The Danger at Midday: Death Threats in the Apocalypse 15 sees the possibility of a combination (of punishments). They would have to kill an ass and then clean out all the guts. Strip the girl…and sew her up inside his belly so that only her face protrudes…the ass will die, as he has long deserved; the girl will endure the bites of beasts when the worms lacerate her limbs, the scorching of fire when the sun scorches the ass’s belly with its excessive heat, and the agony of the cross when the dogs and vultures draw out her very guts (Met. 6,31- 32). This is an imaginary description but one that probably describes precisely how people look at these spectacles. Usually it involves individual events, the death of a pair of men, but in Josephus we also find descriptions of mass annihilations, namely those of Jewish captives after the Jewish war. I have already cited the text where it is said that Titus makes the Jewish captives re-enact a battle as a spectacle. A bit further on in the story of Josephus he relates: during his stay at Caesarea, Titus celebrated his brother’s birthday with great splendour, reserving in his honour for this festival much of the punishment of his Jewish captives. For the number of those destroyed in contests with wild beasts or with one another or in the flames exceeded two thousand five hundred. Yet to the Romans, notwithstanding the myriad forms in which their victims perished, all this seemed too light a penalty. After this Caesar passed to Berytus, a city of Phoenicia and a Roman colony. Here he made a longer sojourn, displaying still greater magnificence on the occasion of his father’s birthday, both in the costliness of the spectacles and in the ingenuity of the various other items of expenditure. Multitudes of captives perished in the same manner as before (BJ VII.37-40). For the rest Trajan does the same thing with thousands of captive Daci. J. Bennett writes about the second Dacian games with reference to the victory in the second Dacian war and the death of Decebalus: Trajan offered 332.5 gladiatorial pairs in 2 munera, the second of 12 days. A third munus, with 340 pairs lasted 13 days, and, 1 November 109, not less than 117 days were devoted to the main series of displays, involving 4.941.5 gladiatorial pairs and 11.000 animals displayed and killed. Finally, on 11 November 109, Trajan inaugurated a naumachia, a structure devoted to mock sea-battles, and exhibited a further 127.5 pairs over a period of 6 days, completing the celebrations for the conquest of Dacia on 24 November 109 (44). (44) J. BENNETT, Trajan: Optimus Princeps. A Life and Times (London – New York 1997). On pp. 96-97 about the triumph after the first Dacian war in the year 102/103 and on pp. 101-103 about the second triumph after the second Dacian war. The citation is on p. 102.