Notes
1. All classical sources quoted in this chapter are translated by Futrell 2006, unless otherwise indicated.
2. According to Friedlander (1908, 21) boxers, wrestlers and runners competed frequently at the Circus (maybe as part of the factions): ‘An inscription found near the grove of the Arvales mentions a Green runner Fuscus, who died at the age of 24, and won 53 times at Rome, twice in the Circus of the Arvales, and once at Bovillae. … Pliny mentions the long runs frequent in the Circus of his day: his distances seem fabulous; one boy eight years old ran 75 millia from midday to evening; another 160 millia; an inscription of an imperial runner tells of his doing 94 millia in one day.’
3. The spiralling costs of ever more exotic spectacles were becoming too great a burden for the state. The games did persist after Aurelius' legislation, apparently despite it rather than because of it; the limitations were completely ignored by Aurelius' son and successor Commodus, for example (Futrell 2006, 48).
4. Kleingeld and Brown (2008) state that ‘There is no doubt that the Stoicism of Cicero's De Officiis or of Seneca's varied corpus explicitly acknowledges obligations to Rome. This is a moderate Stoic cosmopolitanism, and empire made the doctrine very easy for many Romans by identifying the Roman patria with the cosmopolis itself.’
5. Cameron (1976, 158) identifies the circus as a place where the people made their views known to the emperor. He cites Cicero, Pro Sestio 115.