Commontide
Ecumenical Commemoration
Martyrs at Carthage
March 7 · d. 203
also known as Perpetua and Felicity, The Martyrs of Carthage, Perpetua, Felicity, and others, Perpetua and Her Companions
Vibia Perpetua, a young married noblewoman of Carthage, and Felicitas, a slave, were arrested together with Revocatus, Saturninus and Secundulus in 203 while still catechumens. Saturus, not among them at the arrest, gave himself up afterward. Perpetua left a prison diary in her own hand; Felicity gave birth in prison three days before the games. They died in the amphitheatre on 7 March, and have never been commemorated apart.
Vibia Perpetua was about twenty-two, respectably born and liberally educated, married, with a son still at the breast, when she was arrested at Carthage with four others: Revocatus and Felicitas, who were slaves, and Saturninus and Secundulus. None of the five had yet been baptized. They were baptized under arrest, and Perpetua wrote that the Spirit bade her ask nothing of the water save endurance of the flesh. Saturus, who had not been taken with them and who had built up their courage, delivered himself up of his own will afterward.
Her father came to the prison again and again. He was not a Christian, and everything he wanted was reasonable: that she live, that his grey hairs be spared, that the baby have a mother. She pointed to a vessel lying there and asked whether it could be called by any other name than what it was. He said it could not. "Neither can I call myself anything else than what I am, a Christian." He threw himself at her as if he would tear her eyes out, and went away. Later he came back and kissed her hands and threw himself at her feet and called her not Daughter but Lady, and she comforted him: "On that scaffold whatever God wills shall happen. For know that we are not placed in our own power, but in that of God."
In prison she was given a vision. A golden ladder, very narrow, ran up out of sight, and every kind of iron weapon was fixed along its sides, swords and lances and hooks and daggers, so that anyone climbing carelessly would be torn on them. Beneath it crouched an enormous dragon. Saturus went up first. Perpetua said, "In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, he shall not hurt me," and the dragon slowly lifted its head as if afraid of her, and she trod on the first step by treading on its head. Above was an immense garden and a white-haired man in a shepherd's dress who gave her a morsel of cheese and said, "Thou art welcome, daughter." She and her brother understood it: they were going to die, not to be released.
At the town-hall the procurator Hilarianus tried her, holding the power of the sword because the proconsul Minucius Timinianus had died. Her father pushed forward with the baby: "Have pity on your babe." Hilarianus told her to spare her father's grey hairs and her boy's infancy and to sacrifice for the emperors' well-being. She said, "I will not do so." He asked, "Are you a Christian?" She said, "I am a Christian." Her father was thrown down and beaten with rods in front of her, and she wrote that his misfortune grieved her as if she herself had been beaten. All of them were condemned to the beasts.
Felicitas was eight months pregnant, and this frightened her, because Roman law would not execute a pregnant woman and she would be held back from dying with her companions. They prayed, and her labour came on at once. As she cried out, one of the prison servants jeered: if she suffered like this now, what would she do among the beasts? She answered, "Now it is I that suffer what I suffer; but then there will be another in me, who will suffer for me, because I also am about to suffer for Him." She bore a daughter, and one of the sisters took the child and raised her as her own. That sentence is the only speech of Felicity's that anyone wrote down.
Secundulus died in prison before the games. The night before, at the customary free meal, the condemned turned the supper into a love-feast and preached at the sightseers who had come to look at them; Saturus told the crowd to note their faces carefully, so as to recognise them on the day of judgment, and the text says many believed. In the morning they went in, on games held for the birthday of Geta Caesar. Perpetua entered singing psalms. Catching sight of Hilarianus, Revocatus and Saturninus and Saturus signalled to him: "Thou judgest us, but God will judge thee."
A mad heifer was brought out for the two women, a female animal chosen against custom so that the beast would match their sex. Perpetua was tossed, and when she got up she pulled her torn tunic together and pinned up her fallen hair, so that she would not look like a mourner in the hour of her glory, and then reached down and lifted Felicity from the ground. She was so far out of herself that she asked when they would be sent out to the beast, and would not believe it had happened until she was shown her own injuries. Roused as if from sleep, she said to her brother and to the catechumen Rusticus beside her: "Stand fast in the faith, and love one another, all of you, and be not offended at my sufferings."
Saturus had already survived a boar and a bear. He told the soldier Pudens he had felt no beast yet and would die of a single bite of the leopard, and it happened exactly so; the crowd shouted after him, "Saved and washed, saved and washed." He said to Pudens, "Farewell, and be mindful of my faith; and let not these things disturb, but confirm you," and asked for the ring from his finger and gave it back to him dipped in his own wound, leaving him a token and the memory of his blood. Then the four who were left were brought into the middle of the arena and gave one another the kiss of peace before the sword. The young gladiator sent to Perpetua struck badly, piercing between the ribs, and she cried out; then she took his wandering hand and guided it to her own throat.
