Sts. Perpetua & Felicity

Sts. Perpetua and Felicity were Christians executed in the amphitheatre at Carthage in North Africa, traditionally on 7 March 203, during a persecution under the emperor Septimius Severus. Vibia Perpetua was a well-born married woman of about twenty-two with a nursing infant; Felicity was a slave, pregnant when she was arrested. The account of their arrest, imprisonment and death survives as The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, and its central section presents itself as Perpetua's own prison diary, which would make it the earliest surviving writing by a Christian woman.

Carthage, North Africa Died c. 7 March 203 Feast: 7 March Named in the Roman Canon Earliest writing by a Christian woman

1. The Noble and the Slave

Perpetua was a Roman citizen of Carthage, well educated, married, with an infant son still at the breast. The text gives her age as about twenty-two and names her father, a pagan who appears repeatedly and never converts. Her mother and a brother were Christians. Another brother, Dinocrates, had died in childhood years before.

Felicity was a slave. The text names her alongside Revocatus, who was a fellow slave, and the group also included Saturninus and Secundulus. All of them were catechumens, still under instruction, when they were arrested. Their catechist Saturus was not with them at the arrest and gave himself up afterwards so as not to be separated from them.

The two women are always named together, and the reason is theological rather than sentimental. In the Roman social order of Carthage, a matron of Perpetua's rank and a pregnant household slave belonged to different legal categories with different rights, different penalties and different worth. Their community treated them as sisters and buried them under one anniversary, and the Church has spoken their names in the same breath ever since. Paul had written a century and a half earlier that in Christ there is neither slave nor free (Gal 3:28). Carthage in 203 is what that sentence looked like when it was taken literally.

They were baptised while under arrest, before being moved into the prison proper. Perpetua records that at her baptism the Spirit told her to ask for nothing but endurance of the flesh.

2. "I am a Christian"

The exchange with her father comes at the very start of Perpetua's own narrative, before her arrest is even complete. He wanted her to save herself, and he tried argument first. She pointed to a vessel lying on the ground and asked him whether it could be called by any name other than what it was. He said no. She answered that in the same way she could not call herself anything other than what she was, a Christian. The text records that he threw himself at her in a rage and left, and did not come back for days.

He returns three more times in the narrative, and the scenes are the most painful thing in the document. He appeals to her grey hairs, to her mother, to her brothers, to her infant son, and finally he kisses her hands and throws himself at her feet and calls her lady rather than daughter. At the hearing before the procurator Hilarianus he appears carrying her baby and begs her to sacrifice for the emperor's welfare. Hilarianus orders him beaten with a rod, and Perpetua writes that she felt the blow as though she had been struck herself.

Hilarianus asked her the standard question and she gave the standard answer: Christiana sum, I am a Christian. He condemned the whole group to the beasts. Perpetua writes that they went back down to the prison cheerful.

Two details in that section are worth holding. First, nobody in the account is asked to renounce Christ in so many words; they are asked to perform a small civic gesture, an offering for the emperor's health, which most of their neighbours would have regarded as no more than good citizenship. Second, the pressure that nearly broke Perpetua was family love rather than fear of death. Her father is the antagonist of the story and he is drawn with obvious tenderness.

3. The Arena

The final section of the text is written by an eyewitness rather than by Perpetua, and it says so. The prisoners were brought out for games held for the birthday of the emperor's son Geta. They refused to be dressed as priests of Saturn and priestesses of Ceres for the procession, and the tribune gave way, so they entered as themselves.

The men faced a leopard, a bear and a wild boar. Saturus, the catechist, was mauled. Perpetua and Felicity were sent in first stripped and netted, and the crowd itself objected to the sight of a young mother and a woman fresh from childbirth, so they were brought back clothed. A mad heifer was chosen for them, the text says, to mock their sex.

Perpetua was thrown and her tunic torn along the side. The text records that she sat up, pulled the tunic together to cover her thigh, and then asked for a pin to fasten her disordered hair, because loose hair was the sign of mourning and she did not intend to appear to be in mourning on the day of her glory. Then she helped Felicity up.

The crowd called for them to be finished with the sword. They rose, exchanged the kiss of peace, and went to the appointed place. Perpetua's executioner was a novice and his first stroke struck her collarbone. She cried out, and then took his hand and guided the blade to her own throat. The narrator writes that so great a woman could perhaps not have been killed unless she willed it.

The whole passage is restrained, specific and full of the kind of detail a witness supplies and an inventor does not. Whatever a reader concludes about the visions, the account of the arena reads as testimony.

