The passion of Perpetua - Christian woman martyred in Carthage in A.D. 203

Past & Present, May, 1993 by Brent D. Shaw

Men surrender them their souls, women their bodies . . . and for the same reason for which the spectators glorify them, they also degrade and belittle them ... What perversity. They love whom they punish. They depreciate whom they value ...

There was . . . that woman who came out of the theatre and returned possessed by a demon. When the unclean spirit was being exorcized, and was pressed with the accusation that he had entered a woman who believed, he replied |And quite justly too, since I found her in my place'.(1)

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On the morning of 7 March 203(2) a small group of young women and men were led from the prison where they had been incarcerated to the arena of the amphitheatre at Carthage.(3) They were destined for execution in a spectacular entertainment that was simultaneously intended as an instrument of public terror.(4) The celebratory occasion for their deaths was the birthday anniversary of Geta, the reigning emperor's younger son. Amongst the intended victims were a young woman called Vibia Perpetua, and her companion in prison, a young female slave named Felicitas. There were three men, Revocatus, Saturninus and Saturus, who were also part of the group. According to the author who reported the subsequent events, the prisoners maintained their composure, walking to their fates "with calm faces, hardly trembling, if at all". Perpetua herself was able to refute the intrusive stares of the spectators "with her own intense gaze". Her ability to stare directly back into the faces of her persecutors, not with the elusive demeanour of a proper matrona, broke with the normative body language in a way that signalled an aggressiveness that was not one of conventional femininity.(5) Her contemporary, Tertullian, was well aware of the problem. When speaking of the need for young women to cover their heads, he remarks that such veiling is necessary because "a young woman must necessarily be endangered by the public exhibition of herself, while she is penetrated by the gaze of untrustworthy and multitudinous eyes, is fondled by pointed fingers, and is too well loved by far".(6) Her intense return gaze was therefore a sign of Perpetua's rejection of the legitimacy of the onlookers' voyeurism. Her look was a refutation of the spectators' natural assumption that they should be able to engage in "the innocent enjoyment of their national pornography".(7)

When the prisoners were first led out to their execution, the local authorities had attempted to add shame to their suffering by trying to compel the condenmed to don the formal attire of the priestesses and priests of the great non-Christian religious cults of north Africa: the women were to be dressed as priestesses of the goddess Ceres, the men as priests of the god Saturn.(8) The point was perhaps not just one of symbolic inversion, but also a way in which an element of human sacrifice, which had traditionally been part of the rites of Saturn, could be maintained in another form.(9) Because of the resolute resistance of Vibia Perpetua, however, the military tribune in charge of the executions relented, and the prisoners were sent off to their execution clothed as they were. Her ability to confront authority, and to reject its terms, no doubt marked her out as a women who, like her later African compatriot, the martyr Crispina, could be labelled "a hard and contemptuous woman".(10) When the three men who were with Perpetua entered the arena, by their gestures and expressions they indicated to the governor Hilarianus on his tribunal that, although he might be able to condemn them, their God was going to judge him. This behaviour, taken as a calculated insult to established authority by the large crowds in the arena, provoked them to a furious demand for the infliction of additional corporal punishment on the insolent prisoners. The crowd demanded that the men be severely beaten by being forced to run a gauntlet of "beast-hunting" gladiators or venatores. They were the main operational personnel in this public execution since at their trial the group of Christians had been condenmed to death by one of the three most savage judicial penalties that the Roman state reserved for its most hardened and dangerous criminals: "throwing to the beasts".(11) The spectacular context was therefore provided by a munus, or public garnes, involving the hunting of wild animals. It is interesting to note that a contemporary jurist, Ulpian, thought that "it is customary to condemn young men to this punishment".(12) Customary, perhaps, because the punishment pitted young, aggressive males against wild animals, highlighting active confrontation, rather than passive suffering. The involvement of female "criminals" in this sort of public punishment therefore signalled something unusual.

As a ritual of empowerment, the munus or public game was paradoxical in its effects. The intention was that the public humiliation and execution of labelled miscreants would further empower the powerful, the existing social and political order. But the opposite of this process, whether intentional or not, also happened:

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The passion of Perpetua - Christian woman martyred in Carthage in A.D. 203

Past & Present, May, 1993 by Brent D. Shaw

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