"I cannot call myself anything other than what I am: a Christian." — Vibia Perpetua, in her own account of her trial
Two Women Who Walked Into the Arena
On March 7, 203 AD, in the amphitheatre of Carthage — in what is now Tunisia, on the northern coast of Africa, in the Roman province that had once been the great rival of Rome itself — two young women were led out to die. One of them was a noblewoman of twenty-two, nursing an infant. The other was her slave, still recovering from childbirth, who had given birth in prison a few days before. They had been arrested together as part of a group of catechumens preparing for baptism. They had been held for months in conditions of considerable brutality. They had been offered, repeatedly, the chance to make the one gesture that would free them: to offer incense to the genius of the emperor, to perform the ritual acknowledgment of imperial divinity that Rome required and that a Christian could not give.
They had refused. Both of them. The noblewoman had refused her father's tears, refused the magistrate's question, refused the logic of every person who loved her and could not understand why she was choosing the arena over the cradle. The slave had refused whatever pressures were brought to bear on a woman with no social standing and no protector, who had nothing to offer the world except her body and her faith and who had offered both unreservedly to God.
They walked into the arena together.
What makes Perpetua and Felicity unique in the whole calendar of martyrs — what gives them a place in the Church's memory that has not dimmed across eighteen centuries — is not only that they died. Many died. It is that one of them wrote. Perpetua kept a diary in prison. She recorded her dreams, her conversations with her father, the experience of nursing her son in the dark of the cell, the visions that God gave her to prepare her for what was coming. She wrote until she could not write anymore, and then someone else — possibly Tertullian, possibly another member of the Carthaginian Christian community — completed the account with the narrative of the execution that Perpetua could not write herself because she was the one being executed.
The Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis — the Passion of the Holy Perpetua and Felicity — is the oldest surviving text written by a Christian woman. It is one of the most remarkable documents in the history of the early Church. It is also, on its own literary terms, extraordinary: vivid, psychologically acute, theologically dense, honest about fear and love and the cost of what she was doing in a way that no later hagiographer could have invented.
We have her own words. That changes everything.
This is a saint — these are saints — for every mother who has had to choose between her child and her faith. For every woman who has discovered that what she believed would be tested in the most extreme way imaginable. For those who share a vocation across every line of class and legal status that human society draws between people. For the noblewoman and the slave who faced the same death together and whose names have been spoken together in the Canon of the Mass ever since.
Carthage and the World That Made Them
Carthage in 203 AD was the second city of the western Roman Empire — after Rome itself, the largest and most prosperous city in the Latin-speaking world, a metropolis of perhaps three hundred thousand people on the Gulf of Tunis, rebuilt by Rome after its destruction in the Punic Wars and now a center of commerce, rhetoric, law, and the full cultural inheritance of Roman civilization.
It was also a city with a substantial and growing Christian community. The African church — the church of Tertullian and Cyprian and Augustine, the church that would produce some of the greatest theological minds of the patristic era — was already by the early third century a community of real depth and sophistication. Christianity had reached North Africa through the Greek-speaking communities of the east Mediterranean coast, had taken root among the urban poor and the educated classes simultaneously, and had developed in the African context a particularly intense and uncompromising character: the African church was a church that took martyrdom seriously, that had thought carefully about the theology of witness, that understood the arena not as a defeat for the faith but as its most complete expression.
The Emperor Septimius Severus — himself of African origin, born in Leptis Magna in what is now Libya — issued an edict in 202 or 203 that prohibited conversion to Christianity or Judaism. The edict was directed specifically at the catechumenate, the formal period of preparation for baptism, which was where the growing faith was most visibly recruiting. Arresting catechumens was arresting the Church's future.
The group taken in Carthage in 203 included five people: Perpetua, Felicity, and three men — Saturninus, Secundulus, and Revocatus. Felicity was a slave; Revocatus was possibly her fellow slave or her husband, though the Passio does not specify their relationship with precision. Saturus — a sixth member of the group, the man who had been teaching them and who seems to have been their catechist — gave himself up voluntarily after the others were arrested, unwilling to leave those he had formed to face what was coming without him.
Vibia Perpetua: The Noblewoman With Everything to Lose
She was well-born — honeste nata, the Passio says, liberally educated, respectably married, twenty-two years old, with a son still at the breast. Her family was pagan; her mother may have had Christian sympathies, but her father certainly did not. She had a brother who was also a catechumen, which suggests the faith had entered the family through the younger generation. She was, by the standards of her world, a woman with everything: family, social position, a child, a life that had every reasonable prospect of continuing in the comfortable patterns of the Carthaginian upper class.
