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Blue versus Green: Rocking the Byzantine Empire
When the spectators at Rome's spectacular circuses split into
factions, it threatened to bring the Eastern Empire down. The day
was saved by Byzantium's remarkable empress, but only at the cost
of 30,000 lives
By Mike Dash
smithsonian.com
March 2, 2012

A Roman chariot race, showing men from two of the four colorthemed demes, or associations, that produced the Blues and the
Greens. From a poster advertising the 1925 film version of BenHur. Image: Wikicommons.
Bread and circuses, the poet Juvenal wrote scathingly. Thats all the common people want. Food and
entertainment. Or to put it another way, basic sustenance and bloodshed, because the most popular
entertainments offered by the circuses of Rome were the gladiators and chariot racing, the latter often as
deadly as the former. As many as 12 four-horse teams raced one another seven times around the confines of
the greatest arenasthe Circus Maximus in Rome was 2,000 feet long, but its track was not more than 150
feet wideand rules were few, collisions all but inevitable, and hideous injuries to the charioteers extremely
commonplace. Ancient inscriptions frequently record the deaths of famous racers in their early 20s, crushed
against the stone spina that ran down the center of the race track or dragged behind their horses after their
chariots were smashed.
Charioteers, who generally started out as slaves, took these risks because there were fortunes to be won.
Successful racers who survived could grow enormously wealthyanother Roman poet, Martial, grumbled in
the first century A.D. that it was possible to make as much as 15 bags of gold for winning a single race.
Diocles, the most successful charioteer of them all, earned an estimated 36 million sesterces in the course of
his glittering career, a sum sufficient to feed the whole city of Rome for a year. Spectators, too, wagered and

won substantial sums, enough for the races to be plagued by all manner of dirty tricks; there is evidence that
the fans sometimes hurled nail-studded curse tablets onto the track in an attempt to disable their rivals.
In the days of the Roman republic, the races featured four color-themed teams, the Reds, the Whites, the
Greens and the Blues, each of which attracted fanatical support. By the sixth century A.D., after the western
half of the empire fell, only two of these survivedthe Greens had incorporated the Reds, and the Whites
had been absorbed into the Blues. But the two remaining teams were wildly popular in the Eastern, or
Byzantine, Empire, which had its capital at Constantinople, and their supporters were as passionate as ever
so much so that they were frequently responsible for bloody riots.

The Byzantine Empire at its height under the Emperor

Justinian in c. 560. Map: Wikicommons.
Exactly what the Blues and the Greens stood for remains a matter of dispute among historians. For a long
time it was thought that the two groups gradually evolved into what were essentially early political parties,
the Blues representing the ruling classes and standing for religious orthodoxy, and the Greens being the party
of the people. The Greens were also depicted as proponents of the highly divisive theology of
Monophysitism, an influential heresy which held that Christ was not simultaneously divine and human but
had only a single nature. (In the fifth and sixth centuries A.D., it threatened to tear the Byzantine Empire
apart.) These views were vigorously challenged in the 1970s by Alan Cameron, not least on the grounds that
the games were more important than politics in this period, and perfectly capable of arousing violent passions
on their own. In 501, for example, the Greens ambushed the Blues in Constantinoples amphitheater and
massacred 3,000 of them. Four years later, in Antioch, there was a riot caused by the triumph of Porphyrius, a
Green charioteer who had defected from the Blues.
Even Cameron concedes that this suggests that after about 500 the rivalry between the Greens and the Blues
escalated and spread well outside Constantinoples chariot racing track, the Hippodromea slightly smaller
version of the Circus Maximus whose central importance to the capital is illustrated by its position directly
adjacent to the main imperial palace. (Byzantine emperors had their own entrance to the arena, a passageway
that led directly from the palace to their private box.) This friction came to a head during the reign of
Justinian (c. 482-565), one of Byzantiums greatest but most controversial emperors.

