Sarah Ruden is a translator, a writer, and a scholar of the ancient world. In her new book, Perpetua (Yale University Press), Ruden offers both a portrait of the ancient martyr and a new translation of her diary.
Who was Perpetua, and what was she like?
Perpetua was a middle- or upper-class Roman woman, living in Carthage, who was martyred in the year 203. She is perhaps the most honest female voice we have from antiquity, as well as probably the earliest to write in prose. She writes spontaneously, personally, off the cuff. This is not a confection she’s giving us—it’s a prison diary.
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She has a vibrant personality. She is a grandstander. She sees martyrdom—and that means testimony—as a personal glorification. She has no interest in theology or in other people’s martyrdom; this is her performance. We’re used to seeing the Hollywood version: the martyr is pure and holy, a rebel who stands for truth and beauty and human rights against the barbaric Roman regime. But according to Perpetua’s account, martyrdom was a sort of asymmetrical information warfare.
Christians, at this point, were generally poor, very unpopular, and subject to repression. They were typically not well educated either, not sophisticated, not literary, not rhetorical. Martyrdom, as a spectacle, was an effective way to communicate that they were brave, virtuous, and self-sacrificing in the traditional Roman manner. They could tell the populace at large: No, we are not criminals, because we sacrifice so much in the arena.
Trouble was, technically, Christians were common criminals. What we see in Perpetua’s diary is a fascinating account of how this status was massaged—in collusion with both the Christian hierarchy and the Roman organizers of the games. They were all in on this, including the martyrs themselves. They wanted to present their martyrdom as something higher, so they insinuated themselves into the identity of gladiators, as stars of the game, and the organizers actually cooperated. We see this throughout Perpetua’s diary. For example, she and other martyrs get a feast, a last meal, which is traditionally the prerogative of gladiators.
We have a lot of stories of women martyrs in the early church. Why work on Perpetua? What sets her apart?
Well, she’s a real person. All the other women martyrs we know about are either flashes in the pan or mostly made up.
At one end of the spectrum, we have Thecla. The Acts of Paul and Thecla claims that Paul, who died in the 60s, had a companion named Thecla, who went through all kinds of fantastic adventures and was miraculously saved from destruction in a public spectacle. But this is the purest hooey, because there was no such thing as arena martyrdom in the time of Paul.
Then we have legendary women martyrs who might have been real people, but all we have are their names, attached to similar stories. There’s the beautiful young virgin: she refuses to marry and as punishment is sold to a brothel, but by a number of miracles she retains her virginity, and she’s martyred horribly—martyrs like Agnes and Agatha.
And then we have martyrs whose stories are almost certainly real, but they are flashes in the pan. There’s Blandina, who died in what is now France in the second century. Blandina was a slave woman, and she was horribly tortured. The torturers took it as a particular task to break this woman, who was very brave, and they couldn’t. This is probably true, because the story of the martyrs of Vienne and Lyons is too big and too public to have been made up out of whole cloth. But we don’t hear anything from Blandina, who was likely illiterate. In the eyes of history, all that happened was the spectacle of this woman getting tortured to death. That seems to be typical for historical women martyrs—they don’t have a voice.
I find it fascinating that by this era, this seems to be the only public role that’s left for women in the Christian church. In the first century, Paul authorized quite a significant role for women. They could speak in the assembly. They could be organizers. They could have actual titles. But as the church got more organized, women’s roles fell away. Now there were paid positions in local churches, and the men wanted those positions—so they wanted to shut the women up. But martyrdom was a public role that continued to be open to women.
We have Perpetua’s diary. What is the history of the text? How and why do we have it today?
We have it because she was a popular cult figure. She had a female companion, a young slave woman who gave birth in jail and was martyred alongside her, but Perpetua herself seems to have been the enduring focus of public interest and Christian reverence.