She was arrested. Her father came to the prison.
The scenes between Perpetua and her father are the most psychologically complex passages in the Passio, and they have never been surpassed in the martyrological literature as a portrait of the particular anguish that religious commitment inflicts on the people who love the one who is committed. He came again and again. He wept. He appealed to her love for him, to her responsibility to her son, to the madness of what she was doing. He called her by every term of endearment he knew. He argued, he pleaded, he prostrated himself before her in a posture of supplication that, in Roman terms, was an act of extraordinary self-humiliation — a father debasing himself before his daughter, inverting the entire order of paternal authority.
She was not moved. Not because she did not love him — the Passio makes clear that she loved him deeply and that his grief cost her enormously — but because she had understood something about the nature of the choice she was making that made the grief, however real, beside the point. He asked her: Can you not call yourself anything other than a Christian? She looked at the water jug beside her in the cell and said: Can that vessel be called by any other name than what it is?
She was what she was. She could not be called by another name.
Her infant son was brought to her in prison. She was able to nurse him. For a period the child was with her in the cell, and this passage of the Passio — the nursing mother in the prison, the cell gradually transformed into what she describes as a palace because her son was there — is one of the most tender passages in early Christian literature. When the child was eventually taken from her, or weaned, she experienced a physical relief from the pain of nursing that she also experienced as a spiritual sign: her body was preparing itself for what was coming. The child was provided for. She could let go.
She received four visions. The first and most extended is the most famous: she sees a narrow ladder reaching to heaven, lined on its sides with iron instruments of torture — swords, knives, hooks — so that anyone who climbed carelessly would be torn. A dragon lies at the base. She tramples the dragon's head and climbs, and at the top she enters a vast garden where a white-haired shepherd is milking sheep. He gives her a small curd of cheese from his milking. She eats it. She wakes with the taste still sweet in her mouth.
She understood this vision immediately: she would not survive the trial. She was going to die. She shared this interpretation with her brother, and she accepted what it meant without apparent panic — accepted it with the quality of supernatural peace that her account communicates without ever claiming it for herself directly.
Felicity: The Slave Who Would Not Be Left Behind
Felicity's story is told more briefly in the Passio — she did not keep her own diary, and the narrator who records her story is working from observation and report rather than from her own words. But what is told is essential.
She was pregnant when she was arrested. Eight months pregnant, which meant that she could not be executed in the arena — Roman law forbade the execution of pregnant women. The time of the scheduled games approached. Her companions faced the arena; she faced the possibility of being left behind, of surviving into a later martyrdom separated from the community she had been arrested with, among strangers rather than friends.
She prayed. The Christian community prayed with her. Three days before the games, she went into labor. The prison labor was difficult — early, painful, the conditions of a Roman prison cell in the early third century being what they were. The guards mocked her: if she was crying out now, what would she do in the arena, facing the beasts?
She answered: Now it is I who suffer. In the arena, another will be in me who will suffer for me, because I shall be suffering for him.
This answer — given in the pain of a prison labor, without preparation, in response to a taunt — is a piece of theology. It is the theology of martyrdom in one sentence: the martyr does not suffer alone because Christ suffers in the martyr, and the martyr suffers in Christ, and the exchange is so complete that the one who seems to be dying is, in the deepest sense, being held.
She gave birth to a girl. The child was taken by a Christian woman of the community and raised as her own daughter. Felicity's body, postpartum and weakened from the birth, recovered enough in three days for her to walk into the arena with her companions.
She walked in with Perpetua. The Passio notes that the two women entered together — the noblewoman and the slave, the well-born and the servile, the educated and the unlettered — and that in the arena they stood side by side, which was itself a statement about what baptism and the grace of martyrdom had made of the distinction between them.
The Arena
The account of the martyrdom is written by the narrator who took up the Passio after Perpetua's diary ends.
The games were held on the anniversary of the Emperor Geta's birthday. The five martyrs walked into the arena — Saturninus, Revocatus, Saturus, Perpetua, Felicity — and the narrator preserves details about each of them that are specific enough to carry the weight of eyewitness testimony. Saturninus was tossed by a boar and died from the wounds afterward. Revocatus and Saturus faced a leopard. The two women were sent against a wild cow — the choice of animal was deliberate in its obscenity, because a cow was the female of the species, a gender-based humiliation intended to parallel their gender — and the crowd, even the Carthaginian crowd that had come to watch an execution, was disturbed by what they saw: two young women, one of them visibly postpartum, standing in the dirt of the arena.
