The Circus Maximus began as the Vallis Murcia, a marshy, flood-prone valley between the Aventine and Palatine hills where early spectators sat on grassy banks to watch horses race around wooden turning posts in the mud. Tradition held that Romulus found an underground shrine to Consus there and used the races of the Consualia to stage the abduction of the Sabine women, and the track was squeezed between the shrines of Murcia, Consus and the Ara Maxima of Hercules. Tarquinius Priscus built the first raised wooden seats for elites on the Palatine side, Tarquinius Superbus added seats for plebeians on the Aventine side, permanent starting stalls came in 329 BC, and aediles paid for ever costlier games, including a hunt in 169 BC with 63 leopards and 40 bears and elephants.
Julius Caesar enlarged the circus around 50 BC to roughly 621 by 150 meters and an estimated 150,000 seats, with a water channel shielding the crowd from animals. Shops, prostitutes and fortune tellers filled the arches beneath the timber stands, a basket maker’s shop started a fire in 36 AD, and the Great Fire of 64 AD broke out at its curved end. Augustus added the pulvinar and an obelisk from Heliopolis, Domitian watched from his Palatine palace, and Trajan rebuilt in stone and sat among the people. The last beast hunt came in 523 and the last races under the Ostrogothic king Totila in 549, before six meters of soil buried the track.
- Twelve curved starting stalls were likely sprung open at once by twisted sinew under torsion, released by a single lever.
- Seven laps were counted with sculpted eggs from at least 174 BC and with bronze dolphins from 33 BC.
- The 12 gates stood for the zodiac and the seven laps for the days of the week or the planetary spheres.
- A seating collapse under Diocletian is recorded as killing 13,000 people.
- The site later held a market garden, a gasworks from 1852 to 1910, and Italy’s 2006 World Cup celebration.
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