Circus Maximus

The valley between the Aventine and the Palatine, the Vallis Murcia, would have been farmland prone to Tiber flooding. The earliest races were run in that farmland setting, with "nothing more than turning posts, banks where spectators could sit, and some shrines and sacred spots"; the turning posts, each of three conical stone pillars, may have been the first permanent structures on the ground.

In Livy's account the first Etruscan king of Rome, Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, raised wooden perimeter seating for the equites and patricians, and his grandson Tarquinius Superbus added the first seating for the plebs. Roman tradition placed something older at the southeastern turn: an underground shrine to Consus, a minor god of grain stores, which Romulus was said to have found soon after the founding of the city and around which he invented the Consualia, the games at which his men abducted the Sabine women.

Permanent wooden starting stalls were built in 329 BC, staggered to equalise the distance from each stall to the central barrier; by the late Republic or early Empire there were twelve, and the teams were known by their colours, chiefly the Blues and the Greens. Stone trackside seating, for senators only, went up in the 190s BC, and races typically ran seven laps, counted off from at least 174 BC with large sculpted eggs and from 33 BC with bronze dolphins as well.

Julius Caesar's rebuilding, begun in the 40s BC, carried the seating tiers around almost the whole circuit on a track about 621 m long. The total number of seats is uncertain and was probably in the order of 150,000; Pliny the Elder's figure of 250,000 is unlikely. The wooden bleachers were damaged by fire in 31 BC.

Augustus probably repaired that fire damage, though he claimed credit only for an obelisk and a pulvinar. The obelisk was brought from Heliopolis at enormous expense and set midway along the dividing barrier, Rome's first and a reminder of his victory over his Roman foes and their Egyptian allies. The pulvinar was a shrine raised above the trackside seats, from which he sometimes watched the games alongside the images of the gods.

Flooding, probably through the starting gates, continued until Claudius made improvements, and fire was the greater danger: a blaze in AD 36 seems to have begun in a basket-maker's workshop under the stands, and Tiberius compensated the businesses that lost their premises. In AD 64 fire broke out at the semicircular end, swept the stands and shops and destroyed much of the city; the Circus was rebuilt to the same footprint. In AD 81 the Senate raised a triple arch to Titus at that end, topped by a gilded bronze quadriga and marking the capture of Jerusalem. After further fire damage under Domitian, reconstruction in stone was completed by Trajan in 103, the phase to which most of the surviving remains belong.

In Diocletian's reign the collapse of a seating section killed some 13,000 people. In 357 a second obelisk was brought to Rome at the order of Constantius II and raised on the central barrier by the urban prefect Memmius Vitrasius Orfitus; it stands today beside San Giovanni in Laterano. With Christianity established as the official religion of the empire, the ludi gradually fell out of favour. The last known beast-hunt at the Circus took place in 523. The last known races there were held by Totila in 549.

After the 6th century the Circus fell into disuse, its lower levels buried under waterlogged alluvial soil and debris. In the 11th century it was "replaced by dwellings rented out by the congregation of Saint-Guy"; a watercourse was dug in the 12th century to drain the soil, and by the 16th century the ground was a market garden and a stone quarry. In 1587 Pope Sixtus V had two obelisks removed from the central barrier, one re-sited at the Piazza del Popolo. A Jewish cemetery was laid out there in 1645, and in 1852 the Anglo-Italian Gas Society built a gas works that remained until 1910.

Mid-19th-century workings uncovered the lower parts of a seating tier and an outer portico; clearance of the valley ran from 1911 into the 1930s, when the fascist regime also put temporary exhibition structures on the ground. Later excavation has exposed further stretches of seating, the curved turn and the central barrier, the depth and waterlogging of the site limiting how far it can go. From the early 1980s the open ground became Rome's chosen setting for concerts, jubilees and mass gatherings, and the site is now a public park.