Perpetua was tossed by the cow. She landed hard. She rose, found her clothing torn, rearranged herself with a composure that the narrator records with evident amazement, and crossed the arena to help Felicity, who had been thrown down. She helped her to her feet. The two women stood together.
They were recalled from the arena to the gate, where the crowd demanded their return for the final act. Perpetua was in a state that the narrator describes as a kind of trance — as if she had been asleep, as if her spirit had been elsewhere. She did not seem to know what had happened to her body. She asked when she would be sent against the cow. She was shown the marks on her body. She did not believe them until she saw them.
She was led back into the arena.
The soldiers detailed to execute the surviving martyrs were inexperienced, or rattled by what they were doing. The man assigned to Perpetua was shaking. His first blow with the sword was not mortal — it struck her collarbone rather than her throat, and she cried out in pain. She herself — this is the Passio's account — took the young soldier's trembling hand and guided the blade to her own throat.
She died helping the man who was killing her do his work.
The Voice That Could Not Be Silenced
The Passio Perpetuae was read in the churches of North Africa for generations after the martyrdom. Augustine, writing in Carthage two centuries later, knew it and preached on it and cited it. It was read in some communities as part of the liturgy — a practice that required the African bishops to clarify that it was not Scripture, though its authority was such that distinguishing it from Scripture was apparently necessary to say out loud.
The names of Perpetua and Felicity entered the Roman Canon of the Mass — the great prayer of the Eucharist that was being standardized across the western Church in the early centuries — in the list of women martyrs: Felicity, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia, Anastasia. Their names have been spoken at every Mass in the Roman Rite since Late Antiquity, which means that more people have said the names of a twenty-two-year-old noblewoman and her slave in the context of worship than the names of almost any other human beings in history.
The patronage of mothers is direct: both women were mothers who died for the faith within months of giving birth. Their patronage of nursing mothers is Perpetua's specifically — the nursing in the prison cell, the act of letting the child go when the child had to be let go, is one of the most specific and physical details in the Passio. The patronage of cattle comes, with the dark humor that the martyrological tradition occasionally permits itself, from the animal that killed them in the arena.
But the deepest patronage, the one that underlies all the others, is the patronage of the Church's understanding of what baptism means. Perpetua and Felicity were catechumens — they had not yet been baptized when they were arrested. They received baptism, the Passio tells us, during the period of their imprisonment. They were baptized on their way to the arena. The martyr's death was understood in the early Church as a baptism in blood — the baptism of desire completed in the most complete way imaginable — and these two women are the supreme early witness to what it means to take seriously the faith you have asked to receive.
| Born | c. 181 AD (Perpetua); date unknown (Felicity) — Carthage, Roman Africa |
| Died | March 7, 203 AD — Amphitheatre of Carthage (wild animals; sword) |
| Feast Day | March 7 |
| Order / Vocation | Laypeople; catechumens; martyrs |
| Canonized | Pre-Congregation; immemorial cultus; names in the Roman Canon since Late Antiquity |
| Company | Martyred with Saturninus, Revocatus, Secundulus, and Saturus |
| Key writings | Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis (Perpetua's prison diary, c. 203; oldest surviving text by a Christian woman) |
| Patron of | Mothers · nursing mothers · expectant mothers · cattle · martyrs · Carthage · Africa |
| Known as | Martyrs of Carthage · The Two Mothers · Witnesses of the African Church |
| Their words | "I cannot call myself anything other than what I am: a Christian." (Perpetua) · "Now it is I who suffer. In the arena, another will be in me who will suffer for me." (Felicity) |
Prayer to Saints Perpetua and Felicity
O Saints Perpetua and Felicity, noble and slave, mother and mother, you stood together in the arena of Carthage and showed the world what baptism makes of the distinctions it draws between people — that in Christ there is neither bond nor free, and that the grace that makes a martyr does not check your papers before it fills you. Perpetua, you wrote what it cost you, and the Church has been reading it ever since and will never stop reading it: the father's tears, the nursing in the dark cell, the visions, the taste of the shepherd's cheese still sweet in your mouth when you woke. Felicity, you answered the guard's taunt with a sentence of pure theology and then you stood up from a prison floor three days after giving birth and walked into the arena beside your mistress because you would not be left behind. Intercede for all mothers who must choose between what they love and what they believe. Pray for those who carry new life in difficult circumstances. Pray for the catechumens approaching their baptism and for all who have not yet understood what they are asking for when they ask for it. And pray for us, that we may know what we are — that when someone asks us what we call ourselves, we may answer, without hesitation and without apology, as you answered: a Christian. Nothing else. Only that. Amen.
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