Perpetua & Felicitas: When the Arena Is Your Pulpit

Published March 2026 · 9:29 · 10 views

Summary

On March 7, 203 AD, in the arena at Carthage, a young noblewoman named Vibia Perpetua and her slave Felicitas walked into the presence of wild beasts rather than offer a pinch of incense to the Roman emperor. What makes their story extraordinary beyond the martyrdom itself is that Perpetua wrote an account of her imprisonment and her visions — the oldest surviving Christian text written by a woman in the history of the church. That text has never been lost. It survived the fall of Rome, the collapse of North African Christianity under Islamic conquest, the medieval manuscript tradition, and the printing press. It is still read today, still preserved, still capable of stopping a reader cold.

Who they were

Perpetua was a 22-year-old noblewoman from Carthage in Roman North Africa — the city in modern Tunisia that Hannibal had made famous four centuries earlier and that Rome had utterly destroyed before rebuilding as one of its most prosperous provincial capitals. She was recently married, literate in both Latin and Greek, and nursing an infant son at the time of her arrest. Felicitas was her slave — one of the millions of enslaved persons across the Roman world, legally defined as property, whose name nonetheless is remembered when the names of Roman emperors and provincial governors have faded from common memory.

Both were catechumens when they were seized — new converts still in the formal period of instruction that preceded baptism. The edict under which they were arrested, attributed to Emperor Septimius Severus around 202–203 AD, did not target existing Christians but specifically banned conversion to Christianity or Judaism. The charge was the act of becoming Christian, a deliberate political provocation in an empire where religious practice was bound up with civic loyalty and the imperial cult. Five catechumens were arrested together: Perpetua, Felicitas, Revocatus (another slave), Saturninus, and Secundulus.

The Passio Perpetuae — a woman's voice from a Roman prison

Perpetua kept a diary during her imprisonment. The portion she wrote herself survives — not in paraphrase, not in summary, but in her own words, in the first person, describing what she saw and felt and chose. This makes the Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis (The Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas) the earliest firsthand Christian martyrdom account and the oldest surviving text we know was written by a Christian woman. The rest of the account — including the martyrdom itself — was completed by a contemporary editor who identifies himself as an eyewitness; Tertullian, the North African theologian, has been proposed as the author of those framing sections, though the attribution is disputed. What is not disputed is that Perpetua's own voice is embedded in the text, and that the church has recognized it as such for nearly eighteen centuries.

The theological weight of that fact is considerable. At a time when women did not preach from pulpits, did not hold formal teaching offices, and did not write treatises that circulated in Christian communities, Perpetua wrote a document that Augustine of Hippo — two centuries later, preaching in the same North African world — cited repeatedly from the pulpit as authoritative witness. The arena was her pulpit. The diary was her sermon.

The confrontation with her father

The most humanly devastating section of Perpetua's diary is the account of her father's repeated visits to the prison. He was a pagan, desperate, aging, and the text makes clear that he loved her. He came to her cell and called her by name. He pointed to her infant son in her arms. He wept at her feet. He argued by appeal to family honor, to motherhood, to the gray of his own hair. The man was not a villain — the account does not allow him to be one. He was a father watching his daughter choose death.

At the public hearing before the Procurator Hilarianus, he appeared again with her infant child, this time pressing the baby into her arms in front of the crowd, imploring her to have pity. The judge, perhaps moved or perhaps simply impatient, ordered him beaten away from the tribunal. Perpetua later wrote: "I was grieved for his grey hairs." The grief is real. She does not pretend it away. She felt it — and she did not move. She handed her son to her mother and her brother's care, and the account notes that her son thrived and did not need her milk. She never nursed him again. She chose the arena.

Felicitas — giving birth in a Roman prison

Roman law prohibited the execution of pregnant women. Felicitas was eight months along when she was arrested, which meant that if she had not delivered by the day of the scheduled execution, she would be held back and martyred at a later date — separated from her companions and thrown in among common criminals. She feared this. The text is explicit: she feared not the arena but being martyred apart from her friends, in a context stripped of the meaning they had given to their deaths together.

Two days before the execution, the group prayed together for her labor to come early. She gave birth — in the prison, in pain, attended by other prisoners who, hearing her cries, mocked her: if she could not endure labor, how would she endure the beasts? Her reply, recorded in the Passio, is one of the most striking statements in early Christian literature. She said: "Now I am the one who suffers. But then another will be in me who will suffer for me, because I too will be suffering for him." The labor and the arena were not equivalent pains. She was distinguishing between suffering that is merely physical and suffering that carries the presence of Christ. Her infant daughter was born healthy and was raised by a Christian woman of the Carthaginian community.

The four visions

Perpetua recorded four visions in her diary, and they are remarkable documents — neither vague nor merely symbolic, but vivid and specific in the way that genuine dream-accounts are, full of strange concrete detail. The first vision was prompted by her brother's suggestion that she pray to understand whether their imprisonment would end in condemnation or release. In it she saw a golden ladder reaching to heaven, impossibly narrow — only one person could ascend at a time. The sides of the ladder were lined with iron hooks, swords, and lances, so that anyone who climbed carelessly or looked down would be torn. A great dragon lay coiled at the foot.

Perpetua stepped on the dragon's head and climbed. At the top, she entered an immense garden where a grey-haired shepherd sat among thousands dressed in white. He looked up, saw her, welcomed her, and gave her milk and honey. When she woke, she understood: they would not be reprieved. She told her brother, "We will suffer, not for ourselves but for the whole church." The vision did not remove the terror of what was coming. It reframed it — not as defeat, but as participation in something larger than any individual life. The ladder, the dragon, the white-robed thousands: she was not approaching an ending. She was approaching an arrival.

The arena — March 7, 203 AD

On March 7, 203 AD, Perpetua and Felicitas were led into the arena at Carthage. The crowd had gathered for the birthday games of Geta, son of the emperor. The five martyrs walked in, the account says, with calm faces — Perpetua singing a psalm. A wild cow was released against the women — chosen, the eyewitness editor notes pointedly, to match their sex, as if the selection of the animal was intended as an additional humiliation. Perpetua was tossed and injured; she fell, rose, pinned her hair (it was unseemly for a martyr to appear disheveled, she had already told herself), and crossed the arena to help Felicitas, who had also been thrown and was struggling to rise. The image is the image of the whole text: a woman, wounded, going to help another wounded woman, in the middle of an arena designed to demonstrate the absolute power of Rome.

They were brought to the center of the arena for the final sword execution. A young gladiator, nervous, cut Perpetua between the bones of her neck. She cried out. The account says she then took his trembling hand and guided the sword to her own throat. She died by her own direction. Augustine, preaching on these women to congregations in North Africa a little more than two centuries later, said that the courage of Perpetua was not her own. It was given. The feast of Perpetua and Felicitas, observed on March 7, is still in the calendars of the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion — the same date, the same names, eighteen centuries after the arena.

Frequently asked questions

Scripture references

• Revelation 12:11 — "They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death."
• Philippians 1:29 — "For it has been granted to you on behalf of Christ not only to believe in Him, but also to suffer for Him."
• Matthew 10:28 — "Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, fear Him who can destroy both soul and body in hell."

All Scripture quotations from the Berean Standard Bible (BSB).

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