Perpetua, Part 2: Her Significance (and some fun stuff)

The rather racy poster for a German conference on Perpetua. (Source)

So my last entry, about Vibia Perpetua, first diarist in human history, left you all hanging. (Yes, I know… you couldn’t sleep a wink for thinking about it.)  I had gone over the facts of her life as far as we know them, which could roughly be summarized thus:  a young, upper-class Carthaginian woman is arrested by the Romans and thrown in prison to be fed to wild beasts, and while imprisoned, winds up revolutionizing literature as we know it by inventing the diary.

Diarist, Schmiarist.  Who Cares?

So… Perpetua was the first diarist.  Her work is a virtual treasure trove of juicy historical detail–it tells us a great deal about early Christian communities, life in North Africa in the 2nd century CE, relationships between Roman fathers and daughters, and much more. (1)  But, assuming the vast majority of us are not writing doctoral dissertations on Roman Carthage, what real import does her diary have for us?

Oh, Perpetua!  Let me count the ways…

First, for the teachers and/or women’s history buffs among us, her diary gives us a tantalizing clue about Roman women’s literacy, and perhaps literary history in general.  And then, more broadly, it tells us something about the shift in human consciousness that occurred sometime in the first few centuries CE–a shift towards a more “interior” form of religion that Rudolf Steiner thought was emblematic of the late Greco-Roman era, and of Christianity in particular.  More on that below.  First, let’s consider the Roman ladies.

Roman Women: Perhaps not as mute as sometimes thought

Portrait of a young girl with pen and book, from Pompeii, c. 60 CE

Because we have so few examples of literature written by Roman women, it has sometimes been supposed, (even by scholars who should know better) that most of them were illiterate.  Or at best, literate, but not writers of anything other than the occasional letter.    That’s simply untrue.  There’s actually a good deal of evidence that many, if not most, upper class women could read and write.  (2)  However, though we have lots of references to the fact that they could write, we don’t have a lot of evidence for what they actually did write.  Even for the women who were publicly recognized as authors, we have depressingly few surviving texts.  Later male copyists were not kind to women.

With Perpetua, we have a very rare window in.  And here’s what’s interesting about her: neither she nor anyone else in the text thinks it’s odd that she took the time while in prison to write down the ins and outs of her daily life.  In other words, no one is surprised that she keeps a diary.

Without Perpetua, would there have been a Margaret? For centuries, women have reflected on faith, dreams, and daily life in their diaries.

This tells us that writing, and perhaps even diary-keeping itself, was something a woman of her social position might normally be expected to do.  We simply can’t know whether other Roman women kept diaries that have not survived to us, or whether Perpetua’s diary was a one-time flash of brilliance emitted before her bloody end.  But it’s an intriguing thought, and certainly worth noting, that if none of her contemporaries remarked on her diary-keeping, it may indicate that some women did it as a matter of course. (3)  Might the diary have been one of those few arenas for writing that even “virtuous” upper-class women were allowed to pursue?

And, even more tantalizing: if diary-writing originated as a specifically “female” occupation (precisely because it was concerned with the minutiae of daily home life and was generally not circulated to the public), is Perpetua’s diary an example of women’s private writing bursting forth to create a whole new genre of literature?  We may never know for sure, but Perpetua lets us wonder. (4)

Perpetua Breaks Barriers, Human and Divine

Perpetua’s diary has another, possibly even greater, significance.  It gives us a glimpse into the moment when human beings were beginning to think of themselves, and their relation to the divine, in a new way.

Did matching outfits like these put the final nails in the coffin of the Roman state religion?

Rudolf Steiner, the 20th century philosopher and founder of Waldorf education, described the first few centuries CE as a time when people felt that the gods had somehow become more distant, or less accessible, than they had been in previous centuries. (5)  In the ancient world, religion had long centered around acts of offering and sacrifice (including to the king or emperor himself), but for a growing number of people, these acts became less imbued with meaning–perhaps because religion had become increasingly controlled by and connected to the imperial state.  They sought new types of religious experiences, ones that were not so intertwined with the power of Rome.  I mean, really…once you had an emperor building gold statues of himself as a god and dressing up in matchy-matchy outfits with it, who wouldn’t be looking for a new religion on the block?  (BTW, I’m not joking about the statue.  Caligula anticipated by about 2000 years the matching outfits beloved by aged Floridians.)

