Emperors and the Divine – Rome and its Influence

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Women and citizenship in the late Roman Republic and the early Empire

Mary, Thecla, Perpetua and Felicitas are often seen as female exempla both in the early Christian world and in their modern reception. They are considered model teachers, martyrs and apostles, and counter-cultural as they surpass the normative gender hierarchy. Yet, the texts that tell their stories are not so clear-cut. In characterising their protagonists, they repeatedly place them in sexualized or subordinate roles – they are condescended to, distrusted and exhibited. In the end, the women are favoured by the divine but hold little power over their male peers. Even as these texts appear to challenge the patriarchal society from which they stem, they reinscribe it.

The Fetishization of Female Exempla: Mary, Thecla, Perpetua and Felicitas

This article examines the significance of breastfeeding in the self-definition of Perpetua, author and protagonist of the Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis. Through close readings of all relevant passages, this discussion intends to demonstrate that Perpetua's desire to continue nursing her son in prison as well as her eventual resignation to lactation cessation exemplify her struggle to balance her roles as mother and martyr. By illustrating how motherhood foreshadows martyrdom in the Passio, this analysis also highlights the narrator's thorough knowledge of the realities of breastfeeding as an argument that further supports female authorship.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/illiclasstud.42.1.0245

Lactation Cessation and the Realities of Martyrdom in The Passion of Saint Perpetua

Recent scholarship on early Christian martyrdom tends to be sceptical towards the traditional picture according to which Roman emperors wanted to destroy the emerging Christianity and ordered numerous believers who did not take part in the imperial cult to be executed. The vast majority of sources are written from a Christian point of view; they are narratives of uncompromising commitment and the superiority of the Christian faith, not disinterested reports of what happened. No matter how slim the historical evidence on early Christian martyrdom, its ideological significance was remarkable – the sentiment of belonging to a persecuted minority was an important factor of Christian identity. Part of this ideology was to portray the emperor as an archenemy of Christianity, an agent of ultimate evil who is in constant warfare with the divine. Even though the emperors seldom appear in the trial scenes of martyrs, they have an important part to play in the stories of martyrdom. They are present through their officials and their decrees and it is these unjust imperial orders that result in martyrdom. Martyrdom, however, is seen as a God-given fate and the martyr as a triumphant hero, which makes the emperor, despite his apparent victory, an eventual loser. While the battle between the martyr and the emperor is cast on a cosmic level, the authority of the emperor and his entitlement to honours on the mundane level are not questioned.

"What Harm Is There for You to Say Caesar Is Lord?" Emperors and the Imperial Cult in Early Christian Stories of Martyrdom

Modern scholarship on the famous Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis (Pass. Perp.) is vast.1 The text has attracted attention on account of many aspects, such as its complex composition, its relevance for social and religious history, its reports on visions, and above all as a lively por trait of two young Christian female martyrs from Carthage in A.D. 203. Notably, Perpetua's first person account of her stay in prison previous to her execution (chapters 3-10), and another first person account by Satu rus (chs. 11-13) have solicited many scholarly comments. There is, how

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V.J.C. Hunink

Papers

Did Perpetua write her prison account