martyrdom · 203 · Carthage
Vibia Perpetua was twenty-two, well born, educated, and nursing an infant when she was arrested at Carthage with four others, among them Felicitas, a pregnant slave. What makes the account unlike every other martyr-story is that the middle of it is Perpetua's own prison diary, and an editor who witnessed the end says plainly that he is printing it as she left it. She writes about the dark and the heat and being frantic for her baby; about her father coming again and again to beg her to recant, and the last time throwing himself down and being beaten by the magistrate in front of her; about the relief when the child was allowed into the prison with her and the prison became a palace. She records four dreams and reads them herself. Felicitas was eight months pregnant, and Roman law would not execute a pregnant woman — the account says the group prayed and she gave birth early, and the daughter was raised by a Christian woman of Carthage. They were killed at the games for Geta's birthday. Two things in it are worth noticing because they are so unusual: the record is a woman's first-person voice, one of very few surviving from the Roman world at all; and the last thing Perpetua does is guide the executioner's hand, which the editor reports without comment.
What did a Roman martyrdom look like to the person it was happening to?
We know, for once, because she wrote it down while it was happening.