In the first few centuries CE, a number of religious practices arose that offered their adherents something different, something that hearkened back to the religious experiences of ages past, when people felt that the gods had moved in and among the living in more perceptible ways.  From magic and alchemy, to revivals of ancient mystery cults, to gnostic sects and relatively new religions such as Mithraism or Christianity–what they all shared was that practitioners felt they experienced the deity (or deities) directly, in an inward way.

Despite featuring a Nordic god, this poster pretty much sums up how the Roman state viewed Christianity. (Source)

Perpetua’s work provides a beautiful example of this movement back towards a personal experience of the divine.  And even further:  her diary perfectly captures the idea that following God might involve listening to an “inner voice” that could conflict with the outer demands of family and state.  This was utterly bewildering to the people around her who were invested in the Roman state religion (including her father). What did she mean by claiming she was obeying God?  It was sheer nonsense.  To be a pious woman, she had to follow the will of her father and carry out her obligations to the state, including participating in the requisite festivals and sacrifices (and not as bull-fodder). (6) That’s what piety meant: doing what was required of you by the representatives of the gods.

And even more ridiculous to the average “Roman on the street” would have been this: Perpetua’s claim that she (and her god) were somehow victorious when she clearly was not. (7) It simply didn’t make sense to think of being fed to lions as anything other than a defeat–not only of Perpetua, but of her deity.  It’s obvious: if your god is so great, how come you’re being gored by that bull? (8)

Perpetua’s diary takes pains to demonstrate how heaven’s logic might not conform to earthly expectations at all–how her arrest and imprisonment (and even her final death) could be evidence of her greater, inward victory.  And she does this in a way that is eminently personal.  She didn’t write a philosophical treatise on why the Roman state should be dismantled, or a long letter with moral exhortations to fellow-Christians.  Instead, she kept a minute account of her day-to-day inner and outer life as an expression of the inner workings of the Holy Spirit.

This was new.  And revolutionary.  And in my humble opinion, something that she might not have achieved if she had been male.  Lots of men (and some women) before her had reflected on the inner voice of God, on what it means to follow God, and on what it means to be a “victor” in God’s sight–usually in the form of philosophical treatises or letters of advice.  And plenty had recorded their dreams in temple inscriptions and books of dream interpretation.  Still others wrote letters to each other about their daily lives (“Today so-and-so said such-and-such to me; the next day we went to the forum,” etc.)  But no one had brought it all together in a diary as “my story” before–a text where inner thoughts, dreams, and experiences of the divine, are interwoven with daily life.  It took, perhaps, a Roman woman–someone who was “supposed” to confine her writing to the private sphere–to bring all these different threads together in a text that so perfectly captures the revolutionary inwardness of the late Roman period, and shows how diametrically opposed this new interiority could be to the priorities of the imperial state.

This, Perpetua did perfectly.  Her diary stands, therefore, not only as a witness to her own particular courage in subverting Roman gender, familial, and imperial norms, but also as a testimony to the way in which a specifically female voice could so eloquently paint a picture of the changing religious experiences of the time.

Artist Jim Ru’s interpretation of the “couple” (Source)

Now, just for fun:  Who knew?  In recent years, Perpetua (along with her slave Felicitas) has become a patron saint of lesbian couples.  Given how strange some of the traditional saint associations are (e.g. St. Fiacre, who because he could reputedly heal hemorrhoids, is now patron saint of STDs), Perpetua and Felicitas’ stint as a lesbian couple is probably neither more nor less far-fetched than many others.  And it’s nice to think there’s a patron saint for everyone.  (Saints Sergius and Bacchus are the patrons of male couples, and there seems to be some evidence that they really were lovers in real life.)  Here (and scrolling down through my notes) are some contemporary icons of the happy female couple.  The last one is by far the raciest (I gotta keep you reading to the end somehow)  It was done way before the LGBT Christian movement gained traction–by a 19th c. male Australian artist who apparently specialized in naked women in chains.  As one contemporary blogger writes, it’s what the two women might have looked like as an inter-racial couple sleeping nude in prison.

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NOTES

(1) Joyce E. Salisbury does a nice job of summarizing the relationship of Perpetua’s diary to other literary works of her time period, including Hellenistic romances, early Christian tracts and letters, and texts on dreams and dream interpretation.  Perpetua’s Passion: The Death and Memory of a Young Roman Woman. New York: Routledge, 1997.  pp. 92-98.