One reason is that she was upper or middle class. Such people were precious to Christians, who were able to say, “Look, we’ve been able to draw such and such a prestigious figure into our fold.” She was also young, around 21, and there was a sexual interest in her on the part of the public because women martyrs were put on display as sexual objects. She and her companion Felicitas—which means good luck or happiness, a typical slave’s name—were stripped naked in the arena, and a net was put over them. You can associate this imagery with modern pornography. And then they were attacked.
All of these things made Perpetua fascinating to the audience in the arena—and to later literary audiences. When a manuscript survives from antiquity, we tend to assume a significant level of popularity. And we still have both her own writing and different versions and offshoots that followed.
Can you say a little bit about the different versions?
They’re fascinating—and deplorable, because they’re so repressive. Christian authorities were not willing to deal with Perpetua on her own terms. Different versions emerged in the generations after her death, and they were made progressively blander, shorter, more perfunctory, and more aligned with official doctrine. As the church’s thinking became tighter and more misogynistic, the stories of Perpetua conformed to its dictates.
For example, there is the question of her visions. She records several in her diary, and she even depicts herself as having the power to pray her late, unbaptized brother out of a proto-purgatory. She prays a symbolic baptism for him: he splashes around in a pool of water, and all his miseries are shed and he enjoys paradise through her efforts. You can imagine how shocking this notion was to male Christian authorities. So this miracle disappeared from subsequent versions of her story.
When Augustine preached about Perpetua, he tried to explain away her exalted spiritual role as a female. He summarized the male attitude, which was that a woman martyr becomes a man in the course of her martyrdom. She doesn’t have it in her to be holy and transcendent as a woman, because she carries the sin of Eve. She has to be infused with virtus, manliness. A woman martyr has to undergo a virtual sex change in order to be martyred, in order to achieve heaven on the same plane as men. But to tell that story, you have to strip out most of what’s in Perpetua’s diary.
What is it like for you as a translator to work with texts like this that are already well known?
I love doing it. It’s fascinating to look at the Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, particularly if it’s a text that’s well known, if it’s something that I imbibed as a child. I was raised as a Methodist in a conservative part of the country, so the Bible was a big deal. Now I can look at these texts in the original and say, “Aha, that’s not what I was told, not at all!” I can think about what the original readers would have thought, what the original authors would have meant. I love that as an occupation.
The trouble sometimes comes when I publish. My ideas do not fit into prevailing Christian doctrine, especially conservative Christian doctrine, so I get some pushback. My response is: It would be wonderful if I didn’t have to do this. If you, the professional biblical scholars, who know far better than I do what these words mean, would convey those meanings more clearly to readers, I wouldn’t have anything to do. There is an outsized deference to translation traditions that are simply wrong.
An example I like to cite is the Syrophoenician woman in the Gospel of Mark (7:24–30). Jesus encounters a pagan woman, and she is very pushy; she is sassy. You would think, looking at ordinary translations, that Jesus puts her down by calling the pagans dogs: He says that they shouldn’t eat the children’s bread. “You’re dogs!” This would be a shocking way to treat other human beings; dogs were seen as dirty, outcast animals.
But that’s not what Jesus says. He calls them κυνάρια (kunaria), and that’s a rare, special word. It’s the word for little doggies, lapdogs, and it has a comic literary tradition: cute little doggie poos. Dramatically, it makes perfect sense in this story, because the woman sasses back at him and says, well, even the little doggies get the scraps under the table. This is a scenario that, in pagan literature, is a comic one, a tender one. The little dogs at a feast eat until their stomachs are distended, because these are spoiled little lapdogs. This is the scenario that Jesus is echoing here—not the tradition of dogs who eat garbage, who mate in the street, who are disgusting and untouchable.
When we take the gospels as texts with integrity in their own right—with historical rootedness and traceable moods and intentions of their authors—we are in a very different place than a traditional English translation puts us.
How does your own spiritual practice intersect with your translation practice?
