The Voice of the Victim: Gender,

Representation and Early Christian

Martyrdom
KATE COOPER
Centre for Religion, Gender and Culture, Department of Religions and
Theology, University of Manchester

A victim's message is magnified by the cruel fascination of

violence, but it is notoriously slippery in memory. It is a problem
illustrated in our own day by the case of Roop Kanwar, a twenty-
year old Rajput who died whether it was the death of a hero
or that of a victim is unclear in 1987. Her death has been the
subject of an international debate over the practice of women
'becoming sati' joining a husband in death by immolation on
his funeral pyre. Conflicting accounts of the young woman's death
in one, she mounts the funeral pyre voluntarily, and waits
serenely for the flames to engulf her, in another, she is drugged
and thrust on the pyre by in-laws whose motives are cravenly
economic have engendered a debate which reaches as far as the
issues of the position of women, nationalism, and the influence of
the West in South Asia and beyond. 1 The image of the death of a
young woman bears within it such evocative power that it is
peculiarly vulnerable not only to contesting voices who wish to
annex its power, but also to a kind of rhetorical outward spiral,
gathering significance as it attracts to itself concerns beyond its
point of origin.
Similar issues are raised by early Christian martyr texts.
Tertullian of Carthage argued seventeen centuries ago that 'the
blood of Christians is a seed'2 from which the Church would go
forth and flourish: it was an oft-stressed point of the Christian
apologists that persecution of the meek could only back-fire. Yet
it is only in the half-generation since the publication of Michel

1 For a summary of the issues, see John Stratton Hawley, 'Hinduism: sati and its
defenders', Fundamentalism and gender, ed. John Stratton Hawley (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1994), 79-110.
2 Tertullian, Apology 50, 13.
147
148 BULLETIN JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY
Foucault's Discipline and punish^ that scholars have begun to
explain how the paradox of authority and humility in the Roman
arena would actually have been enacted. In scholarly terms, we
know more about the drama of the arena than we have at any time
since Antiquity, and a handful of recent studies have turned this
knowledge to striking, Foucauldian use.4 The present essay seeks
to assess in light of this recent work, the state of our understanding
of early Christian martyr texts, and particularly those texts which
celebrate the particular strength and vulnerability of a martyr
heroine.
The spectacle of the arena was centred around a crushing
assertion of the right order of society. Along with animals and
professional gladiators, the criminal element were put to an
intentionally humiliating death for the entertainment of their social
superiors. 5 In such a society, so pointedly aware of the dynamics
of authority and representation, for a Christian to subvert humilia-
tion by embracing death with equanimity would have constituted
a powerful social gesture. We are beginning to understand the
terms of the contest over subjectivity and allegiance which the
martyr acts document, in particular the role of the accounts
themselves in asserting and shaping the martyr's meaning. Still to
be addressed is the question: what is the relationship between the
contest which took place in the arena itself, and the contest which
remains on the page? We find ourselves, in the martyr acts,
confronted with a complex relation obtaining among parties living,
dead, and dying: the author, his (presumably, his) audience, the
martyr him- or herself, and the Roman crowd. The voice of the
author and the voice of the martyr are often difficult to distinguish
from one another; in general, this is the author's intention. The
martyr's acutely embodied and gendered performance establishes
him or her as the bearer of a supremely authoritative voice, one
which lends its power to the anonymous writer as a sharer in the
martyr's truth.
A single, dazzling text from the early third century points up
these issues by providing the exception that proves the rule. This
is the prison diary of Vibia Perpetua, a married woman of the