They were buried at Carthage, and a basilica was raised over the tomb. Within a century and a half their names stood in the Roman calendar, and Perpetua's own account of the ladder and the garden was still being read aloud to congregations two hundred years later, in the words she wrote by hand in prison, the words of a woman who had already seen where the ladder went.
Notice how much of this story is argument rather than defiance. Perpetua does not shout at her father; she asks him about a pitcher, and lets him answer, and then tells him she is what she is. Notice too that she is not spared any of the cost of that answer: the baby, the beaten old man, her own grief recorded in her own handwriting. You will not often be asked what she was asked, but you are asked most weeks to name something accurately when a softer name is available and would spare somebody you love an argument. When you are next tempted to call the vessel something other than what it is, what is it that you are actually trying to spare?
The evidence for all six martyrs is essentially one document, the Passion of the Holy Martyrs Perpetua and Felicitas, and its unusual value lies in its composition. Three hands wrote it. Perpetua wrote the prison diary in the first person. Saturus wrote his own vision, which the text says he committed to writing himself. An anonymous near-contemporary redactor supplied the preface, the arrest, and the whole arena sequence, and marked the seam himself: "Of this matter she herself wrote thus far; what follows shall be told by another hand." If the attribution holds, and modern scholarship almost universally accepts it, Perpetua's diary is the earliest surviving prose by a named Christian woman. Felicity wrote nothing; everything about her, including her one recorded sentence, comes to us inside the redactor's frame, and that asymmetry between the two women is a fact of the record rather than a gap to be filled.
The date rests on one internal anchor. The Passio places the games on the birthday of Geta Caesar, who held the junior title Caesar from January 198 and was raised Augustus only in 209; the text calls him Caesar and never Augustus, which fits any year from 198 to 208. Geta's birthday is usually given as 7 March 189, though a reading of 27 May exists and the ancient sources are not wholly consistent about him. Narrowing to 203 comes from Hilarianus's tenure and from long tradition rather than from anything internal, and it is best described as inherited consensus, universally repeated and almost certainly right. The 6 March sometimes seen in popular sources is a liturgical artifact of 1908 to 1969, not a competing historical claim.
Outside the Passio there is corroboration of a kind rarely available for a martyr-act. Tertullian, writing at Carthage within about a decade, cites Perpetua by name in his treatise On the Soul for what she saw on the day of her passion, and in his open letter to Scapula he names Hilarian as a persecutor of Carthaginian Christians, which independently attests the official who condemned her. Tertullian has also long been proposed as the redactor of the frame narrative, a hypothesis going back to J. Armitage Robinson in 1891 and to Adhémar d'Alès in 1907; the Catholic Encyclopedia calls it an unproved assertion, and modern study of the text's prose rhythms has turned against it. He is a near-certain early reader and a possible editor, not a documented author.
Liturgically the trail is early. The Depositio Martyrum, the earliest surviving Roman martyr-calendar, whose content was probably fixed by 336 and which is transmitted in the codex compiled about 354, carries the entry "non. Martias. Perpetuae et Felicitatis, Africae." That is two names and a province: the companions are not there. At Carthage a basilica was raised over the tomb, and Père Delattre's excavation recovered a marble plaque, found on 29 March 1907 and now dated to the early sixth century, probably from the Catholic restoration under the Vandal king Hilderic; it names all six, Saturus, Saturninus, Revocatus, Secundulus, Felicitas and Perpetua, as suffering on the Nones of March. The dating of that inscription rests on secondary synthesis rather than on a published excavation report.
In the Roman Rite the feast has always been theirs jointly, and its one disturbance was administrative: 7 March was the ancient date, then Thomas Aquinas was assigned that day and the two women were reduced to a commemoration on it, so Pius X moved them to 6 March in 1908; the reform of 1969 restored them to 7 March and moved Aquinas to 28 January. They were demoted, moved and restored as a unit. They are named together in the Roman Canon, in the Nobis quoque peccatoribus after the consecration, with Felicity spoken first and Perpetua after her, among Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia and Anastasia; no source explains the reversal of the usual order. The Eastern churches keep them on 1 February, in an entry that names Perpetua of Carthage and then the catechumen companions with Felicity among them, and no source explains the difference of date. Anglican and Lutheran calendars keep 7 March by inheritance from the West. Relics of Perpetua and Felicity rest in the Reliquary Chapel of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at the University of Notre Dame; a local tradition also places relics of Perpetua at Vierzon in France, with no documented route. In art the swords of their execution became the standard attribute in the second millennium, while the sixth-century Ravenna mosaics give them no attributes at all and identify them by inscription and by place in the procession of women, with Felicity dressed in plainer garments than Perpetua to mark that she had been a slave even among the crowned. Devotional reference works instead put forward the wild heifer and make them patrons of cattle and of ranchers, which the art-historical record does not support. Eric Gill named a typeface for Perpetua in the 1920s, and it was used to print Walter Shewring's 1929 translation.
