The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity

The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity is the account of six new Christians arrested at Carthage in Roman North Africa and put to death in the arena on March 7, 203, at games held for the birthday of the emperor’s son Geta. Its center is the prison diary of Vibia Perpetua, written in her own hand, and it is widely regarded as the earliest surviving writing by a Christian woman.

Perpetua records her arrest, her baptism in custody, the dark and stifling prison, and her fear for the baby she was still nursing. Above all she records her father, the only one of her family who was not a Christian, who came again and again to beg her to sacrifice for the sake of her son and his gray hair. At her trial before the governor Hilarianus he appeared with the baby in his arms. She answered the governor in three words: “I am a Christian.”

Between these scenes she records four visions: a bronze ladder to heaven guarded by a dragon, her dead little brother Dinocrates healed, and a wrestling bout in the arena against an Egyptian, which she understood to be a fight with the devil. Her teacher Saturus adds his own vision of heaven, and an unnamed eyewitness tells how they died: Felicity giving birth in prison just before the games, the martyrs refusing the pagan costumes, and Perpetua guiding a novice gladiator’s trembling sword to her throat.

Our edition follows R. E. Wallis’s public-domain translation, revised sentence by sentence against the Latin: modernized, and corrected where Wallis departs from what the Latin says. Every section carries the standard number scholars cite it by.

This edition starts from R. E. Wallis’s English translation, printed in the Ante-Nicene Fathers in 1885 and in the public domain, and revises it against the Latin, using J. Armitage Robinson’s critical edition, The Passion of S. Perpetua (Cambridge, 1891), and the text modern editors print. The Latin is the anchor: where Wallis and the Latin disagree, the Latin wins. Where Robinson prints a conjecture of his own (singing leaves, a field of violets), we keep the manuscripts’ reading.

Wallis is accurate in most places, but wrong in some that matter. In his version Perpetua’s ladder is golden; in the Latin it is bronze. He has the Spirit tell her at her baptism that nothing else was to be sought “for bodily endurance,” where the Latin says she was told to ask the water for nothing but endurance of the flesh. Her father, in the last prison scene, “throws himself on the earth” in Wallis; in the Latin he tears out his beard and throws it on the ground. Wallis leaves out that Saturus had instructed the group, that the shepherd in her first vision greets her in Greek, and that Perpetua spoke Greek with the quarreling bishop and presbyter.

Some of Wallis’s errors turn a sentence around. He has the martyrs march to the amphitheater “as if to an assembly”; the Latin says “as if to heaven.” He has Perpetua “casting down the luster of her eyes from the gaze of all”; the Latin says the force of her gaze made everyone else look down. He drops Felicity going “from blood to blood, from the midwife to the net-fighter,” and turns the elders’ “Go and play” into “Go and enjoy.” Each is restored here.

We also modernized the English, using plain words and active verbs, and we set the text in the 21 numbered sections used to cite it, so a reader can find any passage a book or sermon refers to. Sixteen short notes explain Roman terms (the catasta, the Gate of Life, the free meal, the net-fighter) and give the Scripture references. Perpetua’s own account runs from section 3 to section 10, Saturus’s from 11 to 13, and the rest is the editor’s.

The revision was made with the help of AI, reading each sentence against the Latin, and then checked by a second, independent reading against the Latin, which caught several more slips that are now corrected. It has not had a professional Latinist’s review.