3 Michel Foucault, Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison, trans. A. Sheridan (New
York: Pantheon, 1977).
4 David Potter, 'Martyrdom as spectacle', Theater and society in the classical world, ed. Ruth
Scodel (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 53-88, offers an analysis of
the drama of the Christian in the arena as one which subverted precisely the intent of a
ritual by which the social order was meant to be reinforced. Other particularly significant
studies in this area include Carlin Barton, 'The scandal of the arena', Representations, 27
(1989), 1-36; Kathleen M. Coleman, 'Fatal charades: Roman executions staged as
mythological enactments', Journal of Roman Studies, 80 (1990), 44-73; Brent D. Shaw,
'Body/power/identity: passions of the martyrs', Journal of Early Christian Studies, 4 (1996),
269-312; see G.W. Bowersock, Martyrdom and Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995), for a recent and perceptive overview of literature in this field.
5 Potter, 'Martyrdom as spectacle', 53-4.
 VOICE OF THE VICTIM 149

educated classes6 martyred at Carthage on 7 March 203. While we

have few martyr authors to begin with7 in general our martyr
texts are written by other authors some days, years or even
centuries after the fact8 in the case of Perpetua we have a rare
juxtaposition of evidence: both the martyr's own view of the
situation and an independent eye-witness account of her death.9

The Victim and the Veil of Power

A few days later there was a rumour that we were going to be given a hearing.
My father also arrived from the city, worn with worry, and he came to see me
with the idea of persuading me. 'Daughter', he said, 'Have pity on my grey head
have pity on me your father, if I deserve to be called your father, if I have
favoured you above all your brothers, If I have raised you to reach this prime of
your life. Do not abandon me to be the reproach of men. Think of your brothers,
think of your mother and your aunt, think of your child, who will not be able to
live once you are gone. Give up your pride! You will destroy all of us! None of
us will ever be able to speak freely again if anything happens to you!' 10

This extract from Perpetua's prison diary illustrates a number of

important issues which will concern us. To be a victim was not
to be voiceless in the Roman Empire; rather, it was to risk
notoriety not only for oneself but for one's associates, in a context
where there was safety in obscurity. In allowing herself to be
executed for a crime which carried connotations of something very
like political treason, the twenty-two year old Perpetua knew she
would place her surviving family at risk in the context of the
patronage and mutual surveillance governing Roman civic life.
Recent scholarly attention has tended to focus on the hierarchical
reversal implied by this scene: for example, the fact that the terms
of the Christian polity can reduce a Roman paterfamilias to
begging, rather than ordering, his daughter to conform to accepted
social norms. 11 This sundering of community brought about by the
move to Christian allegiance would have been painful to all parties,
and frightening to those left behind. It is not impossible, then, to
6 On Perpetua's family, see Timothy David Barnes, Tertullian: a historical and literary study
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 70.
7 Perpetua differs from Ignatius of Antioch, the earliest (d. c. 98-117) and most expansive
of our martyr authors (unless one includes Paul of Tarsus in this category), in that her own
account is accompanied by that of an eye-witness to her death. On Ignatius, see the com-
mentary of William R. Schoedel, Ignatius of Antioch (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985).
8 On issues of authenticity in the martyr acts, see Gary Bisbee, Pre-Decian acts of martyrs
and commentarii (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988).
9 On the issues surrounding the relationship between Perpetua and the eye-witness
'editor', see Brent D. Shaw, 'The passion of Perpetua', Past and Present, 139 (1993), 3-45.
10 The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, 5; here and throughout I have followed the
edition and translation (with occasional alterations) of Herbert Musurillo, The acts of the
Christian martyrs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) for its ease of availability, though readers
should be aware of the criticisms of Fergus Millar, Journal of Theological Studies, n.s. 24
(1973), 239-43, and Jan den Boeft and Jan Bremmer, 'Notiunculae martyrologicae', Vigiliae
Christianae, 35 (1981), 43-56.
11 E.g. see, Judith Perkins, The suffering self: pain and narrative representation in the early
Christian era (London: Routledge, 1995), 105.
150 BULLETIN JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY
feel some sympathy for Perpetua's father, though the Christian
tradition has tended otherwise.
Attention to what Robert Wilken has called 'the piety of the
persecutors' 12 can illuminate the context of the martyrdom event,
one which our accounts both presume and in some sense subvert.
A recent article by James Rives, borrowing Wilken's phrase for its
title, focuses on the piety of one particular 'persecutor', the
proconsul Hilarianus before whom Perpetua and her companions
are tried. Rives makes the point that there was a wide latitude for
proconsuls to handle accusations brought against the Christians
each according to his own sense of the danger, if any, posed by
the presence of Christians to the social and religious order in his
province. Rives then goes on, through inscriptional evidence, to
flesh out the Hilarianus before whom Perpetua was tried as an
administrator of particular religious conservatism. It is in fact
Perpetua's refusal to 'offer sacrifice for the welfare of the
emperors', 13 in Hilarianus's phrase, which the diary offers as his
motive for condemning her and her companions to the beasts.
The martyr acts stress the threat which Christian martyrs posed
to their persecutors by their unwillingness to deny participation in
the Christian 'superstition' even when proconsuls were willing
to turn a blind eye to participation in Christian cult. The martyr's
challenge is one which engages with Roman cultural and thought
structures regarding dominance, but rather than reinforcing the
existing social order, the structure is mobilized for the purpose of
social subversion. Attention to the role of religio in knitting together
and reinforcing the allegiances, loyalties, and dependencies of the
civic order, and more particularly the role of the emperor cult and
its attendant rituals, will do much to reveal the peculiar divisive-
ness of the martyr's gesture, and the urgency of the martyr's claim
for allegiance on both viewer and reader. The more clearly we
understand the hierarchical infrastructure of ritual, symbol,
ideology, and political or economic relationships carried by
imperial civic cult, which Richard Gordon has characterized as 'the
veil of power', 14 the more likely we will be to be able to attach real
social meaning to the gestures of non-participation performed by
the Christians of the Roman Empire.