Artist Maria Cristina’s depiction of Perpetua and Felicitas  (Source)

(2) This website, though a bit hard to read and written from a Christian perspective, does a nice job at collecting many of the ancient Greco-Roman references to literate women in one place.  Another excellent (and much more scholarly) resource is I.M. Plant’s book, Women Writers of Ancient Greece and Rome: An Anthology.  Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004.  It’s a great source for teachers, since it collects in one place all the writings of Greco-Roman female writers, and gives a 1-2 page introduction to each figure.

(3) Even the rather grumpy Plutarch, who warned that “a virtuous woman’s speech should be private,” allows his hypothetical perfect female the possibility of speaking and writing privately to her family. Plutarch was a Greek from the 1st c CE who became a Roman citizen, and wrote on a number of topics, including the correct deportment of women.  This quote comes from his Moralia, 142c-d.  You can find the whole passage online here.

(4) It’s interesting to note that the second diary-like text we have was also written by a woman–Egeria, a Spanish Christian pilgrim who traveled to the Holy Land in the early 380s CE.  She wrote to a group of sisters (sorores, who may or may not have been nuns) about her travels in and around Palestine, focusing on her daily activities and the sights she saw.  It reads more or less like a travel diary.  You can read the whole diary online here.

(5)  This dissatisfaction with the state religion and rise of new/revived religious traditions has been noticed by other scholars too–it’s not simply a “Steiner thing.”  Writing 50-some years after Steiner, eminent classicist E.R. Dodds characterized the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE as the “Age of Anxiety”–a time when individuals felt a growing division between earthly life and the celestial world, and longed for union with the divine.  E. R. Dodds. Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965.  Joyce Salisbury gives a great overview of his main arguments in her book Perpetua’s Passion.  (pp. 22-32. See note 1 for full reference.)

Artist John Darcy Noble’s rendition of the saints. (Source)

(6) Perpetua, like all Roman women, remained under the control of a male her entire life.  Roman women were legally bound to obey the pater familias (legal male head of the family) under the system of patria potestas (power of the father).  By Perpetua’s time, most Roman women never left their father’s power, even after they married (though sometimes marriage contracts were written up in such a way that she was transferred to her husband’s authority.) There were occasions in which a woman could be “emancipated” from male authority, but these were relatively rare.

(7) It’s interesting, here, to consider some earlier Jewish texts on martyrdom, including 4th Maccabees (dating from the 1st centuries BCE-1st century CE, before the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE).  These texts are in no way diaries, but they do portray the persecution and death of Jews at the hands of Romans as victories–in the case of 4th Maccabees, the victory of the victims’ self-control over their fear.

19th c. artist George Hare’s depiction of a beatific Perpetua and Felicity sleeping in each others’ arms. Robert Mapplethorpe has nothing on this guy.  (Source)

(8) Steiner spends some time considering this counter-intuitive argument in one of his lectures, “Three Streams in the Evolution of Mankind,” which he gave in Dornach in 1918.  He focuses particularly on the logic of Tertullian, a Carthaginian church father who was roughly contemporaneous with Perpetua, and who may even have been the author of the introductory portion of her diary that was added after her death.  For his consideration of the general religious climate of late antiquity, see Lecture One of his work, The Fifth Gospel (1913).  Both texts can be accessed through the Rudolf Steiner online archive, here.

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Vibia Perpetua, First Diarist in History, Part 1

A medieval mosaic of Perpetua from a church in Croatia (Source)

NOTABLE WOMAN STATS:

Name: Vibia Perpetua

Birthplace and dates: Roman Carthage, North Africa; 181-203 CE

Occupation/Claim to Fame:  The first diarist in recorded history, Perpetua kept a record of her time spent in a Roman prison awaiting execution by wild beasts and gladiator.

Her particular importance to Waldorf teachers:  Besides being an extraordinarily self-possessed and courageous young woman, Perpetua is also the first person in history to keep a record of her daily activities, hopes, dreams, and fears.  From a Waldorf perspective, she’s important because she is a perfect example of what Steiner saw as one of the most innovative “gestures” of early Christianity–the privileging of the inner life of the individual and his/her relationship to the godhead over and against the dominant, often hyper-intellectual religious and philosophical traditions embodied in the power of the Roman state.  (If that last statement is a little dense, keep reading–I’ll unpack it in my next post, Perpetua, Part 2.)

