You're looking at a long grassy field where people walk their dogs. This was the Circus Maximus, the chariot-racing track that held around a quarter of a million Romans — and the emperors were its most embarrassing superfans.
Chariot racing was the true obsession of Rome, bigger than the gladiators, and fans split into four teams by color: the Reds, Whites, Blues, and Greens. You picked one young and hated the rest for life. The emperors were not above this. They were the worst offenders. Caligula was a fanatical Greens supporter who would scream at the rival teams from the imperial box, and reportedly had spectators who annoyed him dragged out of the stands mid-race. He spent so much time with the horses he sometimes stayed the night in the stables.
To feel how far this loyalty could go: the emperor Domitian tried to add two brand-new teams, a Gold and a Purple, and they barely lasted a season — you did not simply invent a new team in Rome. And centuries later, in the empire's easte
rn capital, the rivalry between the Blues and the Greens boiled over into a riot that burned down half the city and left something like thirty thousand people dead in a matter of days. Thirty thousand. Over chariot teams. This was never a hobby. It was a fault line running straight through Roman society.
Nero took it further. Being a spectator wasn't enough — the emperor wanted to win. So he had
