The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity

Shortly after the martyrdom, c. AD 203–210

The account of a group of Christians put to death in the arena in Roman Africa. It includes a prison diary presented as Perpetua’s own and a vision written by her fellow martyr Saturus, framed by an anonymous editor who witnessed the end.

The Passion is made of three parts. An editor introduces the martyrs and describes their deaths. Between these he sets what he says Perpetua wrote “by her own hand” in prison: her arrest, her father’s appeals, the hearing before the procurator Hilarianus and four visions (1.2–3.2). A vision of Saturus, also said to be in his own words, follows (4). If the claim is true, these pages are an early example of writing by a Christian woman.

The work was written close to the events. Tertullian, writing at Carthage not long afterwards, already refers to Perpetua’s vision of paradise (On the Soul 55). The editor’s preface defends new visions and prophecies as gifts of the same Spirit who spoke of old, and that conviction shapes what he chose to record. The Latin text translated here names no city and gives no year; it says only that the games were held for the birthday of “Geta Caesar”. The year 203 comes from a late Roman consular list (Fasti Vindobonenses priores) and the name of Carthage from the fifth-century chronicle of Prosper (Chronicle 757).

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