20 Sjef van Tilborg now be caught by the rider on the white horse (ejpiavsqh) and together with the beast out of the earth thrown still alive into the lake of fire that burns with sulphur (19,20). It is clear that this entire motif runs parallel with the world of the munera in which one fights to win, because otherwise death is the consequence. Victory is life; defeat is death. It is realistic language only with ‘the people who are slaughtered’. The rest is figurative- imaginary. But with the ejsfagmevnoi it is about real, existing people: about presumably small groups of people who are executed individually in public ad bestias or ad flammas in the midday intermission of the big, festive city munera, in order to be ‘finished off ’ afterwards with a sword, to be carried off with iron hooks in order to be burned or thrown away as feed for the birds and the dogs. For the spectators of the spectacles these people were the losers, perhaps the victims. The Apocalypse is a book that in imitation of the Jewish martyria (60) has assisted in ideologically changing into a victory that which is for the affected people a painful death. That is necessary, because the author foresees that the threat with such sort of death will continue to apply also for the future: “until the number of their fellow servants and their brethren should be completed, who were to be killed as they themselves had been” (6,11). d) Two other imaginary fights Beside the final qhriomaciva in 19,11-21 which I have already pointed out at different times, there are, finally, still two other imaginary descriptions of qhriomaciva: one with a fatal outcome and one where the fight remains still undecided. In the vision of the two witnesses appears the beast that ascends from the bottomless pit as the great opponent (11,7-10). The beast is presumably the same as the beast that is described in 13,1-8. It bears then the characteristics of the beasts which are used as qhriva in the munera: the leopard, the bear and the lion (61). In spite of their great magical talents, the two witnesses are really no match for the beast. (60) See Die Entstehung der jüdischen Martyrologie (eds. J.W. VAN HENTEN – B. DEHANDSCHUTTER a.o.) (Leiden 1989). (61) At one time a combination of precisely these animals appears in the inscriptions, namely in an inscription from Sagalossos, ROBERT, 98; separately the beasts appear constantly in all sorts of inscriptions, reliefs and other depictions. See also note 23 about the going hand in hand of the reference to Dan 7,4-6 and the reference to the munera.