Introduction

What does it mean to bear witness? Evoking the setting of a courtroom, witnessing is bound up with the process of adjudicating a contested truth. Martyr designates one who testifies in such a process. In classical antiquity, enslaved persons were typically required to give their testimony under torture. In later antiquity, Christians both embraced and transformed this received practice, appropriating the role of the tortured witness. The whole world became a courtroom in which truth was on trial, every believer a potential witness who willingly took on the suffering that testifying entailed. But to what, exactly, did the Christian bear witness? Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–c. 215 ce) says it well: the Christian “bears witness (martyrei) to themselves, that they are faithful and loyal toward god; and to the tempter, that the tempter in vain envied the one faithful through love; and to the lord, with respect to the inspired persuasion for the teaching, from which the Christian will not depart through fear of death” (Miscellanies 4.4.13.2). The truth witnessed was thus both single and threefold. It was, simultaneously, a truth about the one bearing witness, a truth about the suffering inflicted upon them, and a truth about the power of conviction that gave them the strength and purpose to endure. This threefold testimony was forged in crisis. As much a bodily as a verbal performance, it emerged as an astonishing assertion of agency by one whose freedom suffered the most severe constraints, in a context where hope might seem to have been extinguished altogether.

Scholars making the case that the so-called persecution of Christians was, at most, occasional and sporadic help us see that martyrdom was much more than a defensive reaction to Roman state violence or popular anti-Christian sentiment.Footnote ¹ From an early date, the act of bearing witness was deemed crucial to the forging of Christian identity. As Clement frames the ideal, “If the confession to God is a witness (martyria), each soul who has lived purely in the knowledge of God, who has obeyed the commandments, is a witness (martys) by both life and word, in whatever way they may be set free from the body – pouring forth faith like blood throughout their whole life till their departure” (Miscellanies 4.4.15.3). In other words, the act of witnessing formed the Christian, whether through a suffering death, a faithful life, or courageous speech: “I am a Christian!” “I believe!” “Martyrdom and identity are in many ways cross-referential terms” in early Christianity, argues Judith Lieu.Footnote ² “The construction of the linguistic category ‘martyr’ took place alongside and in dialogue with the construction of the category ‘Christian,’” notes Candida Moss, in a similar vein; historically speaking, the identities of Christian and of witness were “coproduced.”Footnote ³

Bearing witness was thus one of the most distinctive and defining practices of ancient Christianity. However, that does not imply that it was uniquely or exclusively Christian. Far from being exceptional, I would argue that the Christian discourse of martyrdom was quintessentially “late antique.” It is commonly acknowledged that Christian understandings of martyrdom drew broadly from non-Christian sources, Jewish as well as polytheistic.Footnote ⁴ More difficult to recognize is how Christian understandings of martyrdom continued to cross-fertilize with other religious cultures of late antiquity, both directly and indirectly. To take one striking case, the Hellenistic–Jewish work known as Fourth Maccabees elaborates prior stories of the trial and execution of the old man Eleazar and an unnamed mother and her seven sons at the hands of the cruel tyrant Antiochus IV, who seeks to force them to forsake their Jewish faith. Rife with instances of fearless speech, gruesome torture, sexual menace, philosophical discourses, and athletic metaphors, Fourth Maccabees is often seen as a “precursor” to Christian martyrdom literature.Footnote ⁵ However, we should perhaps be skeptical of a framing that conforms so closely to the demands of supersessionist historiography, in which Christianity takes up the mantle of divine election from Judaism – in this case, the mantle of martyrdom. Not only is it difficult to date Fourth Maccabees (though a first- or second-century ce origin seems likely); it is also difficult to prove the direct influence of Fourth Maccabees on any early Christian work prior to the fourth- and fifth-century homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus, John Chrysostom, and Augustine that engage the Maccabean martyrs as such. It may therefore be more appropriate to speak of “family resemblances” or “shared innovation” between Fourth Maccabees and contemporaneous Christian martyrdom literature, as Daniel Boyarin suggests, rather than claiming that one derived from the other.Footnote ⁶ Similar ambiguities regarding influence pertain with respect to the so-called “Acts of the Pagan Martyrs,” a collection of fragmentary papyri inscribed in the second or early third century ce, recording the trials and executions of certain elite Alexandrians represented as resisting Roman “tyranny.”Footnote ⁷ The point is not only that influence flowed more than one way, but that Christians, Jews, and polytheists all participated in a shared culture. Identifying some of its most salient features, with respect to the discourse of witnessing, will be part of the task of this essay.