Breaking Frame: Body, Authority., Performance

This brings us to another study which has had a considerable
impact on recent approaches to early Christian martyrdom, Elaine

12 James Rives, 'The piety of a persecutor', Journal of Early Christian Studies, 4 (1996),
1-25, citing Robert Wilken, The Christians as the Romans saw them (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1994).
13 Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, 6.
14 Richard Gordon, 'The veil of power: emperors, sacrificers and benefactors', Pagan
priests, eds Mary Beard and John North (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 199-231.
 VOICE OF THE VICTIM 151
Scarry's The body in pain: the making and unmaking of the world. 15
Scarry's subject one which bears an evocative if incomplete
relationship to the judicial violence of the Roman Empire is the
psychological and social mechanisms governing physical torture in
modern totalitarian regimes, a process which she refers to as 'the
conversion of absolute pain into the fiction of absolute power'. 16
Scarry proposes that the peculiar importance of torture to
totalitarian regimes is in its erosion of the identity and self-
understanding of the victim by a barrage of physical and verbal
abuse. By a Pavlovian mechanism, such abuse reinforces in the
victim the notion that any attempt at self-assertion will lead to self-
destruction. In turn, the fear of torture becomes a spur to docility
among those who are able to avoid themselves becoming victims.
One can imagine how the martyrs' willing acceptance of self-
destruction as the price of their truth could short-circuit such a
system. It seems to have been precisely the ability of the martyrs
to hold on to their meaning in the face of dismemberment and
death which most impressed onlookers, or at least those who wrote
the recorded martyrdom accounts. As Maureen Tilley, the scholar
who has done the most to adapt Scarry's line of inquiry to the
problem of early Christian martyrdom, puts it: 'In spite of danger,
fire, and sword, martyrs rarely scream in their agony. On the
contrary, they calmly lecture their torturers on the unity of God
and who will be where in the afterlife'. 17
Tilley argues that by responding to pain in an unexpected way,
the martyrs were able to 'turn the tables' on their torturers, facing
their torturers 'not with a well-known battle-ground but with an
unfamiliar jungle'. 18 Her essay has the further merit of attempting
to account for how the martyrs were able to achieve this feat.
Drawing on the 1975 Amnesty International Report on Torture, Tilley
analyses the compensatory behaviours that would-be martyrs were
able to bring to bear on their situation, particularly a sense of
community which combated the factors of isolation and
intimidation, and an ascetic discipline which allowed them both
to prepare for physical pain and to reconfigure its meaning. What
we may wish to add to this extremely useful attempt to account
for the martyrs' technique is further attention to the contest over
meaning. The martyrs, or at least their thanatographers, seem to
have had a keen sense of the role of self-understanding in the
struggle for dominance.
These reflections lend pungency to another of the best-known
passages of Perpetua's prison diary:

15 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

16 Scarry, The body in pain, 27.
17 Maureen Tilley, 'The ascetic body and the (un)making of the world of the martyr'j
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 59 (1991), 467-79; here, 467.
18 Ibid., 467.
152 BULLETIN JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY
While we were still under arrest (she said) my father out of love for me was
trying to persuade me and shake my resolution. 'Father', said I, 'do you see this
vase here, for example, or water-pot or whatever?' 'Yes, I do', said he. And I
told him: 'Could it be called by any other name than what it is?' And he said:
'No'. 'Well, so too I cannot be called anything other than what I am, a Christian'.
At this my father was so angered by the word 'Christian' that he moved towards
me as though he would pluck my eyes out. But he left it at that and departed,
vanquished along with his diabolical arguments. 19

From the outset, Perpetua presents her dilemma as one of naming:

whether she should allow herself to be 'let off the hook' by
allowing her offensive religious views to be passed over in silence.
To understand how this refusal to remain silent constituted a
social threat it may be useful to draw on recent contributions to
linguistic theory, especially the inter-disciplinary area of discourse
analysis. Drawing on the contributions of J.L. Austin and Erving
Goffman, a recent article by Bronwyn Davies and Rom Harre has
argued that the conversational 'frame' (to use Goffman's term) by
which speakers indicate the terms of their relationship by the forms
of address which they adopt in speaking to one another, is not a
static exposition of existing terms, but rather the dynamic medium
through which the terms of the relationship are negotiated and
even contested. Thus 'who one is is always an open question with
a shifting answer depending upon the positions made available
within one's own and others' discursive practices'.20 This would
mean that the spectacular enactments of social power undertaken
in the arena were not merely reflections of the social order: by
requiring, and generally obtaining the humiliation of those
who had stood out of place, they brought the social order into
being. For a martyr to best his executors by dying with dignity,
his message intact, was more than a symbolic gesture: it struck at
the heart of the social contract.
In the case of Perpetua this meant that a great deal was at stake
where the matter of a name was concerned. It is not only her
desire to assert her own idea of her identity, but her claim of
ontological certainty, which creates the problem; it is essentially
an attempt to control the socio-linguistic frame. Even in death she
is able to assert an alternative reality and of course her
willingness to die in order to do so lends power to the gesture.
This leads us naturally to a final contemporary approach to our
material, one drawn from a study by the classicist Page duBois of
the practice of judicial torture in fifth-century Athens. It was only
under physical torture, duBois reminds us, that the humblest
categories of individual, such as slaves, were able to give judicial
evidence under Athenian law. The Greek word for inquiry by

19 Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, 3.

20 Bronwyn Davies and Rom Harre, 'Positioning: the discursive production of selves',
Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 20 (1990), 43-63; here, 46.
 VOICE OF THE VICTIM 153

torture, basanos, was also the word for 'the touchstone used to test
gold for purity'.21 Torture was understood, by analogy, as a process
of determining what was true or genuine. The logic behind this
was that a slave, because of his or her low rank, would be
constantly under pressure, not only from his or her owner but from
other higher-ranking individuals, not to tell the truth but to give
false evidence which was convenient to the individual attempting
to influence the testimony whether by bribe or by threat. Torture
was, then, a mechanism for discerning truth both because of the
slave's fear of physical pain, but also because it provided the slave
with a face-saving device against the wrath of the person who had
attempted to control the testimony. An inconvenient truth spoken
under extreme duress might find, if not compassion, at least a
contemptuous acceptance of the excuse of physical weakness.
This system, still in force in the Roman period, carried within it
a paradox: the torture victim who was willing to die in order to
prove his point had a certain advantage in establishing the truth
of his position. According to the theory of the basanos, the fact
that the testimony did not change under torture led inexorably to
the conclusion that it was true. By establishing a link between
torture and truth, the ideology of the basanos would have lent a
powerful cultural resonance to the defiance of the martyrs, willing
to suffer unto death for the sake of asserting their truth.
This has repercussions for the most basic representational aspect
of the phenomenon of martyrdom, the word 'martyr' itself.
Manyria, of course, means 'witness'. The traditional explanation
for the use of this particular term to characterize those who
willingly died for the faith has been to emphasize the wide
semantic range of the word so, for example, just as the apostles
had been eye-witnesses to the resurrection of Christ, so the martyrs
were the eschatological witnesses of Christ's imminent return. 22
Yet when the Christians were brought in for questioning, the fact
that our sources characterize them by the term martyros emphasizes
the judicial aspect of the encounter in a way substantially different
from the understanding of the magistrate who would have ordered
the inquiry.23 Put simply, the interrogation of the martyr, and even
the execution itself, is re-cast as the questioning of a witness:
evidence is brought forward, and its truth is evaluated. But the
question has shifted: from 'is this person guilty of the charged
crime?' or even 'is the superstition of Christianity really dangerous

