Perpetua: Athlete of God

Barbara K. Gold

https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195385458.001.0001
Published: 2018 Online ISBN: 9780190905316 Print ISBN: 9780195385458

CHAPTER

p. 1
Introduction 

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Barbara K. Gold

https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195385458.003.0001 Pages 1–8

Published: October 2018

Abstract
This chapter discusses the key issues surrounding Perpetua’s life and her narrative, the Passio
Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis. It introduces the most perplexing circumstances around her life and
times: the authorship of her Passio (which is written in at least three di erent hands); her life and
family; the conditions of her martyrdom and of martyrdoms during the pre-Constantinian period; the
status of martyrdom texts as personal, social, or historical documents; whether persecutions can be
historically veri ed or were exaggerated by the Christians and others; and the afterlife of Perpetua and
her text in writers from the third century to contemporary times. The introduction lays out the
arguments for these thorny issues and tries to nd a reasonable position on each one.

Keywords: Perpetua, Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis, martyrdom, Christianity, North Africa,
Carthage, authorship, gender, Christians, pagans
Subject: Classical History

This book is titled Perpetua: Athlete of God. It cannot be called a biography because we simply do not have
enough factual information to write the story of her life and family. But we can hope to recreate the milieu
in which a young Christian like Perpetua grew up, was educated, married, became a mother, converted to
Christianity, and resolved to martyr herself in her twenties along with her newfound family of other
Christians. We have a great deal of information on the many aspects of ancient Carthage of the high empire
that must have in uenced Perpetua’s life and death: the history, the ethnography, the literature, the
religious life, the art and architecture, the politics, the social milieu. Perpetua was the product of a dizzying
set of historical and social events that somehow produced a young woman who was clever enough to leave
us with a piece of the Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis, independent enough to abandon her own
family for a Christian group, and brave enough to o er up her life to her newfound God. It is extraordinary
enough that she existed, but even more extraordinary that we have the narrative of her passion.

What I have just written makes several assumptions: that Perpetua did exist and did write a part of the
Passio; that the text of the Passio can be read as a historical or social record; that Christian martyrs were
persecuted in the high empire by the Roman authorities; that a text like the Passio can be regarded as
literature and as rhetorically sophisticated; and that gender was an important consideration in the
 formation and consumption of Perpetua. Vigorous arguments have been laid out for both sides of each
1
statement with little hope of coming to any clear conclusion.

p. 2 Perpetua has become a veritable industry in the past twenty years. Brent Shaw, in his look back at the
beginnings of Christianity in Africa and the “featured actors” in this “holy drama,” refers to Perpetua as the
“new ‘it’ martyr” (along with her fellow female martyr, Felicitas, a “bit actor in the greater drama of a
2
noble family”). She commanded attention then, in the early third century CE , as she does now. Even if
everything about her person, her text, her short life, and her death is open to debate, she demands our
consideration. From the beginning, many readers were believers: They wanted Perpetua to be the author of
parts of the Passio (sections 3–10) and wanted to believe in the authenticity of this text. And female scholars

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of antiquity especially wanted to believe that we had a woman in this period who left us a text in her own
voice. If indeed Perpetua did write a part of the Passio, she would be our earliest Christian female to have
written in her own name and the only woman writer to give us a rst-person account of her Christian
experience. Some authors hear her voice coming through the Passio clearly and distinctly. One critic says of
Perpetua’s singular achievement, “There is something so unusual, so direct and uncompromising about her
reportage that it has evoked a wholly unusual order of responses from a very wide range of modern readers.
They know that there is something, perhaps ine able, that marks her words as di erent in kind from any
3
comparable piece of literature from antiquity. Realities are re ected directly in the rhetoric.” But another
scholar of Perpetua reads the Passio as embodying two female martyrs whose depictions are “so rhetorically
pertinent to the discourse of the period in Carthage as evidenced by Tertullian as to make suspect the
women’s authenticity as real persons. Their representations seem to coincide too closely with the
4
theological polemics of the period not to have been crafted to t a speci c historical argument.”

