Quick Take: How Organized Sport Wrecked the Roman Empire

If religion is the opium of the masses, organized sports is the fentanyl of the masses

(This post is in response to a question from a paying subscriber, The Long Warred, who wanted to know the political nitty gritty behind the hooliganism that grew around Constantinople’s chariot races.)

Fast-paced Romanization made it easier for Hispania to produce some of the most famous Roman emperors, thinkers and writers. In a taste of things to come for centuries, Hispania also produced the empire’s best-known and wealthiest sportsman…

…A man named Gaius Appuleius Diocles, born around 104 AD, who started racing chariots at the age of 18 in a place called Ilerda (Lérida in Spanish, Llleida in Catalan). In a 24-year career in which he switched teams several times, testing his followers’ loyalty, he was reported to have made more than 35 million Roman sesterces, a figure that makes him the top-earning athlete in history.

Chariot racing was THE Roman sport. Despite the best efforts of the old movie Ben Hur, Roman entertainment is mostly associated with gladiators, which is not incorrect. However, gladiator spectacles were never big in the Eastern half of the empire and eventually faded away with the arrival of Christianity. Stupid Christians with their opposition to having people chop each other for our amusement, right?

Chariot racing was huge for centuries on both sides of the empire, and was less dangerous than fighting rivals with weapons, which explains why good old Diocles was able to stretch his career longer than Lebron James, and make more money than Michael Jordan. In the end, chariot racing kept going for over a millennium.

This was not a good thing for the Romans. Arguably, organized sports/spectacles like chariot racing and gladiating had a somewhat detrimental impact on Roman society inasmuch as they contributed to engorge the whole “bread and circus” entertainment industry that turned millions of law-abiding citizens into cowered masses who would become the serfs of a few hundred thousands of Germanic barbarians.

Yup, the Roman Empire was a long experiment to assess the Big Sport argument that professional organized sport will incentivize couch potatoes to take up physical exercise themselves, and the experiment was a dismal failure.

No barbarians are known to have been fond of what they rightly saw as decadent Roman pastimes, and Roman spectacles survived for only a few decades after the Western Empire fell in 476 AD. Now, the situation in the Eastern Empire, what hopelessly racist German historians would later call the “Byzantine Empire,” was entirely different: in Constantinople and other great cities of the East, chariot racing became even bigger over time.