Circus Games, shown on a funerary relief of the second century A.D. At the left are portraits of the deceased couple, while in the centre a charioteer drives his team
past the triple turning-posts (metae) and the central obelisk of the Circus Maximus. Rivalry between the four colours of the circus (red, white, blue, and green)
frequently led to violent disturbances, which increasingly took a political form.
Social Organization
The inequalities of wealth, social standing, and privilege between what a modern government might have called the 'socio-economic categories' of the Roman world
were immense. They embraced not only the physical conditions of life and the opportunities open to individuals for their self-betterment, but areas in which modern
citizens, in theory at least, are equal: as in the differing legal penalties thought appropriate for different classes of men.
Those described as 'more honourable' (honestiores) were in the course of the second century made exempt from such punishments as flogging, burning alive,
exposure to wild beasts, and condemnation to the mines and quarries, penalties regularly imposed, by the most summary of legal procedures, on members of the
lower classes. Honestiores, to be broadly identified with the order of local councillors of the cities of the Empire, might legally be executed only by the sword, and
were able to claim rights of appeal to the jurisdiction of higher courts; in these respects they had inherited some of the privileges enjoyed by Roman citizens in the
first century, before that class had become too extensive to make them worth while. Had a programme of social reform ever been devised by the Roman government
(which in fact never saw any need for such a thing), it would no doubt have identified a free urban citizenry consisting of the craftsmen, traders, and professional