Perpetua: What a Thing Is Called

The young woman had been under arrest for only a few days when her father came to see her. They had not yet been taken to the prison. She was being held under guard somewhere in or near the city of Carthage, in North Africa, in the early spring of the year 203, and her father had come for one reason: to talk her out of it.

Her name was Vibia Perpetua. She was about twenty-two years old. She had a baby son who was still nursing. And she was being held because she would not stop calling herself a Christian.

We know what happened next because Perpetua wrote it down herself. Her father, she says, loved her, and because he loved her he kept on and on at her, trying to turn her away from her faith. So she pointed to a jug that was lying there, a little water-pot, and asked him whether he could see it. He said he could. She asked whether it could be called by any other name than what it was. He said no. And then she gave him her answer. In a well-known old English translation it reads: “Neither can I call myself anything else than what I am, a Christian.”

Her father was so angry that he threw himself at her as if he would tear out her eyes. But he did not hurt her. He only frightened and distressed her, and then he went away, beaten. For a few days afterwards he did not come back, and Perpetua wrote, honestly, that she thanked God for his absence and felt refreshed by it.

It is a small scene: a daughter, a father and a clay jug. But it holds the whole of her story.

A Diary from a Prison

Before we go further, you need to know something unusual about this story. Most of what we know about early Christians who died for their faith comes from other people: friends, church leaders, or writers many years later. Perpetua’s story is different. Large parts of it are in her own words.

The account is called The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity. (“Passion” here means suffering, as in the “Passion” of Christ.) It has three layers. In the middle is Perpetua’s own diary, written in prison, in the first person, describing her arrest, her family, her visions and her trial, right up to the day before she died. Next to it is a shorter account of a dream written by Saturus, the man who had taught her the faith. Around both of them is a frame written by an editor, an unnamed Christian in Carthage who gathered the pieces together soon after the martyrs died, added an introduction, and described what happened in the arena, which Perpetua of course could not write herself. Some people have guessed that the editor was the famous Carthaginian writer Tertullian. Nobody knows for certain.

Perpetua’s section is widely thought to be the oldest surviving piece of writing by a Christian woman. Of all the women who followed Jesus in the church’s first two centuries, the first whose own words we can still read was a young mother in a prison, writing in the weeks before her death.

She ended her diary with a sentence that tells you she knew exactly what she was doing. This is what I did, she wrote, up to the day before the games; what happens at the games themselves, let someone else write, if they want to.

Carthage, About the Year 200

Carthage stood on the coast of North Africa, close to where Tunis, in Tunisia, stands today. Once Rome’s great rival, it had been destroyed and rebuilt as a Roman city, and by Perpetua’s time it was one of the largest and richest cities in the western half of the empire, with a huge amphitheatre where crowds watched gladiators and wild animals.

The church in Carthage was growing, and that made people nervous. Christians would not offer sacrifice to the gods of Rome or to the emperor’s well-being, and to many Romans that looked like disloyalty, even a danger to the city. Persecution in this period was not constant everywhere. It came in waves, often stirred up locally. Around 202 and 203, in the reign of the emperor Septimius Severus (who was himself born in North Africa), a wave broke over Carthage.

A few years earlier, Tertullian, who lived in Carthage, had written a bold defence of the Christians addressed to the Roman authorities. Near the end of it he wrote the line he is most remembered for. In the usual English it is: “The blood of Christians is seed.” The more you kill us, he meant, the more of us there will be. Perpetua was about to show what it meant.

Who She Was

The editor tells us that Perpetua was “well born,” well educated, and married in the respectable way. Her father was alive, and so was her mother. She had two brothers, one of them, like her, a catechumen. She had an aunt she mentions once. Her husband is never mentioned at all, not by her and not by the editor. We do not know whether he had died, or left, or simply was not part of the story. It is one of the silences in the account, and it is better to leave it as a silence than to fill it with a guess.

A catechumen was a person who was learning the Christian faith and preparing to be baptized. In the church of that time, preparation could last a long while, and people often waited months or years for baptism. So when Perpetua was arrested, she had not yet been baptized. She was a believer who had not yet gone through the water.

She was not arrested alone. With her were several other young catechumens: two who were slaves, Revocatus and a young woman named Felicity, and two others, Saturninus and Secundulus. Felicity was pregnant, about eight months along. Their teacher, Saturus, was not with them when they were taken. Later, of his own free will, he went to the authorities and gave himself up so that he could share what was happening to the people he had taught.

In Roman society a noblewoman and a pregnant slave would never have sat at the same table. In this account they are simply sisters, and they would die side by side.

The Dark

A few days after the scene with the pitcher, while the father was staying away, the catechumens were baptized. We are not told who baptized them or exactly where. Perpetua tells us only one thing about it: that as she came out of the water, she felt the Spirit prompting her to ask for nothing else from it except endurance in the body. She knew what was coming.

Then they were put in prison, and Perpetua was terrified. She was honest about that. She had never known darkness like it, she wrote. It was crowded and stiflingly hot, and the soldiers pushed the prisoners around and squeezed them for bribes. On top of all of it, she was sick with worry for her baby.

