Sports Riots are Nothing New—Just Ask the Romans

“Better to be a Pagan than a Blue, God Knows!”  So shouted the mass of people calling themselves the Greens after the color of their favored chariot team, in Constantinople’s great venue for chariot racing, the hippodrome.  It was January of 532 AD, as the Greens, united by an aggressive brand of Christianity, finding their identity in uniform colors and organized seating, here demanded redress of their grievances from the emperor.  The Blues were doing the same thing, and thanks to the ham-fisted response of the authorities they would soon be joining each other in riots that would last for several days, ending with tens of thousands of casualties and the reduction of major government office buildings—as well as the great church of Holy Wisdom—to smoking ruins.  The reason that the Greens would join the Blues was that both sides were protesting efforts by the imperial authorities to extract two men—one from each faction—whom a mob had hidden in a church when the ropes that were to hang then for murder broke at the execution.  If God had saved these people, the authorities should spare them.

In other words, sports riots are not a new thing.

But sports themselves are only half the story.  An ideology independent of sport is extremely useful in defining groups such as the Blues, the Greens, and their modern counterparts.  Back in the fifth century, religion proves to be a useful analytic.  In an era when the great split between two different brands of Christianity was shaping collective identities in different regions of the Eastern Roman Empire, offering sharply bifurcated visions of righteousness and expressions of class solidarity, it was perhaps inevitable that it would be deeply implicated in factional violence.  It helped, of course that the Christianity of this era tended, in any manifestation, to offer inclusive expressions shaped by opposition to groups of all sorts ranging from Zoroastrians, Jews and heretics to pagans (by this time in short supply) and, ultimately, the forces of darkness.  It is perhaps no accident that our records of fan violence pick up in the half century after the Council of Chalcedon anathematized the beliefs of a very large proportion of the empire’s population. 

In earlier centuries, when identity was less ideologically defined, the nature of fan violence was different.  Location, for instance was the organizing force in a riot, in Italy in 59 AD when the people of Nuceria and Pompeii began to kill each other in Pompeii’s capacious amphitheater.  At Rome, the original home of circus factions, we do not hear of factional violence in the imperial period—perhaps because there were then four rather than two factions—but rather of riots enflamed by communal suspicion.  The most famous of these (stage managed by a group seeking to unseat the reigning emperor’s favorite minister) took place after the seventh race in the circus (about mid-morning) when a crowd of children ran into the arena, led by a tall woman (later identified as a divinity) who shouted out attacks on the aforementioned favorite, setting off a violent demonstration.  The complaint was famine, always a hot-button issue at Rome.  Another form of riot, the “my mime is better than your mime” riot, stemmed from the passions aroused by competitive dancers.

Unlike the violence of sixth-century circus factions, earlier riots at Pompeii or Rome were one-off events, and the imperial government was not pleased.  Executions followed the Pompeian riots, along with the closure of the amphitheater; the official responsible for the grain riot, although he got his target killed, did not remain long in office.  Dance rioters were flogged.  This is not atypical of modern fan violence, when a specific set of circumstances triggers a violent response.  In Ann Arbor, for instance, riots used to accompany the Michigan basketball team’s appearance in the NCAA tournament—but there has not in my quarter century here been a post-football game riot—and the tournament riot has also been a feature of life around Michigan State.  Conversely, in Columbus, Ohio, the post-game (win or lose) football riot was long a part of the culture.  (The recent riot on the Penn State campus is another animal entirely.)  In all cases, increasingly strong reactions by local authorities have had some impact on behavior.  What made the recent post-Stanley Cup riots in Vancouver so striking was not that they happened, but that they happened in a place without a history of this sort of chaos.

The primary targets of “event riots” are stop signs and cars.  Riots targeting property are different from the sort of hooliganism characteristic of the Blues and Greens, or that infecting the culture of European football.  Property destruction was coincidental to the great riot of 532, and an earlier event where a charioteer at Antioch—now Antakya in southern Turkey—named Porphyrius (Mr. Purple) started a pogrom against the local Jewish population.  He went on to fame and fortune at Constantinople.  An early seventh-century text purports to be the confession of a recently baptized Jew named Jacob, previously a professional agent provocateur.  He specialized in starting riots between the Blues and Greens so that he could watch the Christians kill each other.  In doing so he tended to take advantage of the political crises of the day.  That appears true of other faction riots, and raises the question of whether Porphyrius or Jacob could have succeeded without some tacit agreement from on high.

Long-term, organized fan violence, ancient or modern, is not impelled by events on the field.  Such violence draws its force from divisions inherent to society, and, unlike “event riots” is very difficult for authorities to control, nor is it always clear that the authorities, be they civil or club, are all that committed to controlling it.  The ban on English participation in European football after the Heysel Stadium disaster was temporary and solved nothing.  Absent a strong economic or moral force opposed to violence of this sort it will continue to derive strength from precisely those discontents that first brought it into being.