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

customary in such athletic contests.(62) Overshadowing the arena she sees an enormous figure clad in the resplendent festival garments and holding the symbols of a patron (editor) of the games, holding the staff of a gladiatorial trainer (lanista) and a branch with golden apples that is to be the reward for the victor. A brutal, grinding hand-to-hand fight ensues that is a combination of the Greek-style "no-holds-barred" martial arts contest known as the pankratz'on and elements of gladiatorial combat.(63) Perpetua defeats the Egyptian and goes up to the lanista to accept her reward. He kisses her and says: "My daughter, peace be with you". To Perpetua, the vision had the clear meaning that in the games on the next day she was not going to battle with mere beasts, but against the Devil himself (represented by the disgusting Egyptian in her dream). But the manner in which it is represented has its troubling aspects. There are two radically opposed standard interpretations. The first, committed to Freudian or Jungian psychoanalysis, sees deep and troubling psychological dimensions in her dream.(64) The other, more pragmatic and rooted in the hard realities of the Graeco-Roman world, is simply dismissive: if Perpetua wished to engage in a pankration in the arena she had to become a male, and that is that.(65) But the latter position is surely mistaken -- there was no need for her to have seen matters this way, much less to go out of her way to dream the details and feel constrained to describe them in words. A closer reading of the text suggests otherwise. Being rubbed down with oil was not only a simple athletic procedure.(66) The words suggest an undertow of recognition subliminally released for Perpetua in her dream state, a confessional reality which she does not consciously face in "the waking world", but which she faithfully reports as part of her confrontation with a threatening and evil male.(67) That is to say, this incident in her dream seems to be coherent with the import of her visions in general -- they are empowering experiences. In them Perpetua is able to assert her powers to the full: to be able to intervene on behalf of the betterment of the condition of the dead, to deal directly with figures of authority in the church on an equal basis, and to fight successfully in the arena in a quintessentially male contest.(68)

With this final dream ends the sequence of Perpetua's words as we now have them. This simple and bare record of a human experience, however, was only beginning its own life, so to speak, one in which it was destined to be reread and commented on by others, all of whom happened to be men. Their interest in her words was, to say the least, hardly disinterested. Indeed, the process of the male rethinking of her experience began almost immediately. The first editor knew of, and emphasized, the fact that the executions were timed to coincide with the birthday of Geta, the younger son of Septimius Severus, the reigning emperor of Rome. As has been convincingly argued, that would seem to indicate an editing process that took place in the years immediately following the deaths in the arena in 203.(69) This first editorial response was, so to speak, unpremeditated. There are few signs that the editing was a deliberate attempt to distort. Rather, the resulting text seems to mirror the way in which he assumed this text ought naturally to be interpreted. The edited document as we have it, therefore, includes Vibia Perpetua's experiences, but systematically brackets them with a complicated preface which attempts to lay out the terms on which her account is to be understood by reader and listener alike, and by a tailpiece that is meant to conclude her story (again to produce the desired effect on reader and listener). (See Table.) The terms of these bracketing pieces are those of the formal male-dominated church. There has been much speculation, some convincing, some not, that the editor was none other than Tertullian.(70) If he was the editor, the case for the degree and type of male reinterpretation is thereby strengthened; if not, the case still stands. The identification is not necessary. Given both the overwhelming probabilities of the case, and the types of ideas and verbiage and modes of expression of the "editor", there can be little doubt that the hand is a male one, and, for the purposes of the problem at hand, that is all that matters.