Indeed, at the very beginning of my project on Perpetua, I had a conversation with this scholar that caused
me to consider for the rst time the real possibility that Perpetua was a construct rather than an actual
woman martyr’s voice from the third century. How could I reconcile Perkins’ conclusions with those of a
critic like Peter Dronke, who simply accepts what the editor of the Passio tells us: “from this point on, she
herself (Perpetua) has recounted the complete account of her martyrdom written in her own hand and
re ecting her own thoughts and ideas” (Passio 2.3). “Because of this,” Dronke claims, “we can still today
5
p. 3 hear Perpetua’s voice, and envisage precisely her experience.” Do we accept Perpetua as a historical
gure whose voice still connects to us from a great distance, or is she a part of a literary ction that
embroiders on what is perhaps a historical kernel and creates a largely ahistorical account that entwines
contemporary debates with a highly rhetorical structure? We are caught on the horns of a dilemma. If we
claim to hear from Perpetua the evocative power of a young woman who voluntarily went to her death, a
6
willing victim, we might stand accused of a naive and unsophisticated reading of the Passio. But, if we fail to
claim Perpetua as one of our earliest female voices from the past and cast her, along with other women from
antiquity, into the mold of a ctionalized tool of male authors and editors, we gain an interesting text but
lose a small, precious slice of historical reality.

Can we reconcile these two well-established and rmly argued positions without having to choose between
them? Shifting the argument over the particularity of Perpetua’s status and existence to a larger set of
issues can help us to reposition these questions. The big question of whether the martyr texts should be read
as historical records or as ctional accounts is embedded not only in the individual martyr stories like
Perpetua’s but in the whole history of early Christianity. How do we know what to take as truth and what has
been exaggerated (by the Christians or their opponents) to make a point? Readers and scholars have been
inclined to believe the narrative found in early Christian authors and church fathers that indicates that there
was rampant persecution of Christians in the pre-Constantinian period. Was this historically the case, or
was the frequency and intensity of these persecutions exaggerated by Christian authors in order to
proselytize, to make their case, and to create in themselves an Other in opposition to their pagan
countrymen? Candida Moss, in her book The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of
 7
Martyrdom, argues for the latter position. There were, of course, periods of persecution of Christians and
others by the Romans, but the Christians’ own stories of victimization and pain and the embroidery of their
stories by later hagiographers tell a ctionalized story. As Moss claims, “Despite the dubious historicity of
these stories, we know that they were preserved for entertainment, for moral instruction, and to encourage
8
people . . . . If we want to use these stories, we need to be aware of their limitations.” Moss separates the
qualities and virtues that characterize the martyrs from believing in the “false history of persecution and
9
polemic that has grown up around them.”

p. 4 The separation of the acts of martyrdom themselves from the accounts and reception of them forms an
important part of an ongoing debate among scholars about these elusive martyrs and their tales. The issue is
most often framed as one of authenticity or of a ctionalization of an historical event. Some scholars have

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bridged the divide by treating the text from a literary perspective, without denying some historicity for the
10
events. To confuse matters further, martyr texts do not easily t into any one genre or have a speci c place
11
in the canon, so we are left without our usual literary norms to guide our assumptions.

I believe that the best approach to the Passio is to believe that it holds within it a kernel of historical truth
and that the clear signi cance of the work derives in large part from its recording of one of the earliest of a
12
long string of martyrdoms, an event that galvanized its audiences then and afterward. But such texts are
not historical documents as such: They do not claim to be reproducing in detail a historical event nor is the
historical detail a central or major part of the story. The Passio o ers no attempt to interpret or corroborate
the events it describes. The characters in the Passio—Perpetua, Saturus, Felicitas, Dinocrates—receive
13
practically no mention outside of this text. They must then be seen as characters, as representations, and
not necessarily as historical characters (although they may have been historical characters). And the work
as a whole (as it must be read) is a work of literature, marked by a greater rhetorical sophistication than has
been allowed until recently. Erin Ronsse, in her assessment of the Passio, reminds us that our “choice need
not necessarily be between absolute historical truth and fanciful ction,” and she says that she does not
14
mean to deny the authenticity of the Passio but rather to “open up additional interpretive possibilities.”
15
The Passio is, she says, “meaningful beyond the ‘data’ about the past that it may provide.” We must regard
the historical data as important, but the Passio o ers us a richer narrative by combining what may have been
an historical event with an extended story about this event. However much we believe in the historicity of
the events narrated in the Passio, Perpetua’s is a voice that has been dominant in both early Christian
treatises and in more recent studies of martyrologies. Her voice shines through the Passio and makes us
want to believe that this story was true.

My approach in this volume has been to try to illuminate the life and death of Perpetua by examining the
social, political, literary, religious, and physical conditions under which a young Christian woman in the late
p. 5 second–early third centuries CE would have lived. I have not written a traditional biography because we
do not know enough about her life. But we have a wealth of information on the Roman empire under
Emperor Septimius Severus, on Roman Carthage in the high empire, on Roman Africa’s writers and
religions, on the treatment of Christians and the punishments they were given, and on other related genres
of writing being produced in that period. I seek to understand how much we can learn about all these aspects
of the early third century CE from the Passio and, equally, how other sources about the literature, religion,
and culture of Rome and Roman Africa can help illuminate the Passio. We need to understand whether
Perpetua was a product of her environment and its in uences or a resister, who rejected and subverted most
elements of her culture and created something new. Above all, we need to place the Passio in its correct
historical place: It is certainly not medieval nor is it even late antique. It falls squarely in the high Roman
empire and has to be measured against the culture of that period.

