Hidden women of history: Saint Perpetua, a young mother put to death in a Roman amphitheatre

• In 203 CE, a young, African Christian woman named Vibia Perpetua was executed in a brutal fashion.
• This horrific scene formed part of the celebrations for the birthday of Caesar Geta, the son of the emperor Septimius Severus.
• The Roman imperial state did not engage in a systematic, empire-wide persecution of Christians in the early third century.

Still breastfeeding when jailed

• The narrator states these chapters are the work of Perpetua herself “just as she wrote with her own hand and according to her own perception”.
• The narrator tells us Perpetua came from a respectable family, was educated and in her early twenties when she died.
• She was still breastfeeding when jailed.
• Perpetua’s account begins after she and four other Christians, including the enslaved woman Felicitas, have been arrested by Roman authorities.

‘I was tormented by concern for my baby’

• “I was tormented by concern for my baby”, she writes of her initial incarceration.
• She is later allowed to suckle her baby, who had been “weak with hunger” without his mother.
• After Perpetua and her fellow Christians are sentenced to die in the amphitheatre, she is filled with anguish for her child.

In her own words?

• Perpetua’s story was known to the African Christian intellectual Tertullian, who mentions her martyrdom in his book On the Soul, written five to ten years after her execution.
• This proves there was a Perpetua, but not that she was the author of these eight chapters.
• One important argument against such scepticism is the style of Perpetua’s Latin is quite different from the narrator’s.

Children and holy women

The degree of Perpetua’s concern for and interaction with her child is unusual in accounts of Christian holy women. For example, Melania the Younger, who lived in Rome in the fifth century CE, desired to become an ascetic, which meant she needed to renounce all worldly ties, including her family.

• When Melania’s two children died young, she interpreted this as God’s endorsement of her desire to reject the conventions of Roman marriage and motherhood.
• Some Christian women rejected motherhood in favour of devoting themselves exclusively to their faith, either through martyrdom or asceticism, while others engaged in child-rearing for the good of the larger community.
• Read more:
  Hidden women of history: Olympias, who took on an emperor, dodged a second marriage and fought for her faith

Family ties

• In many early Christian texts, it is a woman’s husband who poses an obstacle to the holy path she has chosen, but in Perpetua’s narrative, it is her father.
• I gave thanks to the lord because my father was not present, and I was refreshed by his absence.

• Visiting Perpetua in prison, he kisses her hands and prostrates himself before her feet, begging her to consider her family’s reputation.
• This is a typical theme of Christian hagiography, since the hero or heroine’s journey represents a rejection of the futures their family had planned for them.
• And yet the attention Perpetua’s account gives to her family and their suffering is unusual.

Perpetua’s legacy

• While Perpetua does not even mention Felicitas in her first-person narrative, the women became inseparable in the Christian tradition.
• The writings of Saint Augustine show the Passion was read out in North African churches on their feast day (March 7).
• This allows us to understand the motivations and sufferings of an African woman who lived almost 2,000 years ago.

Caillan Davenport has received funding from the Australian Research Council and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Meaghan McEvoy has received funding from the British Academy, Dumbarton Oaks and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.