The martyrdom of SS Perpetua & Felicitas

SS Perpetua & Felicitas were nursing mothers who were put to death in the Carthage Amphitheatre back in 203CE, getting on for 2,000 years ago. As with S Margaret Clitheroe (see July 20th 2011 in the other place), I find it very strange indeed that apparently healthy young women would choose to suffer in this way for love of their Lord Jesus. I know that such things were still happening as recently as 500 years ago, but I can't imagine it happening now. I also imagine that denying the Lord under mortal threat is not even counted a mortal sin any more.

A particularly unusual aspect of this particular martyrdom is that S Perpetua left a short account of her time in prison immediately before her execution, an account which consists in large part of an account of a strange dream. Her account was embedded in a rather larger account by a contempory and the whole has come down to us, to be chewed over by generations of ecclesiastical and classical historians. The only thing of its kind extant; there is nothing else like it.

A translation of the text itself can be had from http://www.pbs.org and a rather lurid adaptation can be had from http://www.catholicheroesofthefaith.com/. Now, for their pains, SS Perpetua & Felicitas are further celebrated by 1,088 pages from the Oxford University Press, in two books, coming in at around 10p the page. The review in a recent TLS does nothing to address what I found strange, but rather offers an account and interpretation of the dream. I don't think that I will be buying the books, not unless I come across them at an advantageous price in some remainder shop.

But I did do a bit of browsing and found out that deaths of this sort in Carthage were indeed barbarous. It would be bad enough to have a lion jump on your back and bite through your neck, more or less in one go, rather as if you were a wildebeest. But it seems that the Carthaginians got rather more for their money, with the martyrs being knocked about by a series of wild animals before having their throats cut by a gladiator. And this is what SS Perpetua & Felicitas signed up for: they did what they did knowing the law and they paid the penalty prescribed. Bit of a puzzle how you can have a non-fatal encounter with a leopard in such circumstances, but perhaps all would become clear if one bought the DVD of the adaptation mentioned above.

At least Margaret Clitheroe was executed more or less in private, under the supervision of the authorities - although the actual dirty work was subcontracted to tramps and such like. I imagine most people looked the other way.