4. The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity: What the Text Is

The document has three layers, and it announces them. An anonymous editor opens with a preface and closes with the account of the deaths. In the middle sits a first-person narrative attributed to Perpetua, written, the editor says, in her own hand, and a shorter vision account attributed to Saturus. The editor states that he has added nothing to their words.

Scholars debate how much the editor shaped the whole, and the first-person sections are widely accepted as substantially Perpetua's. The voice in them is distinct: plain, concrete, preoccupied with her baby and her father, without the rhetorical polish of the frame. If that judgment holds, the diary is the earliest surviving writing by a Christian woman and among the earliest surviving writings by any woman in Latin.

The text survives in Latin and in Greek. Most scholars hold the Latin to be original. A shorter, later summary known as the Acta also circulated and is a secondary reworking.

Tertullian, the great Latin Christian writer who lived in Carthage at exactly this period, refers to Perpetua and to one of her visions in his treatise on the soul, which is close to contemporary corroboration that the account was circulating in Carthage almost immediately. Some scholars have proposed Tertullian as the anonymous editor. That is a conjecture and it has never been established.

St Augustine, bishop of Hippo two centuries later, preached sermons on their feast day and quoted the text, complaining gently that in Africa it was being read in church almost as if it were Scripture. That tells us both how the account was regarded and how widely it was known.

5. Perpetua's Visions

Perpetua records four visions, and they are the reason the text has been studied by historians, theologians and psychologists alike.

The ladder. She sees a bronze ladder reaching to heaven, its sides fitted with hooks, swords and blades, so that anyone climbing carelessly would be torn. At the foot lies an enormous dragon. Saturus climbs first and calls down to her. She treads on the dragon's head and climbs, and at the top finds a vast garden and a white-haired man in shepherd's dress milking sheep, who gives her a mouthful of curd, and thousands in white robes answer Amen. She wakes with the taste of sweetness in her mouth and understands that they will die.

Dinocrates. She sees her brother, who had died at seven of a disease that disfigured his face, hot and thirsty in a dark place, with the rim of a water basin too high for him to reach. She prays for him day and night. In a second vision she sees him clean, refreshed, the wound healed to a scar, drinking freely from the basin, now lowered within his reach, and then playing as children do. She understands that he has been released from his suffering. The Church has read the pair of visions as an early witness to the practice of praying for the dead and to the reality of purification after death (CCC 1030-1032).

The Egyptian. On the day before the games she sees herself led into the amphitheatre to fight an ugly Egyptian. Her clothes are stripped, and she becomes a man; her seconds rub her with oil. A trainer of enormous size appears with a rod and a branch bearing golden apples and announces the terms. She fights, is lifted into the air, strikes the Egyptian's face with her heels, and treads on his head. She receives the branch, and understands that her fight is against the devil and that victory is hers.

Read simply, the visions are what a Christian community in 203 expected God to give a martyr on the eve of death: assurance, and a vocabulary for what was coming. Read as evidence, they are an unmatched window into how ordinary Christians of the period imagined heaven, prayer and spiritual combat, three generations before Constantine.

6. Felicity in Prison

Felicity was eight months pregnant when the games approached. Roman law forbade the execution of a pregnant woman, so she faced being held back and put to death later with common criminals rather than with her companions. The text says she and the others prayed together for her to give birth early, and that she went into labour two days before the games.

The scene that follows is the one everyone remembers. In the pain of a premature delivery she cried out, and a prison guard asked her how she expected to face the beasts if she was screaming now. Her answer was that what she suffered then she suffered herself, and in the arena there would be another in her who would suffer for her, because she would be suffering for him.

She gave birth to a daughter, and a Christian woman of the community took the child and raised her as her own.

Felicity's answer is one of the most compact statements of Christian martyrdom that survives from any period. Paul had written that it is Christ who lives in him (Gal 2:20), and a slave woman in a Carthaginian prison put it in her own words without any apparent training in theology.

7. The Montanist Question

Historians have long noticed features in the text that resemble the movement called the New Prophecy, or Montanism, which arose in Asia Minor in the second century and spread to North Africa: heavy emphasis on continuing prophecy and visions, on the Spirit speaking in the present, and a strong ascetic and martyrial temper. The editor's preface, which argues that new visions and new prophecies should be honoured as much as old ones, is the passage most often cited. Tertullian himself moved toward Montanism later in life.

The question has no settled answer. Some scholars read the text as a Montanist production, some as the work of a mainstream Carthaginian community whose piety happened to look like that, and some hold that the categories were less sharply drawn in 203 than they became later. Montanism was eventually rejected by the wider Church, chiefly for subordinating the Church's ordinary teaching authority to private prophecy.