My concerns are not, of course, strictly antiquarian. How could they be? The cultural legacy of witnessing is with us still and can be discerned in apparently secular spaces as well as explicitly religious ones. And it is a particularly ambivalent legacy. As Elizabeth Castelli notes in the epilogue of her influential 2004 study of ancient Christian martyrdom, “the overprivileging of the self-sacrificial dimensions of the ‘martyr’” has proved especially problematic in our own context. Emphasizing the martyr’s choice as well as the beneficial effects of that choice “undermin[es] sustainable critiques of the fact of suffering itself and the conditions that generate and nurture that suffering,” as she observes.Footnote ⁸ These problems lead Castelli to propose that we reimagine martyrdom as witness, and indeed this is the jumping-off point of the present essay. We should not understand this “reimagining” as any less historically valid than approaching martyrdom as self-sacrifice, however. We craft our histories retrospectively. Impelled by the urgencies of our own ever-shifting moment (urgencies that are no longer the same as they were even when Castelli wrote),Footnote ⁹ we move backward in time, passing through layers of prior interpretation that mediate our access to martyrdom’s past. There, we may find the beginnings of paths that have led to the problematic emphasis on self-sacrifice critiqued by Castelli; we may also “rediscover lost tracks, cut off questions and answers, omitted evidence,” as Markus Vinzent puts it – roads not taken, so to speak.Footnote ¹⁰

When did we start to understand martyrdom primarily as self-sacrifice, rather than witness? “In self-sacrifice, it is the self that is made holy,” notes John Soboslai. “The individual who undergoes the sacrifice is in turn marked as special by the group, as they are seen to have given up that of greatest value and utility to serve the collective.”Footnote ¹¹ The robust concept of human selfhood and agency invoked by this understanding suggests a distinctly modern perspective (if not modern origins): sacrificing oneself for the sake of a greater good is a heroic act of will proper to modern “man.” But it is an ambivalent ideal, for a culture in which the instinct for self-preservation is also viewed as both natural and healthy.Footnote ¹² As Moss shows, Edward Gibbon’s 1776 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire views martyrdom with distaste on the grounds that martyrs actively provoked their own deaths, and this critique “set the tone for subsequent discussion.” A century later, ancient historians began to mobilize the category of “voluntary” or self-provoked martyrdom in order to distinguish “false” martyrs like Ignatius of Antioch (who famously begged the Roman Christians not to prevent his death) from true ones.Footnote ¹³ Gibbon’s suspicion of volunteerism, if not his blanket condemnation of ancient Christian martyrdom, persisted in later centuries, and to a great extent it still does. Self-sacrifice casts a shadow in the form of so-called “voluntary martyrdom,” true martyrdom’s denigrated double.

To be sure, ancient writers also worried about the motivations as well as the staying power of overeager witnesses. Clement of Alexandria admonishes the one who “out of daring presents themselves for capture,” adding, “Such a one becomes an accomplice in the crime of the persecutor” (Miscellanies 4.10). The Martyrdom of Polycarp, possibly composed in Asia Minor around the same time that Clement wrote,Footnote ¹⁴ invokes the negative example of one Quintus, who “forcefully induced himself and others to surrender voluntarily” but then was unable to hold firm when brought to trial. “Therefore, because of this, brothers, we do not commend those who surrender on their own account,” the text concludes (Martyrdom of Polycarp 6.4).Footnote ¹⁵ However, as Moss argues, criticism of those who provoke their own deaths did not emerge before the third century and appeared “only in the context of defending self-withdrawal” in the face of persecution.Footnote ¹⁶ In fact, those who offered themselves for martyrdom earned praise more often than criticism, as G. E. M. de Ste. Croix documents (with disapproval) in an influential study. Failing to bear witness was deemed much more problematic than desiring it too strongly, and the line between merely “willing” and actively “voluntary” martyrs was far from clear.Footnote ¹⁷