Two deacons of the church, whom she names as Tertius and Pomponius, paid the guards so that the prisoners could spend a few hours in a better part of the prison. There Perpetua nursed her son, who was weak with hunger. She talked with her mother and her brother, and handed the baby to them to look after. She saw how much they were suffering because of her, and she said it hurt her to see it. For several days she lived with that anxiety.

Then she was given permission to keep the baby with her in the prison. And at once, she wrote, she grew strong again. Her worry for him lifted, and her prison suddenly became like a palace to her, so that she would rather be there than anywhere else.

The Ladder

Perpetua’s brother came to her with a request. You are greatly honoured now, he told her (this is her report of what he said, not a word-for-word record), so ask God for a vision, and find out whether this will end in suffering or in release. Perpetua had already found that she could speak with the Lord, and she promised him she would tell him the next day. She asked. And she saw this.

There was a ladder, enormously tall, reaching all the way up to heaven. It was made of bronze, and it was so narrow that only one person could climb it at a time. Fixed to its sides were all kinds of iron weapons: swords, spears, hooks, knives. Anyone who climbed carelessly, without looking up, would be torn by them. And under the ladder lay a huge serpent, waiting to attack anyone who tried to climb and to frighten them off.

Saturus went up first. At the top he turned and called down to her that he was waiting for her, and told her to be careful that the serpent did not bite her. She answered that in the name of Jesus Christ it would not hurt her. And then, she says, the serpent slowly put out its head from under the ladder, as if it were afraid of her, and she used its head as the first step, and climbed.

At the top she saw a huge garden. In the middle of it sat a tall man with white hair, dressed as a shepherd, milking sheep. Around him stood many thousands of people dressed in white. He lifted his head, looked at her, and welcomed her as his child. He gave her a mouthful of the cheese he was making, and she took it in her cupped hands and ate it, and everyone standing round said “Amen.” At that sound she woke up, still tasting something sweet.

She told her brother what she had seen. They both understood what it meant. It would not be release. From then on, she wrote, they stopped hoping in anything this world could give.

Christians have long heard in the trodden serpent’s head an echo of the Bible’s first promise, that the woman’s offspring “will crush your head” (Genesis 3:15). Perpetua did not explain her dream that way herself. But she clearly understood who the shepherd was, who the serpent was, and which of them had already won.

“Have Pity on My Grey Hair”

A rumour went round that the prisoners were going to be given a hearing. Perpetua’s father came in from the city, worn out with grief, and tried one last time.

This time he did not shout. Perpetua records what he said, and it is one of the most painful passages in the whole account. He begged her to have pity on his grey hair. He reminded her that he had raised her, that he had loved her more than her brothers. He asked her to think of her mother and her aunt and her brothers, and of her son, who would not be able to live after she was gone. He told her not to destroy them all. He kissed her hands and threw himself at her feet, weeping, and he no longer called her “daughter” but “lady,” the way a servant would address his mistress.

Perpetua says she was grieved for him, because he was the only one of her whole family who would not be glad at what she was about to suffer. She tried to comfort him. Whatever happened at the trial, she told him, would be what God willed, because, in the old translation, “we are not placed in our own power, but in that of God.” He went away in deep sorrow.

Perpetua was not cold. She grieved over her father on almost every page she wrote about him. But she would not stop being what she was to make the pain stop, even his pain. Jesus had said that anyone who loves father or mother more than him is not worthy of him (Matthew 10:37). Very few people in history have had to live that verse as literally as Perpetua did.

The Hearing

One day, while they were eating, the prisoners were suddenly taken away to the forum, the public square, for their hearing. A huge crowd gathered. The judge was a Roman official named Hilarianus, who was acting governor of the province because the governor had recently died.

One by one the others were questioned, and one by one they confessed that they were Christians. Then it was Perpetua’s turn. At that moment her father appeared, holding her baby son. He pulled her down off the step and begged her to offer the sacrifice and have pity on the child.

Hilarianus joined in. Spare your father’s grey hair, he told her; spare your little boy; offer a sacrifice for the safety of the emperors. It was a small act, and many in the crowd must have thought her mad to refuse.

She said she would not. He asked her plainly whether she was a Christian. And she said that she was.

Her father kept trying to pull her down, and Hilarianus ordered him thrown to the ground and beaten with a rod. Perpetua wrote that she felt it as if she herself had been struck, and that she grieved for him in his miserable old age.

Then Hilarianus sentenced them all to be thrown to the wild beasts in the arena. And Perpetua wrote that they went back down to the prison cheerful.

There was one more sorrow. Her baby had been used to nursing and staying with her in the prison, and she sent the deacon Pomponius to her father to ask for him. Her father refused to give the child back. And then, she says, as God willed it, the baby no longer wanted to nurse, and she was not left in pain or fever. She did not have to be tormented, she wrote, either by worry for the child or by pain in her body. She saw even that as a mercy.