Where she fits into the Waldorf curriculum:  HS Ancient or Medieval History (wherever your school places its history of Rome); 6th grade Roman History; HS English skills classes that focus on journaling and/or autobiographies.  Because of the extreme violence, I wouldn’t recommend her story for the second-grade saint tales.

If you read only one thing about Perpetua, read: Her actual diary. (It’s only about 12 pages long.)  If you get inspired and want to read a whole book about this remarkable woman, read Perpetua’s Passion:  The Death and Memory of a Young Roman Woman, by Joyce E. Salisbury.

Perpetua, One Tough Mother

Gladiators were nothing to mess with, but Perpetua was more than a match for them. (Source)

Like Enheduanna, whom I wrote about recently, Perpetua is one of these women who it’s hard to believe isn’t taught in every ancient history class (not to mention every history of literature class).  She is so important, so unique, so indubitably kick-ass, that the mind just boggles as to why she’s not everyone’s favorite ancient personality.  I mean, as if writing the first diary in recorded history were not enough, the woman also nursed her newborn son while awaiting execution in a Roman prison, successfully convinced a Roman governor to grant her fellow-prisoners better living conditions, and then, to top it all off, when she was finally fed to the wild beasts in the Carthaginian gladiatorial games, she actually GUIDED THE GLADIATOR’S SWORD TO HER OWN THROAT.  Now those are some serious lady-cajones.

Perpetua: Just the Facts

Before I get into her diary and its importance, let’s go over what we know about Perpetua’s life. (1)  Vibia Perpetua was a young woman (22 years old) from a leading Carthaginian family when she was arrested with four other people accused of being Christians, one of whom was her own female slave Felicitas, who was pregnant at the time. (2)  (There were at least three other people arrested with her as well–two free men and a male slave.)  Their arrests took place as part of a larger persecution of Christians in the years 202-203 CE under the emperor Septimus Severus.  At the time of her arrest, Perpetua was a new mother, and her concerns over her newborn son’s health and eventual fate worried her while she was imprisoned.  Interestingly,  Perpetua’s husband is never mentioned in the text–whether because she was a widow, as some scholars surmise, “disowned” by her husband because of her Christian faith, or simply didn’t regard him as important enough to write about is hard to say.

A not-very-accurate depiction of the heifer who charged the two women. In real life, they were trapped, naked, in a net to await the mad cow.  Also, notice how the women here are depicted as passive victims–not as the triumphant heroines portrayed in the diary itself. (Source)

Missing husbands aside, during her detention in prison, Perpetua and her comrades were visited by family members and members of her small Christian community.  She recorded her conversations with them, including an ongoing fight with her father, who tried repeatedly (and unsuccessfully) to convince her to renounce her faith.  Perpetua also recorded her dreams in great detail, along with her interpretations of their meaning.

Finally, after some time in prison, Perpetua’s group was tried by the governor of the province.  At the trial, Perpetua’s father publicly begged her one last time to recant her faith and sacrifice to the Emperor.  In fact, he raised such a ruckus that he was beaten by the guards for disturbing the hearing, causing Perpetua deep distress. (3)  Because the group confessed forthrightly to their faith, the governor rather quickly sentenced Perpetua and her fellow inmates to death by wild beasts.  The men were dispatched by leopards, bear, and wild boar, but the powers that be ordained that Perpetua and Felicitas should be attacked by a wild cow in deference to their female sex.  (Though not with too much deference, as they were both stripped and enclosed in nets to await the cow.)  Remarkably, the two women both withstood the charge of the heifer, and so eventually were put to death by sword. (But not before Perpetua, clad for execution in a simple tunic, stopped to tidy her hair to avoid seeming “to be mourning in her hour of triumph.”)  The final, very vivid account of their deaths was added to Perpetua’s own diary by an anonymous fellow-Christian, who says he/she completed the account at “the command…of the most saintly Perpetua.”

Perpetua, looking fabulous (and remarkably un-African), is immortalized in a cartoon for children. (Source)

Now if that ain’t a movie just waiting to be made, I don’t know what is.  (4)

So what to make of this remarkable story and the woman who wrote it?