The whole account depends on one text, the Passion of the Holy Martyrs Perpetua and Felicitas, and every quotation above is taken from the translation of Robert Ernest Wallis in volume three of the Ante-Nicene Fathers (1885), which is in the public domain and divides the work into six large Arguments. The vessel exchange and the ladder vision stand at Argument I, sections 2 and 3; the words to her father about not being placed in our own power at Argument II, section 1; the trial before Hilarianus at Argument II, section 2; Saturus's own written vision at Argument IV, section 1; the death of Secundulus, Felicity's labour and her single recorded sentence, and the free meal at Argument V, sections 1, 2 and 4; and the entry into the amphitheatre, the heifer, Perpetua's last words, Saturus and the ring, and the sword at Argument VI, sections 1 to 4. Readers should know that Wallis renders the ladder golden where modern editions render the Latin as bronze. The scholarly standard is now Thomas Heffernan's The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity (Oxford University Press, 2012), with a new critical Latin text, a fresh translation and the first full English commentary; before it, the critical edition was C. I. M. I. van Beek's of 1936, and J. Amat's Sources Chrétiennes volume of 1996. J. Armitage Robinson's The Passion of S. Perpetua (Cambridge, 1891) remains in print circulation and underlies later public-domain editions. The two ancient witnesses outside the Passio are Tertullian's On the Soul, chapter 55, and his To Scapula, chapter 3, both in public-domain translation; the reception history runs through Augustine's Sermons 280 to 282 and his On the Soul and its Origin, book I chapter 12, on Dinocrates.
Augustine preached at Hippo on their feast between 391 and 430; Sermons 280, 281 and 282 survive, and Sermon 280 refers to the Passio "as it was all being read," which fixes public liturgical reading of the text two centuries after the events. The complete text of Sermon 282, known for centuries only in an abbreviated form, was recovered from an Erfurt manuscript in 2007. Augustine also took up the Dinocrates episode, Perpetua's vision of her small brother dead at seven, first thirsty and disfigured and then clean and drinking, in his book On the Soul and its Origin, arguing against Vincentius Victor that the text nowhere says the boy died unbaptized; there, marking his own limit, he observes that the matter has no record in the canonical Scripture. A widely circulated claim that Augustine complained the Passio was read on a level with Scripture could not be located in any source and should not be repeated.
The text itself survives at a great distance. Nine Latin manuscripts and one Greek are known on Thomas Heffernan's 2012 inventory; the earliest well-attested Latin witness is St Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 577, page 165, of the ninth or tenth century, some six hundred and fifty years after composition. Robinson's edition of 1891 worked from four witnesses: Codex Casinensis 204, Codex Parisinus Latinus 17626, a lost Codex Salisburgensis, and the Greek, Cod. S. Sep. 1 from the Convent of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which J. Rendel Harris had discovered and published with Seth K. Gifford in 1890. Whether the Greek is a translation of the Latin or an independent parallel has been debated; the older reference consensus holds firmly for Latin priority. The early currency of the text is shown not by early copies, of which there are none, but by citation: Tertullian within a decade, Augustine preaching on it two centuries on.
There is no canonization paper trail, and there was never going to be one. These martyrs precede the papal process by roughly a thousand years. Their standing rests on immediate local veneration at Carthage, on entry into the Roman calendar by 336, and on continuous naming in the Roman Canon of the Mass and the later martyrologies.
Almighty God, you gave your servants Perpetua, Felicity & Her Companions boldness to confess the Name of our Savior Jesus Christ before the rulers of this world, and courage to die for this faith: Grant that we may always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in us, and to suffer gladly for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
British (Received Pronunciation): Felicitatis /fɪˌlɪs.ɪˈtɑː.tɪs/; Martyrum /ˈmɑːrtɪrəm/; Augustine /ɔːˈɡʌstɪn/
Readings for a Martyr
Jeremiah 15:15–21Psalm 34Revelation 7:9–17Luke 12:4–12