Yet questions of human freedom and will were indeed crucial to ancient understandings of witnessing, as Page duBois has shown. In antiquity, elite male citizens were understood either to speak truth freely or to maintain a noble silence when coerced. They could not legally be subjected to torture when called upon to give testimony in the context of a trial. After all, what would be the point? In contrast, enslaved persons were understood to speak truth only when tortured; conversely, when tortured, they could only speak truth. In a trial setting, the torture of the enslaved thus became the “touchstone” (basanos) of valid testimony.Footnote ¹⁸ Depictions of Christian martyrs, as we shall see, drew on both figures – the spontaneous (or voluntary) elite witness and the coerced (or involuntary) enslaved witness. Crucially, however, the coerced witness, whether or not actually enslaved, was now also seen to be rendered free in their very witnessing: the truth that they spoke under torture was not the one that the torturer desired but their own.Footnote ¹⁹ In the Christian martyr, the figure of the tortured witness thus converged with the figure of the “parrhesiast” – one who speaks truth frankly, courageously, provocatively, and faithfully. As Michel Foucault puts it, “In parrēsia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses truth instead of lies, death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and duty instead of interest and selfishness.”Footnote ²⁰ Like torture, free speech uttered in a context of risk could be described as a “touchstone” (basanos) or test of truth, as Foucault also points out, with reference to Plato’s Socrates (Laches 188a).Footnote ²¹

Thus, bearing witness, in the terms of ancient Christian discourse, was at once active and passive, something that the martyr both did and suffered. Of course, subjects are always simultaneously acting and being acted upon, but the martyr’s case was extreme: the martyr suffered even to the point of death while never ceasing to resist – improbably, wondrously. In the figure of the prosecuting judge, the overwhelming power of the Roman state was brought to bear on the accused Christian, who nonetheless refused to bend or break. Witnessing took place, then, where the excesses of coercion and freedom – of the involuntary and the voluntary – met. It also exposed and reflected back on those very excesses. According to the discourse of martyrdom, tyranny prevailed in a world of violence, fear, and death; at the same time, truth and life and love and something like hope persisted. I say “something like” hope because Christian witness did not offer hope for the world. But it did conjure a world – an other world – where justice reigned and hope might be risked, even if that world, that hope, could only barely be glimpsed on the horizon of present experience and understanding.

That such a large narrative, both political and religious, could be conveyed by the destiny of a single human figure – and frequently a rather ordinary one at that – suggests that the martyr is crucially a medium of scalar translation, in both temporal and spatial dimensions. That is, the figure of the martyr “transpose[s] on the human scale events and processes that exceed or escape the usual geographical and temporal limits of how we think, or feel involved.”Footnote ²² Thus, the witness’s threefold truth is at once graspable and utterly mind-boggling. Their agency is simultaneously negligible and wholly transformative. In bearing witness, the martyr catches us up in problems and possibilities that vastly outstrip our understanding and control, without relinquishing the accessibility, even intimacy, of connection.

In the pages that follow, I shall continue to explore witness as a frame for understanding the ancient Christian discourse of martyrdom. I am not claiming that it is false to read martyrdom as self-sacrifice (for example), or that reading martyrdom as witness is the only correct interpretation, or even that reading martyrdom as witness is especially novel. After all, it is well known that martyrdom “means” witness: this is the most straightforward translation of the ancient Greek words martys and martyria, from which our “martyr” and “martyrdom” are ultimately derived. If witness is nonetheless one of the “lost tracks” in the history of interpretation, to borrow Vinzent’s phrasing, this is not only because the history of ideas has overprivileged self-sacrifice but also because philology has focused primarily on the process by which words like martys and martyria began to mean something other than “witness.” Thus, it is generally agreed that martys in the New Testament, for example, should be rendered “witness” while martys in the Martyrdom of Polycarp, for example, should be rendered “martyr.” In the latter case, the word is treated as a kind of technical term that resists translation: it is understood to have passed from one semantic field to another, much as hairesis (choice, school of thought) has become “heresy,” daimon (god, spirit) “demon.” And, to be sure, martys did come to mean differently in Christian contexts. However, as Moss puts it, the word “hermetically sealed by linguistic historiography as a terminus technicus, continued to derive its meaning from extra-Christian ancient discourse long after the second century.”Footnote ²³ Indeed, the sense of “witness” still echoes powerfully within the Christian discourse of martyrdom. If we tune into those echoes, we may hear something new, and something that speaks anew to our own moment.