21 Page duBois, Torture and truth (London: Routledge, 1991), 7.

22 W.H.C. Frend, Martyrdom and persecution in the early Church (Garden City, NY:
Anchor Books, 1967), 65ff.
23 Shelby Brown, 'Death as decoration: scenes from the arena on Roman domestic
mosaics', Pornography and representation in Greece and Rome, ed. Amy Richlin (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992), 180-211, offers a striking approach to the problem of how
the Roman elite would have represented the events of the arena.
154 BULLETIN JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY
to men and gods?' it takes an entirely new shape. By framing the
martyr as a witness under torture, rather than as a criminal under
investigation, the martyr acts re-frame the martyr event as
addressing the question, 'is the martyr's assertion the Christian
faith actually true?'
The link which the martyrdom accounts draw between the
martyrs' unwillingness to apostasize, and their refusal to change
this position even in the arena and unto death, becomes a
confirmation of the truth of the view of reality which they
espoused. If this reading is correct, then the term martyros itself is
a triumph of socio-linguistic framing. By assuring that the
encounter is perceived as putting the truth of the Christian
message on trial, the martyr acts in fact challenge the reader to put
the proconsul himself on trial as one who is unable to apprehend
the truth of the evidence set before him.

Gender and the Gaze

There is still more to the story. The ancient ideas of heroism,
authority and charisma drew on, and often exaggerated, the
piquancy of Mediterranean gender conventions: in this sense, the
portrayal of the martyrs as fleshy, gendered men and women was
both unavoidable and evocative. The authoritative speaker of court
and courtroom was paradigmatically male, but his was an
intrinsically agonistic notion of gender performance. One was not,
simply, 'masculine enough': rather, according to what John
Winkler has called the logic of zero-sum competition, a man's
attainment of masculine credibility was won at the expense of
others in the cut and thrust of allegations over military and sexual
prowess, a jostling for rank both brutal and playfully homosocial.24
Physicality was not only metaphorical. Maud Gleason has shown
how men's scrutiny of one another's voice and gesture was based
in the hope that clear signs could be read from these which would
index the veracity of each man's meaning. 25 Such scrutiny was
understood, at least in part, to be wishful thinking: the motivations
of other men's hearts were unknowable, as likely as not to be
unthinkable. We know too that men had good reason for
concealing the motives which they held dearest. Those in power
above them were watching just as closely as were their peers. 26
Watching was both a weakness e.g. the anxious scanning for
clues to another's meaning and a sign of strength. Much of our
literature from Antiquity stresses the disarming self-consciousness
24 See e.g., Michael Herzfeld, The poetics of manhood: contest and identity in a Cretan
mountain village (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); John Winkler, The constraints
of desire: the anthropology of sex and gender in ancient Greece (London: Routledge, 1990).
25 Maud W. Gleason, Making men: sophists and self-presentation in ancient Rome (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
26 Shadi Bartsch, Actors in the audience: theatricality and doublespeak from Nero to Hadrian
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).
 VOICE OF THE VICTIM 15 5