The ruins of Constantinople's Hippodrome in 1600, from an

engraving by Onofrio Panvinio in De Ludis Circensibus. The
spina that stood at the center of the chariot racing circuit was
still visible then; in modern Istanbul, only three of the ancient
monuments remain.
In the course of Justinians reign, the empire recovered a great deal of lost territory, including most of the
North African littoral and the whole of Italy, but it did so at enormous cost and only because the emperor was
served by some of the most able of Byzantine heroesthe great general Belisarius, who has good claim to
be ranked alongside Alexander, Napoleon and Lee; an aged but vastly competent eunuch named Narses (who
continued to lead armies in the field into his 90s); and, perhaps most important, John of Cappadocia, the
greatest tax administrator of his day. Johns chief duty was to raise the money needed to fund Justinians
wars, and his ability to do so made him easily the most reviled man in the empire, not least among the Blues
and Greens.
Justinian had a fourth adviser, though, one whose influence over him was even more scandalous than the
Cappadocians. This was his wife, Theodora, who refused to play the subordinate role normally expected of a
Byzantine empress. Theodora, who was exceptionally beautiful and unusually intelligent, took an active role
in the management of the empire. This was a controversial enough move in itself, but it was rendered vastly
more so by the empresss lowly origins. Theodora had grown up among the working classes of Byzantium.
She was a child of the circus who became Constantinoples best known actresswhich, in those days, was
the same thing as saying that she was the Empires most infamous courtesan.

The Emperor Justinian, from a

mosaic at Ravenna. Image:
Wikicommons.
Thanks to the Secret History of the contemporary writer Procopius, we have a good idea of how Theodora
met Justinian in about 520. Since Procopius utterly loathed her, we also have what is probably the most
uncompromisingly direct personal attack mounted on any emperor or empress. Procopius portrayed Theodora
as a wanton of the most promiscuous sort, and no reader is likely to forget the picture he painted of a stage act
that the future empress was said to have performed involving her naked body, some grain, and a gaggle of
trained geese.
From our perspective, Theodoras morals are of less importance than her affiliations. Her mother was
probably an acrobat. She was certainly married to the man who held the position of bear-keeper to the
Greens. When he died unexpectedly, leaving her with three young daughters, the mother was left destitute.
Desperate, she hastily remarried and went with her infant children to the arena, where she begged the Greens
to find a job for her new husband. They pointedly ignored her, but the Bluessensing the opportunity to
paint themselves as more magnanimousfound work for him. Unsurprisingly, Theodora thereafter grew up
to be a violent partisan of the Blues, and her unswerving support for the faction became a factor in Byzantine
life after 527, when she was crowned as empressnot least because Justinian himself, before he became
Emperor, had given 30 years of loud support to the same team.

Justinian's empress, Theodora, a

leading supporter of the Blues, rose
from the most humble beginnings,
captivating the emperor with her
beauty, intelligence and
determination.
These two threadsthe fast-growing importance of the circus factions and the ever-increasing burden of
taxationcombined in 532. By this time, John of Cappadocia had introduced no fewer than 26 new taxes,
many of which fell, for the first time, on Byzantiums wealthiest citizens. Their discontent sent shock waves
through the imperial city, which were only magnified when Justinian reacted harshly to an outbreak of
fighting between the Greens and the Blues at the races of January 10. Sensing the disorder had the potential to
spread, and eschewing his allegiance to the Blues, the emperor sent in his troops. Seven of the ringleaders in
the rioting were condemned to death.
The men were taken out of the city a few days later to be hanged at Sycae, on the east side of the Bosphorus,
but the executions were botched. Two of the seven survived when the scaffold broke; the mob that had
assembled to watch the hangings cut them down and hustled them off to the security of a nearby church. The
two men were, as it happened, a Blue and a Green, and thus the two factions found themselves, for once,
united in a common cause. The next time the chariots raced in the Hippodrome, Blues and Greens alike called
on Justinian to spare the lives of the condemned, who had been so plainly and so miraculously spared by
God.
Soon the crowds loud chanting took on a hostile edge. The Greens vented their resentment at the imperial
couples support for their rivals, and the Blues their anger at Justinians sudden withdrawal of favor. Together,
the two factions shouted the words of encouragement they generally reserved for the charioteersNika!
Nika! (Win! Win!) It became obvious that the victory they anticipated was of the factions over the emperor,
and with the races hastily abandoned, the mob poured out into the city and began to burn it down.
For five days the rioting continued. The Nika Riots were the most widespread and serious disturbances ever
to occur in Constantinople, a catastrophe exacerbated by the fact that the capital had nothing resembling a
police force. The mob called for the dismissal of John of Cappadocia, and the Emperor immediately obliged,

but to no effect. Nothing Justinian did could assuage the crowd.