The dating of martyrdom accounts is notoriously vexed, in part because we are dealing with what Éric Rebillard calls “living texts,” characterized by a high degree of “textual fluidity.”Footnote ²⁴ Moreover, the scope of this essay would not allow for a chronological or developmental account, even if the nature of the evidence supported it. I shall proceed instead with a series of cases or samplings of some of the most well-known accounts of martyrdom set in the period before the so-called Great Persecution – the Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs, the Acts of Justin, the Letter of the Martyrs of Vienne and Lyons, the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, the Martyrdom of Polycarp, and the Acts of Thecla. I shall also follow recent scholarship in turning aside from the long-standing preoccupation with the question of the historical veracity of these narratives. As Rebillard argues, such a question is inappropriate for texts that “are and claim to be literature.”Footnote ²⁵

Going farther than Rebillard, who is keenly interested in the contexts in which such texts were produced, Marco Formisano makes a case for a thoroughgoing literary approach to martyrdom texts, eschewing not only positivist interpretations of the texts as historical sources but also overdetermining contextualizations of the texts themselves. “[A] text … cannot be reduced to the historical context in and for which it was produced. In fact, the text speaks a language which is not equivalent to reality, but one which actively transforms and transfigures reality.”Footnote ²⁶ Formisano’s words call attention to the crucial role of literature in producing martyrdom as both a performative and a transformative discourse. Indeed, ancient Christian martyrdom, as we receive it, is a fundamentally textual phenomenon, presenting a transfigured reality: literature is the medium of witness, put simply. Heeding Formisano’s call, I want to honor the textuality of Christian witness without entirely forsaking interest in historical contexts or narratives. As Formisano puts it, literary texts “illuminate their historical context from a specific textual (as opposed to documentary) perspective.”Footnote ²⁷

Here literary readings will shape our sense of the larger discursive formation in which the texts find their mutual resonances and exercise their particular power, centering around the narrative elements of interrogation, torture, contest, sacrifice, and sexual violence. Each of these elements also features significantly in the narrative works associated with the so-called Second Sophistic, and their presence marks martyrdom literature as characteristically late antique in its preoccupation with issues of violence, power, and agency. So too does the method of eclectically reworking prior traditions to explore those issues. It is no accident that our texts manifest as both novel and derivative, unified and fragmented, as they partake in a literary aesthetic in which “the classical tradition is analyzed, dismantled, decoded and reassembled in a new form,” to cite Formisano again.Footnote ²⁸ With its echoing of epic and tragedy, philosophy and rhetoric, Christian martyrdom literature is distinctive but not singular. We should thus resist the temptation to lean into christological exceptionalism – imagining that Christian martyrdom is utterly unique because it centers on imitation of Christ, who is himself deemed utterly unique. Sharing in a larger literary culture, Christian martyrdom literature is both illumined by and illumining of that larger culture.

The narrative elements of interrogation, torture, contest, sacrifice, and sexual violence are emphasized to varying degrees and in various combinations across martyrdom literature, as we shall see. All, however, occur at the intersections of freedom and constraint, speech and body, triumph and abject suffering. And all occur in the space of death’s anticipation and deferral. That focus on death as the seal of witness is a consistent and defining feature of martyrdom literature may seem so obvious as not to need stating. Yet the centrality of death presents particular challenges and opportunities for this literature, and these deserve our attention. Read as a document, an account of a witnessing death could be taken to refer to a historical event beyond the text, providing evidence of that event. Read as literature, matters are not so simple. The distance between the witnessing death and the literary witness to that death widens. This points to what Rebillard calls, following Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida, “the impossibility of testimony,”Footnote ²⁹ and what Formisano describes as “a polarized field of tension between … authenticity and imitation” in martyrdom texts.Footnote ³⁰ In short, the martyr cannot testify to their own witnessing death (its motivations, its intentions, its meanings), which thus requires the supplement of a text. But the text is divided against itself, as the very devices that serve to authenticate the martyr, such as the imitation of existing exemplars or the mobilization of recognizable tropes, also betray their own textuality or fictionality. In addition, martyrdom literature is almost invariably anonymous: just as it cannot be anchored in events beyond the text, so it also cannot be anchored by an author on whose credibility the reader might rely. The writing itself must testify. Martyrdom literature thus implicitly thematizes and problematizes the textuality of witness. In so doing, it invites the wager of testimony, which (to put it simply) always demands a leap of trust. Is this witness to be believed or not? It is the performativity of the text itself that now carries the burden of persuasiveness, not our assessment of its reliability in representing something else.

