fall when a too eager charioteer, in his
desire to accomplish this, struck against the protecting curbstone. Ac
each circuit was completed by the foremost chariot, a steward of the
races placed a great wooden egg in a conspicuous place upon the _spina_
to mark the score; and keen was the excitement when, in a match between
two well-known rivals, six eggs announced to the spectators that the
seventh, the deciding circuit, had begun. The entire course thus
traversed seven times in each direction made a race of between three and
four miles, and each heat would probably occupy nearly a quarter of an
hour.[117] The number of heats _(missus)_ was usually four and twenty,
and we may therefore imagine Theodoric and his people occupying the best
part of a summer day in watching the galloping steeds, the shouting,
lashing drivers, and the fast-flashing chariot wheels.

[Footnote 117: I take this calculation from Friedlander
(Sittengeschichte Roms, II., 329), but I cannot find the precise figures
on which he bases his calculation We know the length of the Circus, but
of course for our purpose the length of the _spina_ round which the
chariots careered is the important factor.]

At Rome, as at Constantinople, though not in quite so exaggerated a
degree, partisanship with the charioteers was more than a passing
fancy; it was a deep and abiding passion with the multitude, and it
sometimes went very near to actual madness. Four colours, the Blue and
the Green, the White and the Red, were worn respectively by the drivers,
who served each of the four joint-stock companies (as we should call
them) that catered for the taste of the race-loving multitude. Red and
White had had their day of glory and still won a fair proportion of
races, but the keenest and most terrible competition was between Blue
and Green. At Constantinople, a generation later than the time which we
have now reached, the undue favour which an Emperor (Justinian.) was
accused (532) of showing to the Blues caused an insurrection which
wrapped the city in flames and nearly cost that Emperor his throne. No
such disastrous consequences resulted from circus-partisanship in Rome:
but even in Rome that partisanship was very bitter, and, in the view of
a philosopher, supremely ridiculous. As the sage Cassiodorus remarked:
"In these beyond all other shows, men's minds are hurried into
excitement, without any regard to a fitting sobriety of character. The
Green charioteer flashe