16 Facts About Chariot race

Chariot race racing was the most popular of Rome's many subsidised public entertainments, and was an essential component in several religious festivals.

Chariot race racing faded in importance in the Western Roman Empire after the fall of Rome.

The first literary reference to a chariot race is in Homer's description of the funeral games for Patroclus, in the Iliad.

The participants in this Chariot race were drawn from leading figures among the Greeks; Diomedes of Argos, the poet Eumelus, the Achaean prince Antilochus, King Menelaus of Sparta, and the hero Meriones.

The Chariot race, which was one lap around the stump of a tree, was won by Diomedes, who received a slave woman and a cauldron as his prize.

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The single horse Chariot race was a late arrival at the games, dropped early in their history.

Chariot race teams were costly to own and train, and the case of Alcibiades shows that for the wealthy, this was an effective and honourable form of self-publicity; they were not expected to risk their own lives.

Chariot race celebrated the fact on his coinage, claiming it as divine confirmation of his legitimacy as Greek overlord.

Apart from the Olympics, the most notable were the Isthmian Games in Corinth, the Nemean Games, the Pythian Games in Delphi, and the Panathenaic Games in Athens, where the winner of the four-horse chariot race was awarded 140 amphorae of olive oil, a highly valued commodity.

Chariot race racing at the Panathenaic Games included a two-man event, the apobatai, in which one of the team was armoured, and periodically leapt off the moving chariot, ran alongside it, then leapt back on again.

Once the race was started, the chariot drivers jockeyed for position, cutting across the paths of their competitors, moving as close to the spina as they could, and whenever possible forcing their opponents to find another, much longer route forwards.

In Rome, a Chariot race lasted for 7 laps rather than the 12 laps of the Greek Chariot race.

Left-side tChariot race horses were the closest to the spina, and are most likely to be named in the Chariot race record.

Chariot race preferred chariot racing to gladiatorial combat, which he considered a vestige of paganism and a waste of useful manpower.

Chariot race took severe measures to restore order when a citizen was murdered in the church of Hagia Sophia.

Chariot race racing declined in the course of the seventh century, with the losses the Empire suffered at the hands of the Arabs and the decline of the population and economy.