Byzantine Culture

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The Blues and the Greens

The chariot-racing factions of Constantinople organised the crowd, acclaimed emperors, staffed the militia and started riots. What they were, what they were not, and the Nika revolt.

Every chariot race in the Roman world was contested by four stables distinguished by colour: Blue, Green, Red and White. By the sixth century the Reds and Whites had been absorbed as junior partners, and the Blues and Greens dominated the Hippodrome of Constantinople and the circuses of every major city in the empire.

They were also something more than sporting clubs, and working out exactly what has occupied historians for a century.

What They Were

At the core, the factions (demes) were professional organisations. Each maintained stables, horses, charioteers, trainers, grooms, and — crucially — a body of performers: dancers, mime actors, acrobats, musicians and organists who supplied the entertainment between races.

Each had a headquarters near the Hippodrome, officials, funds, and a formal place in imperial ceremonial. The tenth-century Book of Ceremonies records their scripted role in court ritual: chanted acclamations at the emperor’s appearances, formal dialogues with imperial officials, processional duties at coronations and triumphs. Their choirs are one of the few documented non-liturgical musical institutions of the empire, as Byzantine music notes.

They also had civic functions. Faction members were enrolled in the urban militia and assigned sections of the city walls to defend; they appear repairing fortifications, notably after the earthquake of 447, when the factions supplied the labour force that rebuilt the land walls in sixty days.

What They Were Not

Three theories about the factions have been proposed and largely abandoned.

Political parties. An older view held that the Blues represented the landed aristocracy and the Greens the trading and industrial classes. The evidence does not support it: emperors and aristocrats supported both, and the factional allegiance of individuals does not track class.

Religious parties. Another view aligned the Blues with Chalcedonian orthodoxy and the Greens with Miaphysitism. Again, the evidence is thin and the exceptions numerous.

A popular assembly. A third view treated the factions as the surviving voice of the urban populace in a system that had no other. There is something in this — the Hippodrome was where a crowd could address an emperor directly, and did — but the factions were not representative bodies and did not act as such.

The current consensus, associated particularly with Alan Cameron’s 1976 study, is more deflationary: the factions were sporting organisations whose supporters behaved like sporting supporters, whose violence resembled football hooliganism more than insurrection, and whose occasional political significance came from being the only organised bodies of young men in the city rather than from any programme.

That deflation has itself been modified since. The factions plainly did have institutional roles, ceremonial standing and organised structures beyond racing, and their acclamations were a recognised channel for public opinion. The honest position is that they were somewhere between a fan club and a civic institution, and that the balance shifted over time.

The Violence

Faction violence was real, frequent and serious. Chronicles record riots in Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria and Thessalonica, with deaths, arson and the destruction of property.

Procopius, writing in the Secret History, describes gangs of young partisans in the reign of Justinian with a distinctive look — hair shaved at the front and grown long behind, beards and moustaches cultivated, tunics with enormous sleeves gathered at the wrist, worn in what he calls the Hunnic style. They carried weapons at night, robbed and murdered, and were protected by their faction’s patrons.

The passage is written by a hostile witness intent on blaming Justinian for tolerating Blue partisans. It is also the most detailed description of a youth subculture surviving from antiquity, and the details are too specific to be invented.

The Nika Revolt

The one occasion when faction violence became a genuine threat to the state was in January 532, and it happened precisely because the Blues and Greens combined — which was abnormal.

The sequence: a series of murders following a riot; seven condemned men, of whom two, one Blue and one Green, survived a botched hanging and took sanctuary; the city prefect refused to pardon them; both factions petitioned Justinian at the races on 13 January and were ignored; the shout changed from the names of the teams to Nika — “Conquer!” — the standard racing cry, now turned into a slogan against the government.

Five days of burning followed, in which much of the city centre including the church of Hagia Sophia was destroyed, and the factions proclaimed a rival emperor, Hypatius. Justinian prepared to flee; Theodora is said by Procopius to have stopped him with the observation that purple makes a fine burial shroud. Belisarius and Mundus then trapped the crowd in the Hippodrome and killed, by the chroniclers’ figure, some thirty thousand people.

The full account is in the Nika riots of 532. What matters here is the aftermath: the factions never again mounted a comparable challenge, and their political role diminished steadily thereafter.

