The Life
Perpetua was a young noblewoman of Carthage, twenty-two years old, recently married, with an infant son still nursing. Felicitas was a young slave-woman, eight months pregnant. They were both catechumens — preparing for baptism but not yet baptized. In the year 203, the Emperor Septimius Severus forbade new conversions to Christianity. They were arrested with three of their fellow catechumens. Their catechist Saturus came forward voluntarily to share their fate. Perpetua kept a diary in prison — the earliest Christian writing we have from a woman’s hand. She recorded her arguments with her pagan father, her visions, her prayers for her dead younger brother. Felicitas gave birth to a daughter in prison three days before the games. On March 7, 203, all of them — the noblewoman, the slave, and the men with them — went together to the amphitheater. Perpetua and Felicitas were thrown to a wild heifer and finally beheaded by the sword.
Around 202 AD, the Emperor Septimius Severus forbade any new conversions to Christianity. The persecution that followed reached Carthage in North Africa in the year 203. A small group of catechumens — Christians who had begun their formation but had not yet been baptized — were arrested together. They included Perpetua, a young noblewoman; Felicitas, a slavewoman who was eight months pregnant; her fellow-slave Revocatus; and two free men, Saturninus and Secundulus. Their catechist Saturus, who had been instructing them in the Faith, was not arrested with the others. When he heard about their imprisonment, he came forward voluntarily to share their captivity. The little company of six was complete.
Saint Perpetua’s father was a pagan. He came to the prison again and again to beg her to deny Christ. He brought her infant son with him. He cast himself at her feet, weeping, and called her not “daughter” but “lady,” pleading with her to think of him in his old age. She loved him deeply, but she would not deny Christ. She said to him: “Father, do you see this water pot here? Can it be called by any other name than what it is?” He said no. She answered: “So neither can I be called anything other than what I am, a Christian.” In his rage he struck her. He went away in tears. He came back many times to repeat his pleas. He could not break her.
While Saint Perpetua was in prison, the Lord gave her visions. In one she saw a great bronze ladder reaching to heaven, with knives and swords fastened to its sides, and a great dragon coiled at its foot. Her catechist Saturus went up first; she stepped on the dragon’s head and went up after him. At the top she found a garden with a Shepherd who gave her a piece of cheese, and the angels were singing “Amen.” She woke up still tasting the sweetness in her mouth. She told her companions: “We will be martyred. The Lord has shown me. We must give up all hope of this life.” In another vision she saw her younger brother Dinocrates, who had died of disease as a child of seven, suffering in a dark place. She prayed for him constantly. In a second vision she saw him healed and at peace. The night before her death she dreamed she was in the arena wrestling a giant Egyptian and that she defeated him. “This was not a fight with beasts,” she wrote, “but a fight with the Devil himself.”
Saint Felicitas was eight months pregnant when she was arrested. Roman law forbade the execution of a pregnant woman. As the day of the games approached, Felicitas was distressed: if she did not give birth before the games, her execution would be postponed and she would have to die alone afterward, with criminals, instead of with her companions in Christ. She and her companions prayed three days for an early labor. Their prayer was heard. She gave birth to a healthy daughter in prison, who was raised by a Christian woman of the city. When one of the guards mocked her cries during labor, asking what she would do when she faced the wild beasts, she answered: “Right now I am the one who suffers what I suffer; but in the arena there will be Another in me, who will suffer for me, because I will be suffering for him.”
The day of the games came. The redactor writes: “The day of their victory dawned, and they marched from the prison to the amphitheater joyfully as though they were going to heaven, with calm faces, trembling, if at all, with joy rather than fear.” At the gate the soldiers tried to make the men put on the robes of pagan priests and the women the robes of priestesses of Ceres. The martyrs refused. They had come, they said, of their own accord precisely so that they would not be made to participate in pagan worship. The tribune yielded; they entered the arena in their own clothes. Saint Perpetua walked in singing psalms. Saint Felicitas, who had given birth three days before, walked beside her. The men were given over to a leopard and a bear; the two women, in mockery of their motherhood, were thrown to a wild heifer.
The wild heifer charged. It threw Saint Perpetua first; her tunic was torn. She got up, pulled it back over her thighs to preserve her modesty, and asked someone for a pin to fasten her hair, because (in her words) it was not right that a martyr should die looking as though she were mourning in her hour of triumph. Then she saw Saint Felicitas, who had been thrown to the ground and was lying there. Saint Perpetua walked over, gave Saint Felicitas her hand, and lifted her up. The two of them stood side by side, the noblewoman and the slavewoman together. The crowd, by some movement of pity or shock, called for the women to be taken back through the Gate of Life. They were spared the heifer.
Saint Paul wrote these words to the Galatians in the first century. Saints Perpetua and Felicitas show us what they look like in flesh and blood. The noblewoman and the slave, the educated Roman and the illiterate African, the nursing mother and the mother giving birth in prison — they were all one in Christ Jesus. They were arrested together, baptized together, given visions together, walked into the amphitheater together, and went to their crowns together. The whole Roman world’s social order was undone in their friendship. The Christian Church saw what the Apostle Paul had been talking about, written into the bodies of two young women holding each other up in an arena.
The crowd, when the wild beasts had not killed them, called for the sword. The five surviving martyrs stood up and walked to the middle of the arena. They exchanged the kiss of peace, the same kiss that begins the Eucharistic liturgy, sealing themselves in love before going to the Lord. Each one was beheaded in turn. When Saint Perpetua’s turn came, the gladiator who was to kill her was young and inexperienced; his hand trembled, and he could not strike cleanly. She herself took his hand and guided his sword to her throat. The eyewitness wrote: “So great a woman could not have been killed unless she had willed it.” They received their crowns together on March 7, 203.
Perpetua and Felicitas show us, in flesh and blood, what it means to be one in Christ. The noblewoman who could have walked free if she had only sacrificed to the gods; the slavewoman who had nothing to lose but her own body; the nursing mother who left her son behind; the pregnant woman who left her newborn daughter behind. All of them walked into the same arena, exchanged the same kiss of peace, fell beneath the same sword. The Christian Church remembers them together because they belonged together. Their friendship in Christ was deeper than every social barrier of the Roman world. They are still, after eighteen hundred years, the great early icon of what the apostle meant when he said we are all one in Christ Jesus.