Perpetua and Felicitas

Perpetua and Felicitas (Felicity) (d. 203), martyrs of Carthage. Perpetua was a young married woman of twenty-two who had given birth to a son a few months before being arrested with other African catechumens in the persecution of Septimius Severus, who had forbidden fresh conversions to Christianity. This rendered catechumens liable to the death penalty. With Perpetua were a pregnant slave, Felicitas, and her husband Revocatus, also Saturninus and Secundulus; but the excellent contemporary account of the martyrdom concentrates on the women rather than the seven men. This was written up largely in the martyrs' own words, possibly by Tertullian, and greatly influenced other accounts of Christian martyrdom. It also contains accounts of visions and apocalyptic elements, but its possibly Montanist origin and feminist slant did not prevent it being used with enthusiasm by Augustine and other Christian writers.

After their arrest, the Christians were kept under guard in a private house where Perpetua spoke to her father; later they were imprisoned. Perpetua with her baby, concerned at her family's anxiety for her, said: ‘my prison became a palace to me and I would rather have been there than anywhere else.’ There she experienced various visions while awaiting the day of the Games at which they were to suffer. Perhaps the most remarkable of them is that of her being led out to the arena, where she was stripped, transformed into a man, and had unarmed single combat with an Egyptian (typifying the devil), whom she overthrew. She then trod on his head.

Meanwhile Felicitas gave birth to a girl in prison and the confessors enjoyed a last agape together. On the day of the Games they left the prison for the amphitheatre ‘joyfully as though they were on their way to heaven’. Perpetua refused to wear the dress of Ceres and sang a hymn of praise. Animals were prepared for killing the prisoners: leopards and bears for the men, a mad heifer for the women. Saturninus was unhurt by a wild boar but, as he foretold, was ‘finished with one bite of the leopard’. The heifer tossed Perpetua, but she got up and raised Felicitas to her feet. Perpetua had been so absorbed in ecstasy that she seems to have been unaware of what had happened, for on her return to the gate of the amphitheatre she said: ‘When are we going to be thrown to that heifer or whatever it is?’ She refused to believe she had already suffered until she was shown the marks on her dress and on her body. Saturninus, mangled by the leopard, went with the other martyrs to the place where the mob asked to see them despatched. They exchanged a final kiss of peace; Perpetua then guided the erring and pain-causing gladiator's knife to her throat; ‘It was as though so great a woman…could not be despatched unless she herself were willing.’

The feast of these martyrs soon became very famous in the whole Christian Church and was recorded in the earliest Roman and Syriac calendars was well as in the Martyrology of Jerome. In 1907 an inscription in their honour was discovered at Carthage in the Basilica Majorum where they were buried. Their feast was constantly on 7 March for centuries but was moved for some time to 6 March to allow room for the feast of Thomas Aquinas. In 1970, however, it was restored to its original day. Perpetua and Felicitas are depicted in the Ravenna mosaics (6th century); eight episodes of Perpetua's life are represented on a 14th-century altar frontal at Barcelona.

Bibliography
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• Latin text of the Acts ed. by J. A. Robinson (Texts and Studies, 1891) and with Eng. tr. by W. H. Shewring (1931) and A.C.M., pp. 106–31; the Greek version ed. with the Latin text by C. I. van Beek (1938). See also H. Delehaye, Les Passions des martyrs et les genres littéraires (1921), pp. 63–72 and A. Fridh, Le Problème de la Passion des saintes Perpetue et Felicité (1968); V. Saxer, Saints anciens d'Afrique du Nord (1979). H.S.S.C., ii. 222–8