The young mother in the arena

Vibia Perpetua is twenty-two years old, recently married, still nursing her infant son, and recently arrested for the crime of being a Christian catechumen — a convert under instruction. Her father visits her in prison repeatedly, begging her to recant. He is a pagan, a man of some standing, and her death will ruin him. He weeps. He calls her by name. He tells her to have pity on his gray head.

Perpetua loves her father. The record she keeps of her imprisonment makes this plain. But her answer does not change: Father, do you see this water pot? Can it be called by any other name than what it is? Neither can I call myself anything other than what I am — a Christian.

With her is Felicity, her slave, eight months pregnant. Roman law forbade the execution of pregnant women. Felicity is afraid she will be delayed, separated from her companions, forced to die alone among criminals rather than with her sisters and brothers. She prays to deliver early.

Two days before the scheduled execution, Felicity gives birth. The labor is hard, and a guard mocks her — if you can't stand this pain, he says, how will you stand what's coming in the arena? Felicity says: Now I suffer what I suffer. Then another will be in me who will suffer for me.

Perpetua's diary — the first known piece of Latin literature written by a woman — ends abruptly. Someone else writes the final entry: the account of the arena, and how she died.

Before she died, Perpetua guided the trembling hand of the executioner to her own throat. As if, the account says, so great a woman could not be put to death unless she herself were willing.

Perpetua kept a diary in prison. She wrote about her visions, her father's visits, her infant, her fear, her hope. She wrote like a person fully alive — not a saint performing sanctity but a young woman working through the hardest thing anyone has ever faced.

The diary survives. Two thousand years later we can read exactly what she was thinking in the weeks before she died.

She was not extraordinary in the way we mean the word. She was a new convert, a young mother, someone's daughter. She simply decided, clearly and irreversibly, who she was — and held that identity even when everything around her demanded she exchange it for survival.

Who are you, really, when everything is stripped away?