Great Altar and Enuma Elish. Our exploration of the amphitheater has revealed how the Roman games as mass medium of imperial ideology constructed civic self(hood) and oneness by immersing their spectators in powerful flesh-and-blood images of the other as enemy to be lawfully humiliated and eliminated, dehumanized, tortured, punished, and fought against. This is linked to a fundamentally religious dimension of the arenas as “megachurches” of the empire where the blood of the other/them was collectively
Page 165