Perpetua’s Diary: The Text Itself

Perpetua’s account of her time in prison is one of the few literary documents we have that was written by a Roman woman.  (Sulpicia’s poetry and Severa’s letters are the other two notable female literary endeavors from the Roman era.) As several scholars have shown, Perpetua’s work bears all the hallmarks of having actually been written originally as a diary–the use of the first person, informal language, repeated references to time (“after three days…”, “the next day,”  etc.), recordings of family arguments and other interactions with loved ones, and so forth.  That makes it the first diary known to us from any time or culture.  (She certainly beats out Samuel Pepys, who is often listed as the first diarist by, oh, about 1400 years.  And even another early contender for the title, the Chinese diarist Li Ao, wrote in 9th century CE.)

The text itself, entitled The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity and their Companions, can be broken down into several portions, as outlined below:

a) A brief, laudatory (and very formal) introduction written by a later person (some attribute it to Tertullian, an eminent church leader from Carthage), that also describes the dramatis personae mentioned in the diary.  This is where we get the information that Perpetua was 22 years old and from a well-born family.

b) The diary itself, which records her daily experiences in prison, and which forms the bulk of the text.

The prison cell (in the ruins of Carthage) where Perpetua is traditionally said to have been kept. (Source)

c) A short section in which her fellow-prisoner Saturus recounts his vision, writing it “in his own hand.”  (5)

d) A posthumous, detailed account of her (and her compatriots’) death, written by an eyewitness who was not necessarily the writer of the introduction, and who explicitly states that he/she is finishing the work at Perpetua’s command.

Of the four sections outlined above, only section “b” is actually, as far as we can tell, Perpetua’s diary. (6)

Like the best diaries of any time period, Perpetua’s work is startling in its immediacy.  She writes, for instance, about her initial terror at the “dark hole” of the prison, the stifling heat of the crowd, the extortion of the soldiers who guarded her (and who, after receiving some bribes from the church deacons, allowed them access to a better-ventilated area in the prison).  She writes of being thankful that her breasts have not become engorged and inflamed when she is finally separated from her son (who is given to her mother to raise).  She writes of her experiences in prayer, including a vision of her long-dead brother.  She writes of her slave Felicitas’ hopes and fears, and of the pain she suffers when her child is born prematurely.  She writes also of her own dreams–images that would be familiar today on any analyst’s couch: of ladders and dragons, of gardens and shepherds, of her brother alive again, of herself changing genders, and as a naked man, fighting with a vicious Egyptian gladiator.  In short, it is a diary that feels so fresh you can almost imagine it was written yesterday by some political prisoner of a 21st century regime, and smuggled out of prison by Amnesty International.

Perpetua was the first in a long line of famous diarists, from Li Ao and Samuel Pepys to Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf, and, um… Bridget Jones?

And like a document smuggled out and publicized by Amnesty, Perpetua’s diary seems to have been written with the explicit intention of circulating it to the larger public–in this case, other Christians who might themselves face martyrdom one day.  But why did she choose to encourage her fellow Christians in the form of a diary, as opposed to a more standard, formulaic sermon or epistle?  We have plenty of other documents written by early Christians that take a stance on the issue of martyrdom.  Take, for example, the writings of Ignatius of Antioch, a bishop who was arrested and taken to Rome to be executed, and wrote open letters to churches while he was en route to the lions.  Or sermons by a number of Church fathers encouraging Christians to stand firm in their faith even unto death.  So why didn’t Perpetua just write inspirational letters to her peers?  What impelled her to detail her daily life in jail and, furthermore, to pass it on to others for posterity?

The answers to that question, I would suggest, are both practical (i.e. having to do with her position as a woman in Roman society) and momentous–that is, of great import in the unfolding (or dare I say “evolution”?) of human experience and consciousness.  The brilliant thing about Perpetua’s diary is that it does two things at the same time.  It illuminates a particular moment in history AND it gives us a glimpse into the human condition writ large.

And that, my friends, is where I’ll leave you hanging until next time, when we look at the significance of Perpetua’s diary–for us as teachers, and for humanity as a whole.

—–

NOTES

(1) Most of what we know about Perpetua comes from her own diary.  Aside from the diary, Perpetua’s historicity is attested to by Saint Augustine, who preached several sermons on her in the 4th c. CE.  He quotes and/or paraphrases directly from her diary, so we know that he had access to something like the text we now have today.  During medieval times, her story was known and date of martyrdom celebrated, but it seems as though the actual manuscripts were lost, since medieval accounts of her life and death seem to diverge from the diary itself.  (The manuscript was rediscovered in the 1600s.) Since the late 1900s we have possessed several Latin copies and one Greek copy of the text–giving rise to a debate about the original language of the diary.  All this background is well-covered in a master’s thesis on Perpetua by Melissa C. Perez, available online here, as well as in several scholarly books, the most recent of which is The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, by Thomas J. Heffernan.

