Perpetua's Husband

The identity of the husband of Vibia Perpetua, the young mother martyred at Carthage with her companions in 203 C.E. and immortalized in the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, ¹ has remained a mystery. Perpetua is said to be about twenty-two years old, of the upper social stratum (honeste nata), with a baby son still being nursed. She has a surviving mother, father and two brothers (2), an aunt (5) plus a younger brother who died in childhood (7). She is arrested with two slaves, Revocatus and Felicitas, ² and two others, Saturninus and Secundulus, of undetermined social status (2), and is baptized while under apparent house arrest and before being committed to prison (3). One of her brothers is like her a catechumen at the time of her arrest but is not himself arrested (20). Her mother, father, and brother are able to visit her in prison and for a while she is able to keep her baby with her (3). Her father, adamantly against her Christian commitment, takes the lead among family members in trying to dissuade her, admitting that she is his favorite child above her brothers (5, 6, 9). Finally, he takes the baby away and refuses to give him back to his daughter (6).

Nowhere is a husband mentioned, and there has been little interest in trying to find one. ³ Some speculate that he had recently died, ⁴ but Perpetua would then have been called a widow, which she is not. Others speculate that he was away at the time of the arrest, trial, and execution. ⁵ According to Roman marriage customs established over two centuries earlier, most marriages by this time were sine manu, that is, the woman did not legally leave her familia of origin to pass over into the familia of her husband and his ancestors, as had been done in earlier cum manu marriages of the Republican period. ⁶ Thus she remained a member of her own family and under her father's potestas as long as he was alive. According to Roman law, however, the child even in this kind of marriage should belong not to the mother's familia but the father's. Thus Perpetua's father is acting quite within his expected role to exercise patria potestas over her and to take the lead in trying to dissuade her. But why does he, the maternal grandfather, exercise authority over the child, and seemingly alone? This could conceivably happen if there were no father or father's family to claim the child, or if they were too afraid or too ashamed to do so.

This and many other elements of the narrative fall into place if Perpetua's husband and the father of her child is Saturus, also sufficiently alienated from his family by his faith that they will have nothing to do with him or his wife. He is an elusive character in the story, but with some kind of special relationship to Perpetua. He is the only person under arrest who is not introduced in the first telling about it, since he is not present when the others are arrested. He is first introduced in chapter 4 as a principal character in Perpetua's first dream. He is unlikely to be her slave, since the relationship between them is mutual and in a certain sense, exclusive. Saturus even takes the lead in her first dream (4). He is unlikely to be her brother because others of Perpetua's brothers appear in the narrative and are identified as such. There is an oblique reference to him here as "the one who built us up" (quia ipse nos aedificaverat) and who gave himself up to arrest afterwards. This is sometimes interpreted to mean that Saturus was the catechist of the group. That is unnecessary, but it does seem to mean that he had been a strong member of the group. The focus of his relationships, however, wherever he appears, is not the...