Anthony Kaldellis: belief

Transcript context

…And we should say, going to Perplexity here, the Hippodrome of Constantinople was the main stadium and social center of the Byzantine capital, used primarily for chariot racing and imperial ceremony, and today survives in Istanbul’s Sultanahmet district. And the reason I looked this up, I wanted to see how many people. Shaped as a long U-shaped race course with a central barrier and tiered seating, it may have held from roughly thirty thousand up to a hundred thousand spectators, though exact capacity’s debated because archeological remains are limited. That’s a lot of people. Thirty thousand is definitely a pretty un-underestimate. The Hippodrome is still there. I mean, you can see it from, it’s like satellite photos. The shape of it is still there. And actually some parts of the build, the, the Sphendone, the, the sling around the southern side is still there. You can walk around it. And it’s right next to the palace. In other words, emperors didn’t have to go far. Now, sometimes there are events for replacing an emperor. So say the emperor dies in his sleep, and there’s no heir. This happens in 491, for example. And so the people gather in the Hippodrome in order to have a discussion with the court about whom to appoint. Now, in those kinds of contexts, it’s entirely possible that there are people also in the arena, like not just in the stands. I think some military units might have just been arrayed there rather than in the stands. So you can get more people than what we project might fit in the stands, ’cause they’re not having the races on that day. We should say, so like, I think the thing that was emphasized in the first paragraph is the, the athletic events and the entertainment events, right? Like the imperial ceremony. But there is a, a sort of a political gathering was also popular. The Hippodrome was not just for sport. It was where emperors appeared before the people, where acclamations, public punishments, and political demonstrations took place, and where the rival circus factions, blues, greens, reds, whites, became powerful social and sometimes paramilitary forces. And this goes on and on and on. So this was a place—…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.