The Long Decline

Chariot racing itself declined. It was enormously expensive — horses, drivers, facilities, prizes — and the fiscal crisis of the seventh century ended regular racing in most provincial cities. In Constantinople the Hippodrome continued to host races on major occasions into the twelfth century, but as an imperial ceremonial event rather than a regular sporting calendar.

The factions survived in this reduced ceremonial form for centuries. By the tenth century, the Book of Ceremonies shows them as a liturgy of the court: officials with faction titles, choirs performing fixed acclamations, a form preserved long after the content had gone.

After 1204 nothing substantial remained. The Hippodrome was used for tournaments by the Latin emperors and then largely abandoned.

Why They Matter

The Blues and Greens are the best evidence we have for organised popular life in the Byzantine city. Almost everything else we know about non-elite Byzantines comes through the filter of the church or the tax register; the factions appear as bodies of ordinary people with their own structures, their own money, their own fashions and their own capacity to make an emperor nervous.

They are also a useful corrective to the image of Byzantium as a uniformly solemn theocratic society. For several centuries the most reliable way to draw a crowd of fifty thousand in Constantinople was not a liturgy but a horse race.

The Races Themselves

The sport the factions existed for is worth describing, because its mechanics explain the intensity.

A race was run by four-horse chariots (quadrigae) over seven laps of the spine, anticlockwise, with the turns at the metae at each end. Each faction typically entered one or two chariots; a full day’s programme might run to twenty-four races.

The turns were where races were won and drivers were killed. A chariot that cut too close struck the turning post; one that swung wide lost ground and could be boxed. Drivers wrapped the reins around their bodies for control and carried a knife to cut themselves free in a crash — the naufragium, shipwreck, which the crowd enjoyed.

Successful drivers were celebrities of a kind the modern world would recognise. Porphyrius the Charioteer, active around 500, had at least seven monuments erected to him on the spine of the Hippodrome by the factions — both factions, since he drove for each in turn — and the bases of two survive in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum, carved with his portrait and epigrams from the Greek Anthology.

A driver of that standing earned more than a senior official and moved between the factions for money, which did nothing to reduce partisan feeling.

The Curse Tablets

The archaeological evidence for how seriously supporters took this is direct and slightly unnerving.

Lead curse tablets (defixiones) have been found at circus sites across the Roman and early Byzantine world, including at Constantinople and at Carthage, Antioch and Beirut. They are thin sheets of lead, inscribed, rolled or folded, and deposited — often at the turning posts, in wells, or in graves.

Their content is consistent: the writer names the opposing faction’s drivers and horses, sometimes with great precision, and calls on named demons to bind them, to make the horses stumble, to break the chariot at the turn, and to kill or cripple the driver.

Several invoke a mixture of Greek, Egyptian and Hebrew divine names, which indicates a professional magical trade supplying the texts, and the formulas recur across the empire, suggesting handbooks.

Legislation against circus magic was issued repeatedly, which is the usual indication that it was widespread. The tablets are useful evidence for several things at once: the intensity of factional feeling, the survival of practical magic well into the Christian period, and the literacy of at least some supporters.

Where the Factions Went

The institution’s long decay can be tracked, and it is more informative than a simple statement that they declined.

To the seventh century: full sporting and civic function; riots; walls manned; races several times a year in every major city.

Seventh to eighth centuries: provincial circuses close as cities contract. Racing survives only at Constantinople, on major occasions rather than a regular calendar.

Ninth to tenth centuries: the factions appear in the Book of Ceremonies as a ceremonial corps. Their leaders hold court titles, their choirs perform fixed acclamations at imperial functions, and their role is prescribed to the word. Races are held for the emperor’s birthday and a handful of other occasions.

Eleventh to twelfth centuries: continued ceremonial existence; racing increasingly rare; the Komnenian emperors preferred western-style tournaments and jousting, which Anna Komnene’s contemporaries describe.

After 1204: nothing substantial. The Latin emperors used the Hippodrome for tournaments; the restored Byzantine state had no money for chariot racing, and the arena was quarried for building material.

The trajectory — a mass popular institution reduced over four centuries to a ceremonial fossil performing scripted acclamations at court functions — is a reasonable epitome of what happened to Byzantine civic life generally.

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