I have tried in this book to cover every important aspect of Perpetua’s cultural milieu. Chapter 1 discusses
the text of the Passio: its Greek and Latin manuscripts, the questions of authenticity and authorship of the
various sections, the possible identity of the editor of the Passio, the shorter Acta that tell Perpetua’s story in
 a slightly di erent version, and Perpetua’s dreams or visions. This chapter lays the foundation for further
investigation of Perpetua by looking closely at our only encapsulation of her: the text.

Chapter 2 focuses on the important element of gender in Perpetua’s life and in her text, particularly in her
famous fourth vision in which she enters the arena, ghts with an Egyptian, and becomes male. An
examination of the images in this vision in their theological, philosophical, theoretical, and social contexts
gives us much valuable information about Perpetua’s role as woman and Christian “athlete.”

In Chapter 3 I take up other signi cant genres of writing that appeared at about the same time as the Passio
and undoubtedly either in uenced the Passio and other martyr acts or were in uenced by them: the Gospels,
the apocryphal acts of the Apostles, the ancient secular novel, the Christian novel. None of these works ts

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easily into a generic category, and they bridge an uneasy divide of ction and history. By examining roughly
contemporary works that are uid and cross boundaries, we are better able to assess various aspects of a
work like the Passio and to understand that it arose out of a common set of circumstances with other
writings from this period.

p. 6 Chapters 4 and 5 examine the city of ancient Carthage: its history, culture, society, and religion. In Chapter
4, I look at the history of Carthage and at the non-Christian (or pagan) aspects of this great city. It is clear
that the Christians owed much to their non-Christian countrymen and that there was no clear break or
dividing line between pagan and Christian, so in order to understand Christian life, we must look to those
who lived in Carthage before the arrival of Christianity. The Roman emperor during most of Perpetua’s life,
Septimius Severus, himself a native of Africa, is another important part of the history and political life of
Carthage during this period.

Chapter 5 treats the many forms of Christianity and the way that Christian religion intersected with other
aspects of life in Carthage. Here we look at the interrelationships of Christians, Jews, and pagans and the
question of identity. How would a Christian be recognizable and was there any such thing as
“Christianness”? And, if Christians were a complex and multiform group, where and how does Perpetua t
into this group? In this chapter, I go beyond the oppositions that have frequently been set up, stressing that
the boundaries between groups were almost completely unstable.

In Chapter 6, I focus on what we know about Perpetua’s life and circumstances: her family, her education,
her social status, and her group of fellow Christians. Although it is di cult to have any certainty about most
of these matters, we can use both the text of the Passio and evidence from roughly contemporary sources to
help us reach tentative conclusions. Puzzles about such matters as Perpetua’s absent husband must remain
unsolved and subject to debate. Figures from the Passio, in particular Felicitas and Perpetua’s father, receive
special attention.

The social and physical conditions of martyrdom are examined in Chapter 7. I discuss what the term
“martyr” meant and what distinguished Christian martyrs from Jewish and pagan martyrs; then what
comprised a chosen death. Here I also try to explain the su ering and pain that Christians so willingly took
on and the act of voluntary martyrdom. Two other early groups of Christian martyrs just before the time of
Perpetua, the martyrs of Lyons and the Scillitan martyrs, provide a good comparison with Perpetua’s group;
each of these groups contained both male and female martyrs. Finally I examine the kinds of punishments
visited upon the martyrs and victims, take a closer look at the arena in Carthage where we believe Perpetua
perished, and focus on the dynamic of power and spectacle displayed in the arena.

p. 7 In the last chapter, the main focus is the legacy of Perpetua’s story. Perpetua the character was rewritten
and remade countless times by editors, church fathers, and scholars, starting with the original editor of the
Passio and continuing right up to the present. A major gure in the recasting of Perpetua is Augustine, who
lived and wrote around two centuries later and mentions her in several of his Sermons. Augustine attempts
to contain the disturbing gure of this female martyr even as he celebrates Perpetua and her companion
 Felicitas on their feast day, March 7. Such subsequent revisions and distortions by Augustine, Quodvultdeus,
Notker, Jacob de Voragine, and others make the job of recovering Perpetua that much harder.

