A prisoner facing death makes a Roman commander blush

CARTHAGE, Roman Africa, 203 AD — The games of 203 AD at Carthage were only days away. The Roman tribune there started treating the Christians in his army prison more harshly. Some men had warned him that someone might use magic spells to get the prisoners out.

The prisoners had been sentenced to be killed by wild beasts. They were going to die in the soldiers’ games held for the birthday of Geta Caesar, the emperor’s son. That’s why they had been moved to the prison of the army camp. One of them was Saint Perpetua, a young married woman from a respected family, twenty-two years old.

St. Perpetua had been arrested in the reign of the Emperor Septimius Severus. His law of 202 AD forbade anyone to become a Christian. Her father wasn’t a Christian. He begged her again and again to give up her faith: after her arrest, at her trial, and once more in the camp prison. She refused him every time.

At the trial she wouldn’t offer a sacrifice for the emperors’ welfare, and she said she was a Christian. The Roman official acting as governor sentenced her and her companions to the wild beasts.

St. Perpetua kept her own written account of her days in prison, right up to the day before the games. In it she wrote about Pudens, a soldier who ran the camp prison day to day. He had been letting many fellow Christians in to see the prisoners. She wrote that he “began to regard us in great esteem.” Pudens answered to the tribune, the commander of the Roman soldiers stationed in the city.

Face to face with the commander

St. Perpetua argued with the tribune in person, and she said to him:

“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 was asking for better treatment, and she asked for it in the tribune’s own terms. The prisoners were going to die in the show for Caesar’s birthday. If they came out well fed, the credit would go to the tribune.

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 be with the prisoners.

By then Pudens, the soldier who ran the prison, had come to believe in Christ too.