The Last Days

In the days that remained, Perpetua had more visions, two of them bringing her comfort about a little brother, Dinocrates, who had died of a disease at seven. The last came on the day before the games. She dreamed that she was led into the arena and fought not an animal but a frightening man, an Egyptian, and trod on his head, and a tall figure gave her a branch of victory and said, “Peace be with you, daughter.” She woke understanding that she would fight not with beasts but with the devil, and that the victory would be hers.

A military officer in charge of the prison, named Pudens, began to treat the prisoners with respect, because he could see, the editor says, some great power in them. He let their friends visit.

Saturus had his own dream, which the editor included in his words: he and Perpetua were carried by angels into a garden of light, where voices sang “Holy, holy, holy” without end.

The editor also tells us about Felicity. She was by now eight months pregnant, and she was distressed, because Roman law did not allow a pregnant woman to be executed, and she was afraid she would be held back and later put to death among strangers instead of with her friends. Her companions prayed with her, three days before the games. Immediately afterwards her labour began, and she gave birth to a baby girl. It was a hard birth, and she cried out in pain. One of the prison guards mocked her: if this hurts you so much, what will you do when you are thrown to the beasts?

Felicity’s reply has been remembered ever since. In the old translation: “I now suffer that which I suffer; but then there will be another in me, who will suffer for me, because I also am about to suffer for Him.” A Christian woman, one of the “sisters,” took the baby girl and raised her as her own daughter.

Felicity was a slave. Nobody else in Carthage would have thought her words worth writing down. The church did.

The Arena

The editor’s account of the last day, 7 March 203, is honest, and we will be honest too, without lingering.

The prisoners walked from the prison to the amphitheatre, the editor says, as if they were going to heaven, joyful, with calm faces. Perpetua walked steadily, her face shining, singing a psalm. When the officials tried to make them dress in costumes as priests and priestesses of the Roman gods, Perpetua refused: they had come of their own accord, she said, precisely so that they would not have to do such things. The officials gave way.

The men faced leopards, a bear and a boar. Perpetua and Felicity were sent in against a wild cow, and both were knocked down and hurt. The account remembers small, human things about Perpetua in that moment: that she pulled her torn tunic straight to cover herself, that she asked for a pin to put up her hair, and that, seeing Felicity on the ground, she went over, gave her her hand, and helped her up. Afterwards, at the gate, she seemed to come out of a kind of daze and asked when they were going to be sent against the cow. She would not believe it had already happened until she saw the marks on her own body.

Then she called over her brother and another catechumen and said to them, in the old translation: “Stand fast in the faith, and love one another, all of you, and be not offended at my sufferings.”

At the end, the martyrs who were still alive exchanged the kiss of peace with one another, and were put to death by the sword. The editor records that the young gladiator sent to kill Perpetua was inexperienced and his hand shook, and that she herself guided it. Saturus, who had climbed the ladder first in her dream, had died just before her. He had told Pudens, the prison officer, to remember his faith and not to be troubled but strengthened by what he saw. The editor says that Pudens, by then, was a believer.

What Came After

Perpetua and Felicity were not forgotten. Within a few years their story was being read aloud in the churches of North Africa. A generation later, Cyprian became bishop of Carthage and, in 258, was himself martyred there, beheaded under another emperor. Two centuries after Perpetua, the great North African bishop Augustine preached sermons on the day of her and Felicity’s feast, and in another of his writings he reminded readers that, much as they loved the account, it was not Scripture. Their names are still read and honoured on 7 March by Christians in many traditions around the world.

But the most important thing about Perpetua is not her fame. It is the jug. At twenty-two, not yet baptized, with a baby who needed her and a father whose heart she was breaking, she still could not make herself anything other than what she had become: a person who belonged to Jesus Christ, and who believed that he had already crushed the serpent’s head.

In Their Own Words

“We are not placed in our own power, but in that of God.”

— Perpetua, to her father, in The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity (203)

Think It Through

1. Perpetua answered her father with a clay jug: a thing can only be called what it is. What would it mean for you to be “called” a Christian in a place where that costs you something? Where is that hardest for you?
2. Perpetua loved her father and grieved for him, yet would not do what he asked. How can a person stay loving towards family who oppose their faith, without giving way?
3. A noblewoman and a slave died side by side, and the slave’s words were written down and remembered. What does that tell you about what the gospel did to the way these Christians saw one another?
4. Perpetua was honest in her diary about being terrified in the dark prison, and about being relieved when her father stayed away. Does it help you to know that a martyr felt fear? Why might it matter that she did not hide it?

Read More on Ochorus

Perpetua and Felicity appear in Fox’s Book of Martyrs, in the chapter “The Ten Primitive Persecutions,” which tells the story briefly (its date, 205, differs a little from the one most historians give, 203). For the church in Carthage a generation later, read The Treatises of Cyprian, by the bishop who led that same church through another persecution and died for his faith in 258; his author page carries a full biography. Tertullian’s own writings are not yet in the library.