The puzzling contradiction around Perpetua is that, although we know almost nothing about her, everyone
who reads her has a strong opinion about most aspects of her life and character. So, for example, Bradley
calls Perpetua the product of Christian fanaticism because she abandoned her baby and family for her
16 17
newfound Christian beliefs. Perpetua had, he believes, a “tragic history.” Other scholars argue about
Perpetua’s dreams, using either a feminist framework, informed by contemporary feminist and
18
psychological theory, or embedding the dreams in Perpetua’s own “material and mental world.” It seems
that nothing to do with Perpetua and the Passio is simple or self-explanatory. But despite, or even because
of, the long processes of reinterpretation and multiple points of view, we can, I believe, hear Perpetua’s still

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p. 8 small voice shining through to us if we try to listen. This has been my goal throughout this volume.

Notes

1. So Formisano: “There is something in this text that the reader cannot entirely grasp: the more one approaches it, the more
one is unsatisfied with possible interpretations” (Bremmer and Formisano 2012b: 329). For a good summary of the various
positions, see Bremmer and Formisano 2012a: 1–13. Each set of debates will be laid out in the chapters of my book.
2. Shaw 2011: 589–90.
3. Shaw 2004/1993: 322. Shaw goes on to lament that later (male) authors and critics did not leave this “exiguous voice”
alone but buried it/her under an “avalanche of male interpretations, rereadings, and distortions” (p. 322).
4. Perkins 2009a: 160. Perkins refers to debates over “the centrality of the female body and human birth processes,” which
she believes may have influenced the emphasis on lactation and birth in Perpetua and Felicitas. See also Kraemer, who
does not believe (although she did earlier) that Perpetua wrote any part of the Passio and calls the Passio a “literary
production” and a “deliberate construction of an exemplary female martyr” (2004: 5–6, 356–7; quotes from p. 6).
5. Dronke 1984: 1.
6. See here Cooperʼs remarks on how “the image of the death of a young woman (both recent and ancient martyrs) bears
within it such evocative power that it is peculiarly vulnerable not only to contesting voices who wish to annex its power,
but also to a kind of rhetorical outward spiral, gathering significance as it attracts to itself concerns beyond its point of
origin” (1998: 147).
7. Moss 2013.
8. Moss 2013: 260.
9. Moss 2013: 261.
10. See the recent edited volume by Bremmer and Formisano, which includes many essays that treat the Passio as a literary
and not a historical document (Bremmer and Formisano 2012b). See in particular Formisano 2012: 329–47.
11. See Halporn 1991, especially 223–4; Farrell 2012: 300–20. Farrell comments on the marginal position that the Passio holds
so that those who try to fit it into one or another silo (e.g., womenʼs literature, heterodox theological tract) fail to discover
its true meaning (320). Halporn says, “It is clear that texts like these are not to be evaluated in the same terms as standard
literary texts” (1991: 230).
12. Halporn says (rightly, I believe) that the significance of both the Passio and the Acta “derives from the actual events to
which they testify” (1991: 234).
13. Only Tertullian (De anima 55.4) and Augustine (Serm. 280–2) mention Perpetua and her story.
14. Ronsse 2006: 285 and n. 6.
15. Ronsse 2006: 285. Ronsse cites the work of Musurillo, who says that the multivalence of such texts was “an explicit goal of
early Christian thinkers and writers” (Ronsse 2006: 305, n. 60, citing H. Musurillo, “History and Symbol: A Study of Form in
Early Christian Literature,” Theological Studies 18.3 [1957]: 357–86). Musurillo says, for example, “All through the narrative
(of the De catechizandis rudibus), Augustine teaches, the catechist must attend not only to the litterae, but also to the
mysteria, that is, to the allegoria underlying the religious history” (372). See also, for an interesting meditation on an
historical event and its interpretation in language, Mesnard (2012: 321–8) who says, “objective information is not enough
to account for an event” (327).
16. Bradley 2003: 167, 171. Bradley discusses the deleterious e ects of “the terrible collision between traditional and
nontraditional systems of family ethics to which Christian beliefs, fortified by a human recalcitrance born of what can only
be called fanaticism, gave rise” (166–7). These e ects include extreme self-interest, lack of thought for family and
 community, and child abandonment. Bradley concludes by saying, “A greater perversion of nature it is di icult to
imagine” (172).
17. Bradley 2003: 171.
18. Miller 1994: 148–83; Bremmer 2002: 95–7 (quote from p. 97). Bremmer thinks that Miller has substituted for “the premises
of the past” the “prison of the present” (95), and he finds that the results of her analysis “hardly rise above the level of
fairly banal feminism and Freudianism” (96).

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