Sts. Perpetua and Felicity are among the female saints included in the First Eucharistic Prayer, the Roman Canon, because they were martyrs. The account of their deaths, written at least in part from Perpetua’s own hand, is among the oldest works of martyrology we have from the ancient Church. (Because Lenten weekdays generally take precedence over almost all feast days, today’s feast is an optional memorial). 

Both died in AD 203 in the Carthage amphitheater (in today’s Tunisia in north Africa) as part of the public executions the Romans sometimes euphemistically called the “games.” Vibia Perpetua was a 22-year-old recently married Roman noblewoman nursing a child. She was well educated. Felicity was her pregnant slave woman. They died along with three other men, at least one of whom was also Perpetua’s slave: Revocatus, Saturinis and Secundulus. They were all catechumens, i.e., people preparing to be baptized, and were baptized before being imprisoned.

Roman Emperor Septimius Severus (193-211) had intensified persecution of Christians. Prior to his rule, Christians could be punished for not offering incense to the Emperor (an acknowledgement of his divinity) but were not necessarily actively sought out. Severus shifted to a more active hunt, though some revisionist historians try to blame persecutions on local authorities during his reign.

When Perpetua and her companions were denounced and arrested as Christians, they were imprisoned. Perpetua’s mother was a Christian, her father a pagan. He did everything he could, including using the appeal of her infant son against her, unsuccessfully to induce his daughter to apostasize.

“The Passion of St. Perpetua, St. Felicity, and Companions” is Perpetua’s first-person account of her imprisonment leading to her death, although obviously some details had to be added post-mortem by an eyewitness. It is one of the oldest texts of Christianity, vibrantly written, making the feel almost as if he was there. It is also a mystical text, in which St. Perpetua describes a number of visions of her impending martyrdom before she had before she died, clearly intended to strengthen her in her confession of faith.

The saints were condemned to be torn apart during a public spectacle by wild beasts. Secundulus died in prison. The men were to be tortured by a bear, leopard and boar, the women by a wild cow, so that each sex was afflicted by a beast of the same sex. St. Felicity was pregnant. By contemporary custom, pregnant women could not be executed. But Felicity delivered prematurely, in her eighth month, ensuring both the safety of her child and her own crown of martyrdom. The child was adopted by a Christian. Both saints are among the patronesses of mothers.

Perpetua and Felicity were thrust naked but for netting into the arena. Felicity was crushed but alive. When the cow could not kill them, the two women were summoned to the gate of the place, where a Roman gladiator killed them by the sword. “The Passion” speaks of Perpetua holding the sword to her throat (as she is sometimes depicted in Christian art), so that “she might taste some pain” in the suffering of her martyrdom, after having been previously stabbed in the ribs. The editor of the “Passion” concludes with this observation of Perpetua’s strength: “Possibly such a woman could not have been slain unless she herself had willed it, because she was feared by the impure spirit.” (The persecution of the Christians as a work of the devil permeates that document.)

Our saints are illustrated today from a 10th-century Eastern manuscript illumination. The work is contained in the “Menologion of Basil II.” A menologion is an Eastern Rite service book but his included the lives of the saints. Basil II was Eastern Roman Emperor in Constantinople from 976-1025.

One commentary claims it was “unusual for a menologion from that era to be so richly painted.” Not being an expert on Eastern Christian sacred art, I cannot say, although illumination of manuscripts was already a Western tradition, as this catalog shows. In keeping with the iconographic traditions of the East, the scene is boiled down to the sacred event, i.e., background and other “incidental” historical detail are absent in favor of a gold background that points towards heaven and a sacred event connected with those going there is underway. The various confessors are there, the last two being finished off by Roman swords on the edges of the scene, framing it. The thrust through the throat was perhaps how local Romans assured their victims were dead: the woman on the right may not be Perpetua, as she does not also have her hand on the sword, while she is much older than the two younger women already in the body pile, the central one in white (Perpetua?) pierced through the throat. (There was no commentary to this particular illumination). 

The manuscript is in the Vatican Library.