Maggie Popkin (Case Western Reserve University)
Caput Factionum? Rethinking Rome through Ancient Sports Merchandise
Histories of the Roman Empire—ancient and modern—often take as a given that the city of Rome was the empire’s political, cultural, and symbolic center (see Hope 2000). For many ancient authors, Rome was the empire, and the empire Rome, rhetorically at least (e.g., Ov. Fast. 2.684; Plin. HN 36.101; Aelius Aristid. Or. 6, To Rome). These authors offer a host of reasons for Rome’s centrality: the presence of the emperor, the city’s republican history, the role of its institutions in setting economic and political policy for the provinces. It is these sorts of figures and institutions on which coins, minted by politically connected moneyers, focus (see Elkins 2015). But popular representations of Rome reveal a different picture of what made Rome the proverbial “big city” in the Roman Empire. Specifically, this paper examines sport-related objects such as lamps and drinking vessels—the sports merchandise of the ancient world—systematically analyzing for the first time how they represent the city of Rome and, therefore, what light they shed on ancient conception of the city and its role in the empire (for overviews of such objects see Köhne and Ewigleben 2000; Dunbabin 2016; Bell 2020). Sport-related consumer goods do not depict Rome via its religious, political, or artistic monuments. Instead, responding to and reflecting consumers’ desires, they represent one Roman monument above all others: the Circus Maximus, Rome’s massive stadium for chariot racing.
An analysis of Roman sports merchandise reveals that the city of Rome was equated with the Circus Maximus and the circus factions that raced within it in all corners of the empire. Such an analysis suggests that, if Rome was perceived as the center of anything, it was as the center not of politics and culture but rather of Roman sport. From glass cups from Britain with scenes of quadrigas racing in the Circus Maximus and terracotta appliqué medallions from Gaul inscribed with cheers for the Blue and Green factions, to oil lamps imported to Libya depicting famous charioteers of the factions, many people living both inside and outside Rome chose to consume an image of the city not as political or artistic capital, but as home of chariot racing.
This paper argues that, according to this material evidence, Rome appeared in ancient popular imagination less as caput orbis in any grand literary sense and more as caput factionum. This conclusion has significant implications for our understanding of representations that are often interpreted either as political symbols of empire or as evidence of “Aegyptiaca” —e.g., of obelisks on cameo glass, gems, and tokens (van Aerde 2013); in reality, these might have related as much to the context of the Circus Maximus and its central barrier as to conceptions of the “foreign” or “exotic.” Ultimately, considering representations of Rome through its Circus Maximus demonstrates the extent to which people living in the Roman Empire conceptualized sport, particularly chariot racing, as a major axis around which to organize their conceptions of Rome, both city and empire.