Featured Individual: Vibia Perpetua
Tracey J. Kinney
A Woman’s Account of Martyrdom
Around 203 CE, in the Roman city of Carthage, a woman named Vibia Perpetua was put to death in the arena. The survival of a diary which she kept while imprisoned has meant that the story of the martyrdom of Perpetua, and the Christians imprisoned alongside of her, is one of the most widely known in the contemporary world. Despite the male narrator’s voice at the beginning and the end of the diary, the account itself remains one of the oldest Christian texts authored by a woman. The narrator refers to a renewed persecution of Christians launched by the Emperor Severus (r. 193-211); however, contemporary historians have argued that this period did not coincide with a renewed imperial persecution and, rather, the persecutions that led to the deaths of Perpetua, Felicitas, and the others, were a result of the actions of local governors concerned with challenges to their authority.
The Martyrdom of Vibia Perpetua
A. D. 203.
A VIOLENT persecution being set on foot by the emperor Severus, in 202, it reached Africa the following year; when, by order of Minutius Timinianus, (or Firminianus,) five catechumens were apprehended at Carthage for the faith: namely, Revocatus and his fellow-slave Felicitas, Saturninus, and Secundulus, and Viba [sic] Perpetua. Felicitas was seven months gone with child; and Perpetua had an infant at her breast, was of a good family, twenty-two years of age, and married to a person of quality in the city. She had a father, a mother, and two brothers; the third, Dinocrates, died about seven years old. These five martyrs were joined by Saturus, probably brother to Saturninus, and who seems to have been their instructor: he underwent a voluntary imprisonment, because he would not abandon them. …. The martyrs were for some days before their commitment kept under a strong guard in a private house: and the account Perpetua gives of their sufferings to the eve of their death, is as follows:
“We were in the hands of our persecutors, when my father, out of the affection he bore me, made new efforts to shake my resolution. I said to him: ‘Can that vessel, which you see, change its name?’ He said: ‘No.’ I replied: ‘Nor can I call myself any other than I am, that is to say, a Christian.’ At that word my father in a rage fell upon me, as if he would have pulled my eyes out, and beat me: but went away in confusion, seeing me invincible: after this we enjoyed a little repose, and in that interval received baptism. The Holy Ghost, on our coming out of the water, inspired me to pray for nothing but patience under corporal pains. A few days after this we were put into prison: I was shocked at the horror and darkness of the place; for till then I knew not what such sort of places were.
We suffered much that day, chiefly on account of the great heat caused by the crowd, and the ill-treatment we met with from the soldiers. I was moreover tortured with concern, for that