I believe the word "factio" originally referred to the chariot-racing
teams, and then the supporters of each team banded together for social
welfare etc, and the modern meaning of "faction" as a political grouping
grew out of that.
Jean
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote
Ooh! I was just reading about this! The Roman hippodrome had four
stables which each had a different color associated with it: red,
green, blue, and white. They were like different teams, so maybe the
filmmakers assumed people would have dressed in their teams' colors
just like modern sports fans (and I wouldn't be surprised if they were
right). Those four colors were also associated with the four political
factions that served as labor unions/guilds/political machines for the
city of Rome, and later Constantinople, so alternatively, they could
have been implying that those people were supporters of those factions.
I haven't found out yet if the stables were associated with the
factions, but in Constantinople, the emperor Justinian was nearly
overthrown by an alliance of the four factions at the end of a chariot
race in the hippodrome, which seems to have been used by the factions
to whip the crowd into a suitably revolutionary frenzy.
I hope this helps!
Tea Rose
-----------------------
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 06:07:04 -0700
From: WickedFrau <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [h-cost] Toga trim in Gladiator..
I was rewatching Gladiators this weekend and wondered if there were some
color system to the toga trims. In some scenes there seemed to be
groups of black trim, red and I think blue....anyone aware of any
historical information for this?
Thanks,
Sg
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Jean Waddie
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