Roman tribune blushes and gives way to condemned St. Perpetua

CARTHAGE, Roman Africa, 203 AD — In the army prison at Carthage, in the days before the games of 203 AD, a Roman tribune began treating the Christians condemned to the beasts more harshly. He had been warned that someone might use magic spells to get them out of his prison. Saint Perpetua, twenty-two years old and one of the condemned, argued with him in person. He gave way: he ordered the prisoners treated more humanely and let her brothers and others in to be with them.

St. Perpetua was a young married woman of good family. She had been arrested under the Emperor Septimius Severus, whose edict of 202 AD forbade anyone to become a Christian. Her father, a pagan, begged her again and again to give up the faith: after her arrest, at her trial, and once more in the camp prison. She refused him each time. At the trial she would not offer sacrifice for the emperors’ welfare and said she was a Christian, and Hilarianus, the procurator then acting as governor, sentenced her and her companions to the wild beasts.

After the sentence the condemned were moved to the prison of the army camp, because they were to fight in the soldiers’ games held for the birthday of Geta Caesar, the emperor’s son. Pudens, a soldier serving as the prison’s adjutant, ran it day to day. St. Perpetua wrote that he “began to regard us in great esteem.” He had been letting many fellow Christians in to see them. Pudens answered to the tribune, the commander of the Roman city cohort stationed at Carthage.

St. Perpetua wrote her own account of the prison up to the day before the games, and left the games to anyone who wished to write about them. She did not write the scene with the tribune. It comes in chapter 16 of the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, written by the editor who finished the account after the martyrs died.

“Certain deceitful men” had warned the tribune that the prisoners might be taken out of the prison “by some sort of magic incantations.” St. Perpetua answered him to his face:

“Why do you not at least permit us to be refreshed, being as we are objectionable to the most noble Caesar, and having to fight on his birth-day? Or is it not your glory if we are brought forward fatter on that occasion?”

She argued in the tribune’s own terms. The prisoners were to die in the show for Caesar’s birthday, and if they came out well fed, the credit would go to the tribune.

In the Latin text of the Passion, St. Perpetua calls the prisoners noxiis nobilissimis, Caesaris scilicet (the most noble of the condemned — Caesar’s, that is). “Most noble” was the regular title of a Caesar. Inscriptions give it to Geta. The translation above gives the title to Caesar. J. Armitage Robinson, who edited the Latin text in 1891 AD, read it the other way: St. Perpetua was handing Geta’s title to the condemned “who are to grace his festival by their death.”

The tribune “shuddered and blushed.” He ordered that the prisoners “should be kept with more humanity.” Her brothers and others were allowed into the prison to share some comfort with the prisoners.

The chapter’s last words are about Pudens, the adjutant who had let the visitors in. By then he too had come to believe in Christ: iam et ipso optione carceris credente (by then the prison adjutant himself believed).