In 203 CE, a young, African Christian woman named Vibia Perpetua was executed in a brutal fashion.
She and her fellow Christians were taken to the amphitheatre of Carthage (now in Tunisia), where they were grievously wounded by wild beasts before their throats were slit by gladiators. This horrific scene formed part of the celebrations for the birthday of Caesar Geta, the son of the emperor Septimius Severus.
The Roman imperial state did not engage in a systematic, empire-wide persecution of Christians in the early third century. However, many believers like Perpetua were denounced to local officials, who put them in prison. They were executed when they refused to make religious offerings to the Roman gods and emperors.
The tales of early Christian suffering are recounted in texts known as hagiographies, or accounts of saints’ lives. Perpetua’s tale stands out among these works because she may have written much of it herself.
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Still breastfeeding when jailed
The Latin text of the Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas was discovered at the Italian monastery of Monte Cassino in the 17th century. Most of it is written by an unknown narrator, who recounts the suffering of Perpetua and her fellow martyrs so that other Christians might learn from their experiences.
However, eight chapters are written in the first person singular. The narrator states these chapters are the work of Perpetua herself “just as she wrote with her own hand and according to her own perception”.
The narrator tells us Perpetua came from a respectable family, was educated and in her early twenties when she died. Her parents were still living. The Latin used to describe Perpetua’s family and upbringing indicates they were wealthy Roman citizens.
Perpetua was married and had a baby boy. She was still breastfeeding when jailed. Yet her husband is not otherwise mentioned and it would be very unusual for a wealthy woman to be nursing her own baby. This suggests Perpetua may well have been of much lower status than the narrator assumed.
Perpetua’s account begins after she and four other Christians, including the enslaved woman Felicitas, have been arrested by Roman authorities.
Across the eight chapters, Perpetua describes her relationship with family members, her father’s attempts to convince her to renounce her faith, the visions she had in prison and her treatment by Roman soldiers and officials. The final part of the tale, which includes the execution scenes described above, is told by the narrator.
Perpetua’s style is straightforward (but not uneducated), her narrative sometimes detailed, at other times frustratingly vague. Above all, it is deeply touching.
‘I was tormented by concern for my baby’
Despite being aware her Christian faith will lead to her death, separating her from her child, Perpetua expresses a deep bond with her son. “I was tormented by concern for my baby”, she writes of her initial incarceration.
She is later allowed to suckle her baby, who had been “weak with hunger” without his mother. She is even given permission to keep the boy with her. The presence of the child meant that,
prison was immediately transformed into a palace for me, so that I preferred to be there than anywhere else.
After Perpetua and her fellow Christians are sentenced to die in the amphitheatre, she is filled with anguish for her child. But God intervenes.
And just as God willed it, the baby no longer wanted my breasts nor did they cause me pain, so that I was not tortured by worry for my son nor by aching in my breasts.
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In her own words?
But are they her words? Perpetua’s story was known to the African Christian intellectual Tertullian, who mentions her martyrdom in his book On the Soul, written five to ten years after her execution. This proves there was a Perpetua, but not that she was the author of these eight chapters.
Some sceptics point to the difficulty of obtaining writing materials in prison. Others observe that many martyr accounts make ambitious claims to be authentic, eyewitness narratives.
One important argument against such scepticism is the style of Perpetua’s Latin is quite different from the narrator’s. This could be the work of a clever male author changing his style to fit different voices, much like a modern-day novelist writing a story from different perspectives.
But as Perpetua’s narrative so aptly and movingly captures the female experience, the scale tips towards authenticity.
Children and holy women
The degree of Perpetua’s concern for and interaction with her child is unusual in accounts of Christian holy women. For example, Melania the Younger, who lived in Rome in the fifth century CE, desired to become an ascetic, which meant she needed to renounce all worldly ties, including her family.
When Melania’s two children died young, she interpreted this as God’s endorsement of her desire to reject the conventions of Roman marriage and motherhood.
Another fifth century woman, Matrona, who aspired to a religious life in Constantinople, even abandoned her family and disguised herself as a man in order to enter a monastery. Matrona entrusted her little girl to another Christian woman to raise as her own.
This echoes the story of the enslaved woman Felicitas, whom the narrator says was eight months pregnant when arrested with Perpetua. We do not have Felicitas’ own words, but we are told she was worried her execution and martyrdom would be delayed because of her pregnancy.
After the other Christian prisoners pray she will go into premature labour so she might die alongside them, Felicitas gives birth to a little girl, whom she entrusts to a member of the African Christian community. Perpetua’s own son was left in the care of her family.
Some Christian women rejected motherhood in favour of devoting themselves exclusively to their faith, either through martyrdom or asceticism, while others engaged in child-rearing for the good of the larger community.
Family ties
Perpetua’s tale develops this theme of Christian communities. In many early Christian texts, it is a woman’s husband who poses an obstacle to the holy path she has chosen, but in Perpetua’s narrative, it is her father.
She writes that her father was so worked up by the word “Christian” that “he launched himself towards me in order to tear out my eyes”, before thinking better of it and withdrawing.
When she is arrested, Perpetua writes,
I gave thanks to the lord because my father was not present, and I was refreshed by his absence.
The father makes two further appearances in the narrative, showing his growing desperation. Visiting Perpetua in prison, he kisses her hands and prostrates himself before her feet, begging her to consider her family’s reputation. This is a typical theme of Christian hagiography, since the hero or heroine’s journey represents a rejection of the futures their family had planned for them.
He then confronts her during a public trial in the forum, brandishing her baby son while imploring Perpetua to make offerings to the Roman gods for the safety of the emperors and thus save herself.
In response, the Roman governor orders the old man to be flogged. She writes:
I grieved for my father’s situation as if it were me who had been beaten, I grieved for him in his wretched elderly state.
Perpetua’s journey from fearing to pitying her father draws her closer to her Christian brothers and sisters, preparing her for the martyrdom that awaits. The idea of a “spiritual family” coming to take the place of a “natal family” is found throughout early Christian texts.
And yet the attention Perpetua’s account gives to her family and their suffering is unusual. She dwells on her concern for her son and father; her anxiety about her mother and brother and memories of another brother who died of cancer as a child.
It may be that this, less stylised, element of the text also reflects Perpetua’s own voice. We rarely receive such insights from hagiographies.
Perpetua’s legacy
The tale of Perpetua and her fellow martyrs grew in popularity in subsequent centuries. While Perpetua does not even mention Felicitas in her first-person narrative, the women became inseparable in the Christian tradition.
They were venerated in Rome by the mid-fourth century. The writings of Saint Augustine show the Passion was read out in North African churches on their feast day (March 7).
In addition to the famous Latin text, there is also a Greek version. It probably dates to the fifth or sixth century CE, but was not known to scholars until the late 19th century, when it was discovered in Jerusalem. Since it was very rare to translate Latin texts into Greek, this shows Perpetua’s story was considered to be so important it needed to be made accessible to the Greek-speaking communities of the eastern empire.
There are also shorter, fifth-century accounts known as Acts, which abandon the first-person narrative and instead include a detailed dialogue between the Christians and the Roman governor of Africa.
The Acts rewrite the narrative in various ways, providing Perpetua with a husband who appears at her trial along with other members of the family. Perpetua reassures her father that devoting herself to Christ and his glory is the only way that she will truly be a “perpetual daughter”.
Perpetua lives today not only through Christian veneration as a saint, but through this moving first-person account. This allows us to understand the motivations and sufferings of an African woman who lived almost 2,000 years ago.