In her death cell, St. Perpetua writes down a vision of victory

CARTHAGE, Roman Africa, 203 AD — Saint Perpetua, twenty-two years old and under sentence of death, has written down the vision she had on the eve of the games. In it a deacon came to the prison gate and led her out to the amphitheatre. St. Perpetua fought a man in front of the crowd, threw him, put her foot on his head, and was handed a green branch hung with golden apples. She wrote it out in her own hand, in the cell, the day before she is to fight for real.

St. Perpetua is a married woman of good family at Carthage, liberally educated, with an infant son she was still nursing when she was arrested this year. She was taken with four others, among them St. Felicity, a slave; every one of them was a catechumen, under instruction for baptism and not yet baptised. Last year the Emperor Septimius Severus issued an edict forbidding anyone to become a Jew or a Christian. It falls hardest on people at exactly their stage, on their way into the Church. Their case went to the procurator Hilarianus, who had just taken the power of life and death at Carthage after the death in office of the proconsul Minucius Timinianus. He wanted one thing from St. Perpetua: sacrifice for the well-being of the emperors, Severus and his son Caracalla, who both held the imperial title that year. That meant burning the sacrificial incense before a statue of the Emperor. The law required it. She refused, and said she was a Christian. She would not give up that name; Hilarianus would not give up the sacrifice; and he held her life. He sentenced all six of them to the beasts. That means they are to be put into the amphitheatre and given to wild animals in front of the public, and the show is tomorrow.

The account of all this is hers, written in prison from the arrest onwards, and the vision is the last entry in it. St. Perpetua carried the record as far as the day before the games and stopped. She left a line for whoever would finish the story: what happened at the games themselves, she wrote, “let who will write.” A Christian who was there for the games did the finishing. After their deaths he added the account of the arena and the executions, and the completed record was read publicly in the churches of Africa.

St. Perpetua was arrested earlier this year, and St. Saturus, the catechist who had taught the group, was not there when it happened. He gave himself up afterwards on the others’ account, and he baptised them in custody. They were put into a civil dungeon, and the dark frightened her — she had never been in anything like it. Two deacons, Tertius and Pomponius, paid the jailer to have the prisoners let out for a few hours a day into a better part of the building. Her mother carried the baby in to her. Once St. Perpetua had permission to keep the boy at her breast she wrote that the prison had suddenly become a palace, and that she would rather be there than anywhere else. At the hearing her father pushed forward holding the child and pulled St. Perpetua down off the platform. Hilarianus told her to spare her father’s grey hairs and the infancy of her boy, and to sacrifice. She refused. She sent Pomponius to her father to ask for her son back, and her father refused to hand the boy over. Then the prisoners were moved to the camp prison, because the show belongs to the army and is being given for the birthday of Geta Caesar. One of the six, St. Secundulus, died in his cell there and never reached the arena. As the day came close her father came in worn out with grief, tore at his beard and threw himself face down on the ground.

That was the state of things when she slept. The vision begins at a door St. Perpetua knew: “The day before that on which we were to fight, I saw in a vision that Pomponius the deacon came hither to the gate of the prison, and knocked vehemently. I went out to him, and opened the gate for him.” Pomponius was the deacon who had been paying her jailers. In the vision he was dressed for something other than a prison visit — “clothed in a richly ornamented white robe,” she writes, with “manifold calliculæ,” shoes fastened with many buckles. He had come to fetch her, and Pomponius said to her: “Perpetua, we are waiting for you; come!”

He took her hand, and the way out was hard going: “we began to go through rough and winding places. Scarcely at length had we arrived breathless at the amphitheatre.” Pomponius walked her into the middle of the arena, told her, “Do not fear, I am here with you, and I am labouring with you,” and left her there.

The beasts she had been sentenced to never came, and she noticed it while she was still looking at the crowd: “And I gazed upon an immense assembly in astonishment. And because I knew that I was given to the wild beasts, I marvelled that the wild beasts were not let loose upon me. Then there came forth against me a certain Egyptian, horrible in appearance, with his backers, to fight with me.” Young men came to her side as her helpers. From there the vision runs like an ordinary bout, with the preparations of a wrestling match: “and I was stripped, and became a man. Then my helpers began to rub me with oil, as is the custom for contest; and I beheld that Egyptian on the other hand rolling in the dust.”

Then the man in charge of the fight walked out. “And a certain man came forth, of wondrous height, so that he even over-topped the top of the amphitheatre; and he wore a loose tunic and a purple robe between two bands over the middle of the breast; and he had on calliculæ of varied form, made of gold and silver; and he carried a rod, as if he were a trainer of gladiators, and a green branch upon which were apples of gold.” The trainer called for silence and said what each of them stood to get: “This Egyptian, if he should overcome this woman, shall kill her with the sword; and if she shall conquer him, she shall receive this branch.”

The fight itself is short in her telling. “And we drew near to one another, and began to deal out blows. He sought to lay hold of my feet, while I struck at his face with my heels; and I was lifted up in the air, and began thus to thrust at him as if spurning the earth.” It stalled there, and she changed her grip: “But when I saw that there was some delay I joined my hands so as to twine my fingers with one another; and I took hold upon his head, and he fell on his face, and I trod upon his head.”

St. Perpetua went to the trainer and took the branch. He kissed her, and said: “Daughter, peace be with you.” Then she walked out. “And I began to go gloriously to the Sanavivarian gate,” she writes — the porta Sanauiuaria (the Gate of the Living), the door a victor left by.

She woke in the camp prison, with the games still in front of her, and wrote the last thing in her account: “Then I awoke, and perceived that I was not to fight with beasts, but against the devil. Still I knew that the victory was awaiting me.”