What the Church did with the text is clear enough. Perpetua and Felicity were honoured universally, their names were placed in the Roman Canon, and Augustine preached on them without hesitation. The martyrs were received on the strength of their deaths.

8. Their Names in the Mass

Felicity and Perpetua are the first two women named in the list of martyrs in the Roman Canon, the first Eucharistic Prayer, followed by Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia and Anastasia. Their inclusion in that list, fixed centuries before any formal canonisation process existed, is a measure of how quickly and how far their story travelled from Carthage to Rome.

The Catechism defines martyrdom as the supreme witness given to the truth of the faith, borne even unto death, and notes that the martyr bears witness to Christ who died and rose (CCC 2473). Perpetua's Christiana sum before Hilarianus and Felicity's answer to the prison guard are both instances of exactly that, spoken by people with no office in the Church and no formal education in doctrine.

9. Feast Day and Devotion

Their memorial in the general Roman calendar is 7 March, the traditional date of their deaths, and it is an obligatory memorial. The date has been kept in the Roman Church since antiquity.

Devotion to them has always been strongest among mothers, and Perpetua in particular is invoked by mothers and by expectant mothers, for obvious reasons: the diary is largely the record of a woman trying to arrange care for a nursing baby from inside a prison. Felicity is invoked by women in difficult pregnancies and by those who have had to give a child into someone else's care.

They are also patrons in the broader sense of the African Church, and modern African Catholicism has taken them up as evidence that Christianity in Africa is as old as Christianity anywhere. The site's page on Christianity in Africa sets out that history.

10. What a Reader Can Take From Them

The pressure usually comes from people who love you. Perpetua was never threatened into apostasy by an enemy she could despise. She was worn at by her father, who was right about everything except the one thing that mattered. Most Christians will meet the same shape of difficulty.

Say what you are. The water-pitcher argument is unanswerable because it is not an argument. Perpetua declined to describe herself falsely, and everything else followed from that single refusal.

Rank does not survive baptism. A matron and a slave died holding hands, and the Church put the slave's name first in the Canon of the Mass. Any Christian community that reproduces the social sorting of the world around it has failed the test Carthage passed in 203.

Grace arrives at the point of need, not before. Felicity screamed in childbirth and expected help in the arena. She was clear that she had no reserve of courage stored up. She expected Christ to supply it at the moment it was required.

Pray for your dead. Perpetua's prayer for Dinocrates is one of the earliest pictures we have of a Christian doing it and believing it worked. See purgatory for what the Church teaches about purification after death.

11. Frequently Asked Questions

Who were Perpetua and Felicity?

Perpetua and Felicity were Christians executed in the amphitheatre at Carthage in North Africa, traditionally on 7 March 203, under a persecution during the reign of Septimius Severus. Vibia Perpetua was a well-born married woman of about twenty-two with a nursing infant; Felicity was a slave who was pregnant when arrested and gave birth in prison two days before the games.

Did Perpetua really write a diary in prison?

The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity contains a first-person narrative that its anonymous editor says was written by Perpetua in her own hand. Scholars debate how far the editor shaped the whole document, and the first-person sections are widely accepted as substantially hers, which would make it the earliest surviving writing by a Christian woman. Tertullian, writing in Carthage at the time, refers to one of her visions.

What did Perpetua say to her father?

She pointed to a vessel lying on the ground and asked whether it could be called by any name other than what it was. He said no. She answered that in the same way she could not call herself anything other than what she was, a Christian. He returned three more times to plead with her, including at her trial, where the procurator Hilarianus had him beaten.

How did Perpetua and Felicity die?

They were condemned to the beasts and sent into the arena against a mad heifer, which threw them without killing them. The crowd then called for the sword. They rose, exchanged the kiss of peace, and were killed by gladiators. Perpetua's executioner was a novice whose first stroke struck her collarbone, and she took his hand and guided the blade to her throat.

When is the feast of Sts Perpetua and Felicity?

Their obligatory memorial in the general Roman calendar is 7 March, the traditional date of their deaths in 203. Their names are also spoken in the Roman Canon, the first Eucharistic Prayer, at the head of the list of women martyrs.

Why does Perpetua's vision of Dinocrates matter?

Perpetua saw her brother, who had died at seven, suffering and thirsty, prayed for him, and then saw him refreshed and playing. The Church has read the pair of visions as an early witness to Christian prayer for the dead and to purification after death, which the Catechism treats at paragraphs 1030 to 1032.