The saints

Saints Perpetua and Felicity

Martyrs · Feast day March 7 · Died about 203 · Carthage, North Africa · Also known as Perpetua and Felicitas

Saints Perpetua and Felicity were two young mothers, one a well-born noblewoman and one a slave, martyred together in the arena at Carthage for refusing to renounce Christ. Perpetua kept a prison diary, one of the earliest surviving writings by a Christian woman, and the courage of the two friends under the eyes of Rome made them among the most beloved of all the early martyrs.

Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.Romans 8:37 (KJV)

Two women, two worlds, one faith

The story is set in Roman Carthage, the great city of North Africa, around the year 203, during a persecution under the emperor Septimius Severus, who had forbidden conversions to Christianity. Perpetua was a young married noblewoman of about twenty-two, well educated, from a respected family, and newly a mother, still nursing her infant son. Felicity was a slave, expecting a child of her own, who shared Perpetua's faith and would share her fate. They were arrested together with several companions, among them Perpetua's brother, while they were still catechumens preparing for baptism, and in that arrest the whole rigid order of Roman society was quietly overturned, for in Christ the noblewoman and the slave were sisters and equals, and they would go to their deaths side by side as such.

What makes their story unique among the martyr accounts is that a large part of it is told by Perpetua herself. During her imprisonment she kept a written account of her days, her fears, her visions, and above all her wrenching struggle with her father, and it has survived. An eyewitness added the account of the day of their death and framed her diary with an introduction and a close. Together the record gives us these young women not as remote and stylized icons but as living people, frightened and brave by turns, ordinary and extraordinary at once, and it is treasured as one of the earliest first-person writings by a Christian woman anywhere in history.

I am a Christian

Perpetua's hardest trial was not the arena but her own father, who loved her deeply and came to the prison again and again to break her resolve, not with cruelty but with tears and pleading. He begged her to think of him in his old age, of her mother and brothers, and above all of her infant son who would not survive without her, and simply to perform the small act that would set her free. In her diary Perpetua recorded the exchange that decided everything. She pointed to a small water pitcher lying nearby and asked her father whether it could be called by any name other than what it was. He said it could not. Then neither, she told him, can I call myself anything other than what I am, which is a Christian.

Her father, in grief and anger, threw himself at her, and at one point struck her, and Perpetua wrote that she suffered for him, for she loved him and hated to wound the one member of her family who did not rejoice in her faith. She worried too for her infant son, whom she was permitted to keep and nurse in the prison for a time, until, as she recorded with quiet gratitude, God so arranged it that the child no longer needed her milk and her breasts did not pain her, freeing her for what was to come. Through all of it, through her father's tears and her own aching love, she never once wavered from the four words that would cost her life: I am a Christian.

Visions of the ladder and the garden

Perpetua's diary records a series of visions given to her in prison that steadied her for what lay ahead, and she set them down with striking directness. In one she saw a great ladder of gold reaching up to heaven, its sides set with swords and hooks so that the careless would be torn, and a fearsome dragon crouching at its foot, and she saw herself tread upon the dragon's head as she began to climb, and reach at the top a wide and beautiful garden where a shepherd welcomed her and gave her sweet curds to eat. She understood that the way to heaven led up through suffering and past the enemy, but that it ended in green pasture and welcome.

In another vision she saw her little brother Dinocrates, who had died young of a disfiguring illness, in a place of thirst and darkness, unable to reach the water he longed for, and she prayed for him earnestly day and night, and in a later vision she saw him healed, clean, and drinking freely from a fountain, and she was comforted. Whatever one makes of the visions, they show a young woman facing death not with dread but with a serene and growing confidence, so sure of the garden at the top of the ladder that the beasts of the arena had lost their terror. She had been shown, she believed, that death was a door and not a wall.

Two mothers in labor and in chains

Felicity's own trial was different and no less hard. She was eight months pregnant when the day of the games drew near, and Roman law forbade the execution of a pregnant woman, so she was seized with fear, not of death but of being held back and forced to die later and alone among common criminals, cut off from the companions with whom she longed to suffer. Two days before the games she went into labor, and as she cried out in the ordinary pain of childbirth, one of the prison guards mocked her, asking how she expected to face the wild beasts if she screamed like that over a birth. She gave him an answer that has never been forgotten: now, she said, it is I who suffer what I suffer, but in the arena there will be another in me who will suffer for me, because I too shall be suffering for him.

She bore a daughter, whom fellow Christians took away to raise as their own, and so, her child delivered, she was free to go with Perpetua and the others. The two young mothers, the noblewoman and the slave, had both given up their newborns to keep faith with Christ, and now they would die together. It is one of the tenderest and most terrible details in all the acts of the martyrs, these two women, their bodies still marked by childbirth, walking side by side into the arena rather than deny the Lord who they were sure had a place prepared for them.

The day in the arena

On a festival day the whole company was led into the arena to die for the entertainment of the crowd, and the eyewitness who finished the account records that they entered as though they were going into heaven, their faces bright, Perpetua walking with a shining countenance and singing a psalm. The men were set upon by a boar, a bear, and a leopard; the two women were stripped and sent out to be gored by a maddened wild cow. Even the hardened crowd recoiled at the sight of the two young mothers, one delicate from recent childbirth, and they were brought back and clothed before being sent out again.

Perpetua, thrown and bruised by the beast, is described rising and pausing to pin up her disordered hair, since loose and disheveled hair was a sign of mourning, and this, she seemed to say by the gesture, was for her a day of triumph and not of grief. She reached out to help the injured Felicity to her feet, and the two friends stood together. When the beasts had not finished the work, the martyrs were brought forward to be dispatched by the sword. Perpetua, the account says, met her death without flinching, and when the hand of the young and nervous gladiator wavered and his first stroke went astray, she herself guided his trembling sword to her own throat, as though so great a woman, in the writer's words, could not be killed except by her own will.

The witness that outlived Rome

The account of their martyrdom was read aloud in the churches of North Africa for generations and was so treasured that Augustine, preaching in the same region two centuries later, had to caution his hearers not to honor the story as though it were Scripture. Their names were entered into the most ancient prayers of the church, where Felicity and Perpetua are still remembered by name at the altar to this day, the slave named before the noblewoman in some of the old lists, the last put first exactly as the gospel promised. The empire that killed them is long gone; the two young mothers it fed to the beasts are honored across the world.

Their story mattered so much because it showed the ancient world what the new faith made possible. Two young women, one highborn and one enslaved, both nursing mothers, faced the full organized cruelty of the Roman state and were not afraid, because they belonged to someone the state could not reach or touch. The powers of Rome that seemed to hold their very lives in its hand were shown to hold nothing at all that could separate them from the love of Christ, and their fearlessness preached a sermon louder than the roar of the arena, a sermon the empire never managed to answer.

Why Perpetua and Felicity still matter

Perpetua and Felicity speak with particular force to mothers, to the young, and to everyone who has ever been told that faith is acceptable only so long as it stays private and costs nothing. They gave up husbands, fathers, and newborn children rather than deny the Lord, and they did it not grimly but with a courage so bright it unsettled the arena and its crowd. Their answer to every threat and every loss is still the church's answer in the face of death: that nothing, neither death, nor life, nor the whole assembled might of an empire, can separate us from the love of God, for in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.

A note for all traditions: the saints are honored across the church as examples of faith and, in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, as friends who pray with us, never worshiped, for worship belongs to God alone. What Scripture records and what later tradition holds are distinguished above. In every tradition there is one Lord, Jesus Christ, and every believer, not only the saints, is called to follow him.

Related: Who is Jesus? · The saints · Saints for March 7 · Saint of the day