Perpetua of Carthage

She was twenty-two years old, and she was writing from a prison in Carthage. That is the astonishing fact you meet before you meet anything else about her. In a Roman city on the North African coast, in what is now Tunisia, a young noblewoman named Vibia Perpetua sat in a dungeon with a wax tablet and told her own story in her own hand. She was nursing a baby as she waited for her death. The year was 203. The Emperor Septimius Severus had, sometime after 201, forbidden conversion to Christianity, and the governor of Carthage, a man named Hilarianus, was enforcing the edict. Perpetua had been arrested along with four others — Revocatus, Felicity, Saturninus and Secundulus — all of them catechumens meaning that all of them were preparing for baptism. A sixth, Saturus, joined them voluntarily by walking up to the magistrate and saying he was one of them too. Perpetua came from a good family. She had been well educated. She had a husband — though the record is oddly silent about him, and most historians assume she was already a widow — and an infant son she was still breastfeeding. Her mother was a Christian. Her father was not, and it is her father, more than the emperor or the governor or the beasts in the arena, who breaks your heart in her diary.

He came to the prison again and again. He begged her. He pleaded on the grey hair of his own head, on the son at her breast, on the family name she was about to ruin. He tore at his beard. Once he tried to strike her. He wanted a single word from her — a recantation, a whisper of denial, any small lie the Roman authorities would accept. He wanted his daughter back. Before her arrest, in a scene she recorded early in the diary, he had pressed her hard in their home. She looked around and found a small vessel on the ground and pointed to it. Could it, she asked him, be called by any other name than what it was? He said it could not.

She was writing this down. That is what you have to keep remembering. The scene did not come to us through a bishop or a chronicler. It came to us because a young woman in a Roman prison thought her father's grief and her own answer were worth preserving with her own hand, and someone after her death kept the tablets, and the Church has been reading them ever since. During the first days of her detention she was baptized, and only afterward was she transferred with the others to the public prison, where she began the diary that has preserved her voice for nearly eighteen centuries. The guards were rough. She was, in her own words, tormented by care for her child — until deacons named Tertius and Pomponius bribed the jailers so the martyrs could be moved to a better part of the prison where her infant son could be brought to her. She nursed him. With her child beside her and her fears relieved, Perpetua would later write:

Then came the day of the hearing. Her father came again, this time carrying the baby, and stood at the foot of the platform where the Christians were being questioned. Hilarianus, the governor, tried to be kind, in the way Roman governors were kind before killing you. He asked her to spare her father's grey hairs, to spare the infant, to offer a sacrifice for the emperors' welfare. She said she would not. He asked, "Are you a Christian?" She said, "I am a Christian." Hilarianus sentenced them all to the beasts. They went back down to the prison, she says, cheerfully. The trials, the visions in the night, the arguments with her father — all of it survives because a woman kept writing. Her diary breaks off on the day before the games. What follows was added by an editor who says he was an eyewitness, and it is with him, not with her, that the story moves into the arena.

The games were held for the birthday of Geta, the emperor's younger son. Felicity, Perpetua's slave and companion, had been pregnant when arrested, and Roman law would not execute a pregnant woman; she was frightened she would be left behind and die alone later, and she prayed, and she went into labour early. She bore a daughter in the prison. A Christian sister raised the girl. Felicity walked into the arena still bleeding from childbirth. The martyrs were led out to be scourged before a line of gladiators. Beasts were set on them — a boar, a bear, a leopard for the men, a wild cow for the two women. The cow tossed Perpetua and did not kill her. She stood back up. She noticed her tunic had been torn and pulled it modestly across her thigh. She asked for a pin and fastened her hair, because loosed hair looked like mourning, and this was not a day for mourning. She found her brother in the crowd of prisoners and told him and a catechumen named Rusticus to stand fast in the faith and love one another and not be scandalized by what they had just seen her suffer. Then, when the beasts had done what they were going to do and the crowd wanted an ending, the martyrs were called forward for the sword. The others were dispatched. Perpetua's turn came. The gladiator was a young one, still in training, and his hand shook, and his first stroke missed her throat and struck her collarbone, and she cried out. Then, the eyewitness says, she took his hand — the trembling hand of the boy who was supposed to kill her — and guided it herself to her throat. That is where the record ends. The editor closes the book and says it must have been so, because a woman like that could not have been killed unless she herself had willed it. She was twenty-two. Her diary was copied and copied and read aloud in the churches of North Africa for centuries. Augustine, two hundred years later, would preach about her on her feast day and gently push back against congregations who were treating her writings almost as Scripture. Her name and Felicity's were placed in the Roman Canon of the Mass, where they are still spoken today. What survives of her is not a legend and not a fresco. It is a young woman's voice, in the first person, from inside a Roman prison, still calling her son by name and calling her Lord by name and refusing to be called by any name but the one that was true - Christian. And as Christian, she stood to her last breath. A pitcher cannot be called something it is not. Neither, she said, could she.