On the fourth day, the Greens and Blues sought out a possible replacement for the emperor. On the fifth,
January 19, Hypatius, a nephew of a former ruler, was hustled to the Hippodrome and seated on the imperial
throne.
It was at this point that Theodora proved her mettle. Justinian, panicked, was all for fleeing the capital to seek
the support of loyal army units. His empress refused to countenance so cowardly an act. If you, my lord,
she told him,
wish to save your skin, you will have no difficulty in doing so. We are rich, there is the sea, there
too are our ships. But consider first whether, when you reach safety, you will regret that you did
not choose death in preference. As for me, I stand by the ancient saying: the purple is the noblest
winding-sheet.

Belisarius, the Byzantines' greatest

generalhe once conquered the
whole of Italy with fewer than 10,000
menled the troops who massacred
30,000 Greens and Blues in the
Hippodrome to put an end to the Nika
Riots.
Shamed, Justinian determined to stay and fight. Both Belisarius and Narses were with him in the palace, and
the two generals planned a counterstrike. The Blues and the Greens, still assembled in the Hippodrome, were
to be locked into the arena. After that, loyal troops, most of them Thracians and Goths with no allegiance to
either of the circus factions, could be sent in to cut them down.
Imagine a force of heavily armed troops advancing on the crowds in the MetLife Stadium or Wembley and
youll have some idea of how things developed in the Hippodrome, a stadium with a capacity of about
150,000 that held tens of thousands of partisans of the Greens and Blues. While Belisarius Goths hacked

away with swords and spears, Narses and the men of the Imperial Bodyguard blocked the exits and prevented
any of the panicking rioters from escaping. Within a few minutes, John Julius Norwich writes in his history
of Byzantium, the angry shouts of the great amphitheater had given place to the cries and groans of
wounded and dying men; soon these too grew quiet, until silence spread over the entire arena, its sand now
sodden with the blood of the victims.
Byzantine historians put the death toll in the Hippodrome at about 30,000. That would be as much as 10
percent of the population of the city at the time. They were, Geoffrey Greatrex observes, Blues as well as
Greens, innocent as well as guilty; the Chrionicon Paschale notes the detail that even Antipater, the taxcollector of Antioch Theopolis, was slain.
With the massacre complete, Justinian and Theodora had little trouble re-establishing control over their
smoldering capital. The unfortunate Hypatius was executed; the rebels property was confiscated, and John of
Cappadocia was swiftly reinstalled to levy yet more burdensome taxes on the depopulated city.
The Nika Riots marked the end of an era in which circus factions held some sway over the greatest empire
west of China, and signaled the end of chariot racing as a mass spectator sport within Byzantium. Within a
few years the great races and Green-Blue rivalries were memories. They would be replaced, however, with
something yet more threateningfor as Norwich observes, within a few years of Justinians death theological
debate had become what amounted to the empires national sport. And with the Orthodox battling the
Monophysites, and the iconoclasts waiting in the wings, Byzantium was set on course for rioting and civil
war that would put even the massacre in the Hippodrome in sorry context.
Sources
Alan Cameron. Circus Factions: Blues and Greens at Rome and Byzantium. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976;
James Allan Evans. The Empress Theodora: Partner of Justinian. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002;
Sotiris Glastic. The organization of chariot racing in the great hippodrome of Byzantine Constantinople, in
The International Journal of Sports History 17 (2000); Geoffrey Greatrex, The Nika Revolt: A Reappraisal,
in Journal of Hellenic Studies 117 (1997); Pieter van der Horst. Jews and Blues in late antiquity, in idem
(ed), Jews and Christians in the Graeco-Roman Context. Tbingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006; Donald Kyle, Sport
and Spectacle in the Ancient World. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007; Michael Maas (ed). The Cambridge
Companion to the Age of Justinian. Cambridge: CUP, 2005; George Ostrogorsky. History of the Byzantine
State. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980; John Julius Norwich. Byzantium: The Early Centuries. London:
Viking, 1988; Procopius. The Secret History. London: Penguin, 1981; Marcus Rautman. Daily Life in the
Byzantine Empire. Westport : Greenwood Press, 2006.
About Mike Dash

Mike Dash is a contributing writer in history for Smithsonian.com. Before Smithsonian.com, Dash authored
the award-winning blog A Blast From the Past.