Romans played games everywhere. Game boards scratched into the steps of the Colosseum, carved into the pavements of the Roman Forum, incised into the floors of military barracks from Hadrian’s Wall to the Syrian desert — the physical evidence for Roman gaming culture is distributed across every context where Romans spent time waiting, resting, or socializing. The games themselves ranged from dice games requiring no equipment beyond three cubes of bone or ivory to board games of genuine strategic complexity, and they were played by everyone: soldiers, merchants, slaves, emperors. Claudius was reportedly so devoted to dice games that he designed a special board for playing in his carriage. Augustus played board games regularly. The imperial dignity was not considered incompatible with sitting across a game board from someone.

The Roman theater had Greek ancestors and Roman ambitions, which meant it was grander, more permanent, and more politically charged than the tradition it inherited. Greek theaters were cut into hillsides; Roman theaters were freestanding structures built anywhere the politics and patronage required, carrying their own support in the massive substructures that allowed them to be erected on flat ground without natural topography to exploit. The technical capacity to build a freestanding theater — requiring vaulted concrete substructure at a scale that Hellenistic builders had not attempted — was itself a statement about Roman engineering ambition, and the theaters that survive from across the empire, from Orange in France to Aspendos in Turkey, demonstrate that the ambition was fulfilled consistently.

The Circus Maximus was the largest sports venue the ancient world ever built, capable of holding somewhere between 150,000 and 250,000 spectators — the ancient sources give figures that seem implausibly large but are not entirely implausible given the site’s archaeology. For comparison, the Colosseum held perhaps 50,000 to 80,000. The Circus was Rome’s dominant entertainment venue, chariot racing was Rome’s dominant spectator sport, and the passion Romans invested in the circus factions — the Blues, Greens, Reds, and Whites — was of an intensity that modern sports tribalism only partially approximates. In Constantinople, a dispute between circus factions contributed to a riot that killed tens of thousands of people and nearly ended Justinian’s reign. This is the world that chariot racing inhabited.

The Colosseum was not called the Colosseum when it was built. Its official name was the Flavian Amphitheater — the Amphitheatrum Flavium — after the dynasty that commissioned and completed it. The name we use derives from a colossal bronze statue of Nero that stood nearby, a work of imperial self-aggrandizement that survived its subject by centuries. The building itself is formally anonymous, which is fitting for a structure whose purpose was to direct attention outward, toward the spectacle it contained, rather than inward toward the men who paid for it.