Witchcraft at the Colosseum
Medieval people believed this was an arena for sorcery!
Greetings Gold and Silver Level Templar Knights! This may seem odd but in the Middle Ages, people genuinely believed that the Colosseum had been built as a venue for sorcery and magic. How did they come to think this?
There's an incredible medieval legend that the Ancient Roman poet Virgil practised witchcraft at the Colosseum. It's based on zero historical fact. The real Virgil wrote epic poems but was never known to have cast spells or conjured up demons. Yet centuries after his death, that's exactly what he became famous - or infamous - for.
Virgil (70BC - 19BC) was a highly influential Roman poet, best known for his epic poem The Aeneid. It tells the story of Aeneas, a Trojan who fled the legendary siege of Troy, went to Italy and became the ancestor of the Roman people. Virgil's popularity as a poet continued throughout the Roman period and well into the Middle Ages. Proof of that is that in the 14th century story The Divine Comedy, by Dante, it is Virgil who guides the author on a journey through hell and heaven.
In the medieval period, Virgil was transformed into a magician, a sorcerer, with immense power. Legends developed that he had the ability to control the weather, summon up demons, and even create life. The venue where he conducted some of his displays of witchcraft was the Colosseum - pictured below in a medieval image.
The sheer scale of the Colosseum and its structure - especially the warren of tunnels beneath it - confused the medieval mind. The notion arose that Virgil had conjured up the vast arena and brought into being the tunnels beneath it.
Virgil evolved into a kind of Nostradamus-like figure with people opening his works at random pages and reading out a verse like it was a horoscope, or prophecy. This was necromancy by "bibliomancy" - the use of books to divine the future. Christian scholars interpreted Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, which describes a golden age ushered in by a newborn, as a prophecy of Jesus's birth. This led to Virgil being viewed as a pre-Christian prophet.
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