Week 9: Perpetua
Salvete omnes,
We’re nearing the end, somehow. I have forms to complete for college and things to prepare for graduation. It’s all starting to feel real and that is very disconcerting. I’m starting to finish up with Proba–I’ll probably be done sometime next week, and my paper is…sort of getting somewhere?
I realized that, since I haven’t been lemmatizing her text for my internship, I haven’t really talked about Perpetua yet here, so let’s do that now since she’s actually relevant, unlike my other ideas.
The Passio sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis is one of the oldest Christian texts we have, and it’s the first Latin text by a female author that I read. Vibia Perpetua was a noblewoman in Roman Africa, specifically Carthage, and she wrote the Passio Perpetuae as an account of her life while imprisoned, before she was eventually martyred. The text opens with an argument between Perpetua and her father, who begs her to recant her beliefs, which she emphatically refuses to do (and in fact gets baptized before she is thrown into jail.) She has an infant son, and much of the text revolves around her distress in being separated from him, although she is eventually able to bribe her guards to allow him in with her. She also describes several visions she has, which warn her about the struggles she will have to face.
For some historical context, Perpetual died around 203 CE, so she lived during the reign of Septimius Severus. Severus’ feelings towards Christianity are debated, with the Historia Augusta claiming that he issued an edict banning conversion to Christianity, but with Tertullian saying that he acted favorably towards Christians, employing several personally. The Historia Augusta is quite unreliable, so I’m more inclined to believe that Severus was rather neutral, and it is more likely that the persecutions of Christians that occurred during his reign were more due to local decisions than his decrees. This is quite different from the situation of later authors, like Proba, as, once Christianity had spread and become a significant issue, emperors had to have a strong stance of either toleration or persecution.
That’s it for today!
Valete,
Sophie Z. H.