Perpetua (on left) and Felicitas (on right). Note the difference in skin tones, despite there not being anything in the text about their respective origins.

(2) Felicitas really merits her own page on this blog, but I’ll settle for a really long footnote since we only know of her through Perpetua’s writings.  This brave woman, a slave, was pregnant when arrested (and for most of her imprisonment).  She apparently was tortured during the trial.  Under Roman law, torture for slaves was mandatory.  Interestingly, though it was apparently ok to torture pregnant women, the diary states Felicitas couldn’t have been executed, given her condition.  (You gotta draw the line somewhere, I guess.)  As it turned out, she wound up giving birth in prison to a baby girl (and, bless her, dealing a withering verbal blow to some guards who were taunting her, even as she pushed the baby out).   After delivering the infant, she gave her over to a Christian woman to raise and went forward to her death willingly.  But the sight of milk flowing from her engorged breasts during the games caused even the hardened Carthaginian crowd to call for relief in the form of a tunic to cover her nakedness.

Judging from the title of the text (The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas and their Companions), which gives Felicitas credit as the “co-star” of the story, the slave woman’s bravery was widely acknowledged not just by her own community, but by the early church in general.  Perpetua’s diary indicates that the two women were close, something the later editors of the tale obviously picked up on and enshrined in the title.

Perpetua (on left) and Felicitas (on right). In this rather moving contemporary icon, both women are depicted with darker skin tones, but even here, Felicitas the slave is darkest.

One final point about Felicitas:  It’s interesting that in most modern depictions of the two women, Felicitas appears as dark-skinned while Perpetua is portrayed as lighter-skinned.  In actuality, we have no evidence for the skin color of either woman.  Though it’s reasonable to assume that Perpetua was of North African origin, as a slave, Felicitas could be of any background whatsoever–from having been born in Perpetua’s own household to imported from any corner of the Roman empire (including Britain or Eastern Europe) or beyond.  The idea that Felicitas is a “black” slave therefore betrays more about our own racial ideas than those of the Roman empire.  For that matter, Perpetua herself could have been “black,” since skin color was not an impediment to Roman citizenship.

(3) At the time Perpetua was arrested, being a Christian was a political crime–that is, a person’s refusal to participate in the cult of the emperor by refusing to sacrifice to him (or to the state gods) was seen as treasonous.  Whereas we might see Perpetua’s actions as primarily religious (i.e. her worship of a different god), the Roman state saw her as a threat to the political stability of the empire.  Of course, this division between political and religious is our division–neither the Roman state nor Perpetua would have separated the two.  The earliest Christians were, for the most part, pointedly rejecting the status quo of empire, gender and family norms, as well as distinctions between slave and free people.  Of course, the status of women and slaves was hotly contested even within early Christian communities, but here in Perpetua’s diary we see a woman as the de facto leader and diarist of the group.  And all the Christians, male and female, slave and free, suffer the same fate and receive the same heavenly reward.

(4)  There have, in fact, been some non-academic books and movies about Perpetua.  A Catholic company actually made a Perpetua cartoon (!) about her martyrdom, in which Perpetua’s attractive appearance rivals a Disney princess.  (Warning for those who might be tempted to show this cartoon to their kids:  like the original story, there is plenty of violence.)  There’s also a 2009 (Christian) documentary about her.  (You can see the trailer here.) And there’s also a novel about Perpetua (also from a Christian perspective): Perpetua: A Bride, A Martyr, A Passion.  

(5) It’s very interesting that even though Saturus was obviously literate, he is not the primary author of the text.  His portion comprises only a very small part of the total work, and is introduced (presumably by one of the editors) as a short “add-on” to Perpetua’s main diary, sandwiched in before the account of the prisoners’ deaths.  And Saturus’ contribution simply recounts his vision, without any reflection on the meaning (as Perpetua had provided for her dreams) or any other account of his feelings, actions, or interactions with others.  In other words, it is simply the recording of a single dream, not a diary.

(6) It seems reasonable to assume that section c (Saturus’ vision) was written at the same time as Perpetua’s.  If we take the writer of part d at his/her word, it would appear that portion was written shortly after Perpetua’s death (though we don’t actually have any external proof that this is true).  Part a, the introduction, could have been composed at an even further remove from the original diary.

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