Upon their entrance into the amphitheatre before the martyrdom of Perpetua, Felicitas and their companions, young Perpetua challenged civil authority one last time.
From an early age, Perpetua had juggled childhood and growth toward maturity. She became a voracious reader and enjoyed memorializing her experiences with pen and parchment. At their domus, within their social settings, and among gatherings of aristocratic circles, she was respectfully expressive and often appropriately contentious in words and mannerisms. Perpetua possessed an ability to articulate cognitive observations, insightful commentary, and argumentative postulations that exceeded her experience and age.
Upon arrival to the amphitheatre, they were constrained at the gate. Both the men and women were mocked and forced to be re-dressed in attire honoring the Roman gods Saturn and Ceres—”that noble minded woman resisted even to the end with constancy. For she said, ‘We have come thus far of our own accord, for this reason, that our liberty might not be restrained. For this reason we have yielded our minds, that we might not do any such thing as this: we have agreed on this with you.’ Injustice acknowledged the justice; the tribune yielded to their being brought in as simply as they were.”
Perpetua and her companions were incarcerated centuries ago . . . and today, many believe they have been sentenced to a similar, though endless, incarceration they and their children will never be released from. Like many before her, embracing life and our truevoice can be most challenging. Silence can condone violence, and provocative pronouncements can contribute to the same. Reasoned responses, expressed quietly loud, are often the most elusive.
As Professor Thomas J. Heffernan has written, “As a young graduate student, I dismissed the autobiographical claims as rhetorical device, and I settled comfortably on the presumption that yes, the Passion was a fiction. While I put it aside, I could never quite put the Passion out of my mind. It continued to inhabit a part of my consciousness, where it remained as a trace memory of a behavior only barely possible within a human frame. Yet, I could not escape the intuition that the behavior being celebrated could represent the very quintessence of human agency—integrity held so dearly that life itself is worth sacrificing for it.”
“How blessed are we when invited each new day, invited each in our own way, to share with humility the fullness of our humanity with our Father’s children.” – Perpetua