HOWZAT

They were still coming 400 years later when Sidonius Apollinaris described how “the hoarse roar from applauding partisans stirs the heart, and the contestants, both horses and men, are warmed by the race and chilled by fear”. By then the biggest chariot races had relocated to the new centre of the Empire, Byzantium, now Istanbul.

In AD531 riots at the Hippodrome boiled over into a full-scale revolt against the Emperor Justinian. It took five days to restore order and the rioters were brutally suppressed. About 30,000 of them were locked inside the Hippodrome and slaughtered in a single day.

Chariot racing fell from favour over the following centuries and by the time that a crusader army sacked Byzantium in 1204 the daredevil skills of its greatest protagonists had vanished from the world.

Now they are being revived in Neuendorf, a small farming village south of Berlin where Pfeiffer, a horse trainer by profession, has spent the past year working on the show.

Times Archive, 1959: Ben-Hur again turned into a film spectacle

The two syllables that make up the name Ben-Hur are enough to conjure up visions of all that is mammoth, colossal, expensive and spectacular in cinema

• Ben-Hur at Windsor Castle, 1927

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He has four months left to train 35 horses, mostly Andalusian thoroughbred stallions, to race together in teams of four while their drivers perform high-speed stunts and crashes behind them.

The five chariots in the race will circle an arena little more than twice the size of Centre Court, Wimbledon, at more than 30mph (48km/h).

Watching Pfeiffer cooing softly to his horses as he executed 180-degree turns at speed with only a slight tweak of his fingers, it was possible to imagine Abrahams’s dream made flesh.

Then it was my turn.

The best thing about chariot racing is boasting about it in advance. The worst thing is putting on a skimpy centurion’s costume in the cold.

The night before I flew to Germany I had sat down to watch the chariot race scene from Wyler’s Ben-Hur. Two charioteers crash horribly in the first three minutes. At the airport lounge I made the mistake of looking up my new sport on Wikipedia: “Chariot racing was often dangerous to both driver and horse,” the entry began. “They frequently suffered serious injury and even death.” The Romans even had a word for these casualties: naufragia, or shipwrecks.

Real Roman racing chariots were death traps: they were designed to be as light as possible to maxmise speed so they were built entirely from wood and leather. Pfeiffer’s home-made chariot is ten times heavier at 350kg and has left and right brake pedals secreted in the rubber floor of the platform. But it is not safe.

Fortunately I was not allowed to steer. Clementia, the Roman Goddess of Mercy, must have intervened on my behalf. I just had to stand up straight and not injure myself.

Even at a gentle trot the experience was atmospheric — the clink of armour, the jangle of the horse harnesses and the deep clang of the sheet-metal chariot each time its Polish-made axle bounced over a bump in the ground.

There is no suspension on a chariot so a novice rider feels the strain of balancing first in the calves and then in the knees, which keep smashing into the inside of the chassis. Imagine riding a wheelbarrow towed behind a rally car.

After a couple of stately laps of the field with the horses’ chins tucked primly into their chests, Pfeiffer decided to pick up speed and charge. Hooves thundered, clods of earth flew up past my face, the air pressure squeezed my eyes into a squint. This was what I had come for.

For as long as it lasted I was Charlton Heston — without the muscles or the tan or the repertoire of heroic grimaces. Or indeed the reins.

The premiere of Ben Hur Live is at the O2 Arena in London on September 15

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