Alan (the Lone Librarian) Teder’s Reviews > Perpetua: The Woman, the Martyr > Status Update

Juvenal’s famous question, “Who’s going to guard those guards of yours?” is about corruptible slaves set to watch over women prone to adultery.

[Today's "Who polices the police?" has its origins in Juvenal's "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" from The Satires (100-127 AD).]

A standard proviso for reading ancient texts is that “the more difficult reading is the stronger one”; as Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot would insist, an incongruous clue should be taken seriously, not jammed in to “fit” with other facts that may themselves have been falsified in order to support each other.

[Nice to see a shoutout to Christie & Poirot! 🕵🏻‍♂️]

Surprise, curiosity, prurience may be first impressions, but they are not the means by which a story sticks; and certain women’s stories stick like nothing else.

If the main narrator’s style in The Suffering of the Holy Perpetua and Felicitas is arresting but not odd to our ear, it is because, centuries before modern writers thought they were inventing it, she had the intimate literary voice down flawlessly: She is not like a literary disciple: not traditional, not institutional, not collegial, and not emulative. She is just strikingly herself on paper.

The Suffering does not include palaver of this specific kind, but the etiquette demanding displays of joyful gratitude for the gift of martyrdom as a guarantee of heaven results in huge gaps in plausibility. As far as the text itself is a performance, it breathes desperate pride but also psychic strain and division.

She has had no real biography prior to this attempt of mine, even though, among other distinctions, she appears to be the first female prose author in Western history whose work we still possess.

I come to Perpetua from several starting points—and I hope that does not remind readers of Stephen Leacock’s Lord Ronald, who “flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.”