of being watched. To show oneself unmoved by such scrutiny was

to reveal a strength that some revered as god-given this, too,
was performative.27 This strength came from the perception that
above and more perspicacious than the gaze of men was God's all-
seeing, terrible and benevolent gaze; his gaze unmanned and
unmasked those on view and those who presumed to take the role
of viewers. 28 Our authors are conscious of the power of these
notions of gaze and performance, and seek to offer a niche where
the reader can find his or her own implied presence as a partaker
in the spectacle.29
Such notions of masculine authority were not far from the
sensibility of Christian writers even when they wrote of female
martyrs. Most famous is Perpetua's vision transforming her into a
male wrestler;30 Blandina, too, is represented in a gender-crossing
light as she endures a crucifixion which intentionally echoes that
of Jesus. 31 In a sense, these texts partake of the paradigm of the
'male woman' made famous by Kerstin Aspegren. 32
But the violence is also pornographic, and in this wise the genre
invites the proposal of a heroine whose vulnerability an audience
can guess at even as they admire her valiant conduct. The charm
of a heroine's fear was a stock technique of ancient as of modern
authors. 33 When, in the Acts of Agape, Irene and Chione, the lovely
Irene is condemned to labour in a brothel by a sneering governor,
the reader is meant to be titillated by her blushes even as he
admires her fortitude. 34 Similarly, when the martyr Basilides stops
to engage with a passing kindness a Christian maiden who has had
rough treatment from a jeering crowd, one understands that the
episode has been included not only to call attention to Basilides'
nobility of spirit, but also for the sake of the same titillation.
It is this latter kind of scene which contemporary literary theory
imagines as marked by the implication of a male readership: a
woman, reading such texts, would be drawn into imagining herself
as a male reader in order to accept the proposed objectification of

27 The boldness of Perpetua's gaze, deflecting that of the staring crowd by vigor oculorum,
is commemorated at Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, 18.
28 Blake Leyerle, 'John Chrysostom on the gaze', Journal of Early Christian Studies, 1
(1993), 159-74, discusses the dynamics of the earthly spectator and the divine gaze as seen
through the eyes of an Eastern bishop two centuries later.
29 An analogous phenomenon to that charted by Harry O. Maier, 'Staging the gaze: early
Christian apocalypses and narrative self-representation', Harvard Theological Review, 90
(1997), 131-54.
30 Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, 10; on the context of this dream, see Patricia Cox
Miller, Dreams in late Antiquity: studies in the imagination of a culture (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1994), 161ff, and literature cited there.
31 Martyrs of Lyons, 41.
32 Kerstin Aspegren, The male woman: a feminine ideal in the early Church (Uppsala:
Uppsala Universiteit, 1990).
33 On the charms of fear, see Amy Richlin, 'Reading Ovid's rapes', in Richlin, Pornography
and representation, 158-79; here, 162ff
34 Acts of Agape, Chione and Irene, 5.
156 BULLETIN JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY

women and/or erasure of their femininity. 35 Similarly, Lorraine

Code's concept of 'rhetorical spaces' would imply that such
typifications of woman serve to delimit the subject positions
through which women can be heard as speakers. 36 Yet it is also
possible that women themselves would have grasped, and on
occasion used to advantage, the pathos of a heroine which these
texts attempt to mobilize;37 this may also be true in the case of the
'male woman'. Perpetua's dream implies that the boundaries
imposed by gender on the imagination could shift according to
occasion and cultural milieu. 38
None of this is meant to imply that the authors of the martyr acts
would have been female. With the striking exception of Perpetua
herself the authors adopt a specifically 'male' standpoint. 39 Both
masculine and feminine typologies are squarely cut to fit the
purpose of rhetoric and authority for the author's message, the
truth of the Christian's claim to eternal life. Where the
vulnerability of a heroine is stressed, it serves as an enhancing
apposition to her heroism, and as a means of discrediting her
and by implication the author's opponents.
It was a standard feature of Greek and Roman literature that
retaliation for mistreatment (or abduction) of a woman was one
of the most effective ways to raise an army. 40 Perhaps in the spirit
of amplifying the intended reader's own sympathy, the authors of
the martyr acts represent the crowds as pitying the martyr heroine:
thus the crowd at the martyrdom of Carpus, Papylus and
Agathonike call out to her to have pity on herself and her children,
and wail all the more furiously at her execution when she is
stripped for burning and her striking physical beauty is fully
revealed.41
35 Jonathan Culler, On deconstruction. theory and criticism after structuralism (London:
Routledge, 1983); Janice A. Radway, Reading the romance: women, partiarchy, and popular
literature (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). See the discussion
of the issues, particularly the notion of the 'resisting reader', in Holly Montague, 'Sweet
and pleasant passion: female and male fantasy in ancient erotic novels', Richlin, Pornography
and representation, 231-49.
36 Lorraine Code, Rhetorical spaces: essays on gendered locations (London: Routledge, 1995).
37 Kate Cooper, The virgin and the bride: idealized womanhood in late Antiquity (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 65.
38 On the Montanist context for Perpetua, see Frederick Klawiter, 'The role of
martyrdom and persecution in developing the priestly authority of women in early
Christianity: a case study of Montanism', Church History, 49 (1980), 251-61, and now
Christine Trevett, Montanism: gender, authority and the new prophecy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996).
39 Even the text of Perpetua's diary itself is preserved in a form which has been edited
by what seems to be a male editor: see the argument of Shaw, Perpetua, and literature cited
there.
40 Sandra Joshel, 'The body female and the body politic: Livy's Lucretia and Verginia',
in Richlin, Pornography and representation, 112-30; for Augustine's early fifth-century
critique of the social assumptions behind this literary topos, see Dennis Trout, 'Re-
textualizing Lucretia: cultural subversion in the City of God', Journal of Early Christian
Studies, 2 (1994), 53-70.
41 Martyrdom of Carpus, Papylus and Agathonike, 6.
 VOICE OF THE VICTIM 157

Conclusion: The Voice of The Victim

It is not easy to know the truth about these and similar practices, and even if
one were to find out, it would be difficult to convince others; and it is just not
worth the effort to try to persuade people whose heads are full of mutual
suspicion.42
While the victim's truth is slippery in memory, the victim's voice,
amplified by the magnetic horror of the arena, was possessed of a
quality of authenticity rare to the Roman ear where matters of
creed or allegiance were concerned. It spoke confidently to a
society which had no secure purchase on the broader problem of
how to distinguish the true from the false, with emperors and
philosophers agreeing that there was no exact science for
discerning religion from superstition, the charlatan from the saint.
This is one of many reasons why legitimation by biography the
legitimation of an idea through association with the life and death
of an exemplary individual-became increasingly popular during our
period.43
With this in mind, we may remember with new interest the final
words of Perpetua's diary, which ends on the eve of her appointed
day in the arena. The story of her death, alongside her
companions, is given in the hand of an anonymous editor, who has
often been criticized for his (presumably, his) tendency to
emphasize the feminine modesty of Perpetua, which some
contemporary readers have found ironic given Perpetua's own
willingness to imagine herself as a naked male wrestler in a
wrestling-match. 44 Surely the peculiar magnetism of Perpetua's
account is the fact that while other martyrs' stories are told in the
mixed voice of prurience and censoriousness of editors very like
her own, her prison journal gives us access to the vivid, bold, and
unapologetic voice of the martyr herself. Her boldness reveals itself
in the very precision with which she grasps the problem of how
her own voice will be made vulnerable in a future beyond her
death and lost to her control: 'This is what happened up to the
day before the contest. As for what is to happen at the contest
itself, let him write of it who will'. 45'46

42 Plato, Laws 933a-b, as cited in C.R. Phillips, III, '"Nullum crimen sine lege": socio-
religious sanctions on magic', Magika hiera: ancient Greek magic and religion, eds Christopher
A. Faraone and Dirk Obbink (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 261-76.
43 On the emergence in late Antiquity of the holy man (or woman) as an icon of
objectivity, see Peter Brown, The making of late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1978).
44 Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, 10, and Shaw, 'Passion of Perpetua'.
45 Martyrdom, 10.
46 Margaret Y. MacDonald's interesting treatment of the passage in Pliny the Younger's
letter 10 to the Emperor Trajan, in which he mentions judicial torture of two female
Christian slaves, unfortunately came to my attention too late to be discussed in the present
essay. See M.Y. MacDonald, Early Christian women and pagan opinion: the power of hysterical
women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).