Since age 30, my spiritual calling has been as a Quaker. Quakers have a special tradition for communication and for searching for the truth. We worship in silence, and we are admonished to be very careful before we say anything. We don’t have clergy telling us what to think and do; we are working it out as a community. There is no proper place in a Quaker meeting for self-expression, for argument, for self-assertive modes of discourse. We just don’t do that. You sit, you wait. You hope and pray for the Holy Spirit to assert itself as an independent force manifested in the community.
The way Quakers taught me to translate is to be patient and diligent and to sit with the texts—and, rather than assuming that I know what I’m looking for, to go to the community of scholarship. The authors of lexicons have a lot of authority with me. Lexicons gather in the whole literary tradition and say, OK, a word could mean this or this or this, and here is how the word functions throughout its history. The lexicon has a lot of authority in persuading me to translate a word one way or another.
In contrast, the tradition of translation is full of hearsay: I translate this word this way because that’s the way I’ve read it in English. That’s the way people told me to translate. Of course the translation changes over time, but there’s a great reluctance to alter important passages when the scholarship demands it. So verses many people live by are misrepresented.
Martyrdom is met with a lot of skepticism and criticism these days, including arguments that it glorifies suffering or encourages self-destruction. What value do martyrdom narratives still have for us, and how do we avoid their dangers?
Yeah, you’ve certainly named the problems. Martyrdom today is associated with terrorism. We have learned over the past century to be very skeptical about people who are utterly dedicated to the cause, willing to die, not willing to ask questions. We have experienced, through world wars and now through fascisms of recent vintage, how horrifying it is that people simply don’t care about lost life or about violence, that they hold the cause so strongly in their hearts and minds that they are not only willing to die but will use the young, poor, weak, impressionable, and helpless as living weapons. This is the case with, say, a child with a bomb strapped to his chest, sent into the enemy compound to blow it to pieces, operating through the appearance of innocence.
We can see that to some extent in Perpetua. She’s in a circle of young people who are confused and marginalized. We can see these ancient martyrs manifesting social contagion, egging each other on. The young men in the arena, for example, have decided to treat their own deaths as young men today might treat a sports match or a video game. They are planning it all out, they’re deciding what will be the most fun and the most glorious way to die. And Christian officials are orchestrating all of this. They’re not asking, Have you thought about this? What are you really thinking in giving up your life here? No, they are in collusion with the pagan prison officials, encouraging the martyrs, giving them special privileges. It’s perfectly horrifying.
I don’t know how we get past this, back to a sense of martyrdom as an exalted mission. We can certainly talk about 20th-century martyrs like Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But there are also secular martyrs. There were communist martyrs under the Nazis who behaved just as well.
I’m not even sure that I would say religious martyrdom is something special. I don’t have one iota less admiration right now for Alexei Navalny, for his witness against tyranny and totalitarianism, than for the greatest of the Christian martyrs. In fact, I’ve got more admiration for him, because—whatever his religious beliefs, which aren’t clear—he doesn’t seem to have made his sacrifice in order to go to heaven, to have immortal, glorious life as a reward. He seems to have made his sacrifice for humankind, for the future, to make history different, to inspire others to stand up to tyranny.
I reckon this is a Quaker way of thinking. We strongly de-emphasize the afterlife. We don’t count on any immortality. We think that it’s deeply important what we do now, right now, and that we should concentrate on that.
The current political moment, domestically and globally, is one of crisis and persecution. Do you think Perpetua’s story can offer any kind of wisdom?
I think the wisdom Perpetua can offer us is as a negative example. And I don’t say that disparagingly. She offers us a valuable example because of her frankness. She was about 21. She’s hooked on immortality. She can’t imagine getting old, learning the hard way, getting the big picture. She’s all about fantasy, about being the darling child of heaven. Of course, that’s a very limited way to see the world.
I think the proper advice for us to draw from her story is to be grown up, to see the big picture, to have a less egotistical sense of the universe. That’s a great American fault, which I know I share; it was a great Roman fault too, and in many ways Perpetua was a typical Roman.
Writer and translator Sarah Ruden with her dog; Ruden’s new book Perpetua: The Woman, the Martyr
