity status of athletes, cheering crowds, widespread coverage, gambling, grand venues and prizes—all the attendant glories of modern televised sport are striking echoes of what has gone before.

The top charioteers and horses were celebrated as iconic heroes: it was grumbled that Rome showed more grief over the loss of a favorite racing team than a military defeat in battle.  The annual Circuit wound from Rome down the Italian peninsula and around the Mediterranean, with the best-known teams clashing at venues in Syracuse, Carthage, Alexandria, Constantinople, Antioch, Athens—bringing color and excitement to the drab lives of the imperial citizenry.

Emotions ran hot in the stands, with winning supporters rioting as losers wept and threw their clothing on the track to wander the streets in despair:

“… a people to whom one need only throw bread and give a spectacle of horses since they have no interest in anything else. When they enter a theatre or stadium they lose all consciousness of their former state and are not ashamed to say or do anything that occurs to them…. constantly leaping and raving and beating one another and using abominable language and often reviling even the gods themselves and flinging their clothing at the charioteers and sometimes even departing naked from the show. The malady continued throughout the city for several days”
~ Dio Chrysostom, c. 200 AD (Orationes, XXXII, LXXVII) describing fan behavior in Alexandria

What was this grandfather of modern televised sports insanity, how did it grow and what were the effects of the passions it released?

Next up: The Charioteers

“The Chariot Race” (1882) by Alexander von Wagner

I’m planning a series of chariot racing posts. A goal of mine when writing “Eclipsed by Shadow” was to introduce lesser-known history and discuss it in new ways. Roman chariot racing signaled something new to humanity with far-reaching implications, and it was the phenomenon that made me aware of the central role horsemanship has truly played in the development of civilization.

Ancient Rome is important for its lessons. Western civilization traces its roots to the Greek and Roman societies of antiquity, and those roots are far more than entertaining echoes in our own time. In “Eclipsed by Shadow” I note: “Rome had advertising, taxes, courts and contracts, free market capitalism, corporations, seven-day weeks, holidays, welfare, organized religion, spectator sports, running water and sewers, fine roads, literature, cultural arts, and a well-run military—none of this would save them.”

There was much that was good about Rome in its early centuries. Their society grew the world’s first Middle Class, and instituted a representative form of government complete with a Senate, elected politicians and a system of law. Yet it is the unhappy fact of Rome that they corrupted and became something that destroyed human conscience and pitched Europe into brutal centuries of Dark Ages.  Western Civilization has died once before.

The tragedy of Rome is that they were doomed by forces mankind had never encountered before, because they were something new under the sun. At its height, Rome offered its citizens a standard of living not seen again until the middle 1700’s—more than 12 centuries of brutal squalor in Europe lay between the fall of Rome and the Enlightenment. It is not a path to tread again.

One of the forces that Rome unleashed was fanaticism, and it happened through chariot racing.

Chariots of early history (16th century BC)

This is my third “Mirror” post in a row, and where I finally explain the use of the metaphor and close the barn door after it.

In the first post of this Mirror trilogy, I mentioned becoming interested in reading about history while browsing the shelves of the doomed used bookstores in Harvard, and becoming aware that

a) History is not always what we think it is, and

b) Our culture seems to be forgetting the history we do know (or did) while repeating mistakes of the past.

I didn’t have answers about what history people should remember, or what conclusions should be drawn. I was simply interested in knowing about factual history and discussing it. Well, you can’t discuss what people don’t know, which led to thinking of ways to present historical information in a new way … which became the Legend of the Great Horse trilogy.

My blog’s “Mirror” Trilogy Concludes

Horses were a common factor in almost every time from primitive man and antiquity to the Renaissance and the American West. The animal has literally been with mankind every step of the way. As someone who competed in equestrian sports and worked in the horse industry, I found this to be an example of common knowledge not commonly explored.

Horsemanship was not an obvious process to humanity: it took thousands of years for mankind to learn to control a horse as a rider. While the first uses of horses are misty and inconclusive, truth be told early horsemanship was a dog’s breakfast of nose-rings, superstition and brutality.  So poor were the prospects of the first mounted riders ending up where (and how) they wished to arrive, that as a practical matter driving appears to have been the main use for horses in the early days of civilization.

This changed in the last millenia B.C. with a new kind of horsemanship based on working with the horse in an empathetic and humane way. The horse responded to empathetic methods so well that the new art, today called “dressage,” led to a revolution in mounted riding. As the human consciousness arced up our horsemanship advanced to new levels of cooperation and partnership.

da Vinci’s “Rearing Horse”

However, when Rome fell into centuries of brutalized Dark Ages, dressage was lost to Western Civilization. In fact, dressage was one of the “rediscovered” Classical arts that sparked the new age of the European Renaissance. Riding schools were set up and Riding Masters emerged as students in the laboratory of the ménage. Horsemanship recovered its humane component and advanced to unprecedented heights of sport and art.

The history of horsemanship seems to highlight the relationship between empathy and human progress. It is fascinating to see how horses have adapted to the different stages of human development; horses are not only a true link with our past but a reflection of their times. Progress in horsemanship has mirrored the progress of mankind itself.

It makes for a fascinating study–and the greatest canvas on which to tell a story.