I will have more to say in the conclusion of this essay about why I think witness is especially worth dwelling on in our moment. But for now, let me acknowledge that the language and imagery of martyrdom are more pervasive than ever, as our societies face heightened levels of political polarization and violence and the increasing breakdown of both civil discourse and scientific consensus. When other forms of knowledge and authority lose traction, appeals to the martyr’s sacrifice may rush in to fill the gap, often inciting retaliatory violence. In this context, suffering, even to the point of death, remains the touchstone of the witness’s truth. But what counts as suffering and whose suffering counts? Who gets to say? These become crucial questions. Castelli, as we have seen, calls for a version of martyrdom that focuses not on self-sacrifice, much less retaliation, but on bearing witness to suffering, in its unfathomable vastness: “Such a figure of martyrdom calls all of us into its service, demanding that we see and testify to all the losses and suffering” of the world, “losses that exceed our capacity to narrate them completely and our ability to absorb them fully.”Footnote ³¹ Saidiya Hartman, similarly, calls us to be not spectators or voyeurs but rather “witnesses” to the pain, torture, terror, and repression on display in all-too-familiar representations of Black suffering and death.Footnote ³² Bearing witness, as these scholars frame it, is a protest against systemic violence directed against the powerless. It is also an act of commemoration and an expression of grief. The losses are beyond counting.

1 Interrogation: Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs and Acts of Justin

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the renowned hagiographer Hippolyte Delehaye constructed a typology that allowed him to rank narratives of martyrs and other saints according to their historical value. “Official reports of the interrogatories of martyrs” held pride of place in Delehaye’s scheme, and this continues to be the case for many scholars of martyrdom.Footnote ³³ Even those who recognize the literary character of other kinds of martyrdom accounts frequently assign documentary status to the handful of texts that are presented in the form of minutes of court proceedings. Such works, which include the Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs and the Acts of Justin, are assumed to be among both the earliest and the most reliable of martyrdom accounts. Jan Bremmer, for example, asserts as recently as 2020 that “there is no reason to doubt” that the Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs “was composed by a Christian on the basis of court proceedings” soon after the trial. Increasingly, however, such assumptions are indeed being called into reasonable doubt.Footnote ³⁴ Rebillard speculates that the Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs and the Acts of Justin date to the early fourth century rather than the mid to late second century when the trials are supposed to have taken place. He further suggests that their format is itself a literary device; in his opinion, it is highly unlikely that Christians would have had access to court records prior to 260 ce.Footnote ³⁵ Noting that “the majority of the texts in protocol form concern martyrs of the Great Persecution,” he proposes that “a good case can be made that this textual form was used only after the Great Persecution.”Footnote ³⁶ Rebillard’s arguments remain speculative, and the historical question of whether we are dealing with edited versions of court records or whole cloth literary compositions that mimic court records may not be fully resolvable. Nonetheless, there is nothing inherently improbable about viewing these, or other trial scenes embedded in narrative texts, as literary compositions. As Marco Fucecchi observes, “Trial scenes are a topos in ancient prose narratives.”Footnote ³⁷ They showcase the rhetorical skills and the personal virtue of the characters while staging narratives in which innocent heroes are tried “for dreadful crimes and even more dreadful punishments,” as Saundra Schwartz puts it.Footnote ³⁸

From a textual perspective, the proof is in the pudding: what results does a literary approach yield? In this section we shall focus on the use of interrogative dialogue in the Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs, written in Latin and set in Carthage in 180 ce, and the Acts of Justin, written in Greek and set in Rome in 165 ce. Both texts are preserved in several different recensions or versions; as Rebillard argues, martyrdom texts are not stable, since they continued to be adapted to changing circumstances throughout antiquity and beyond. Because I am especially interested in the narrative distillation or condensation that the dialogue form allows, I shall focus on the shortest version in each case,Footnote ³⁹ without making any assumption that it is the earliest or most “authentic.” Rather than viewing these as documentary or quasi-documentary works reflecting a simplistic or even “primitive” form of martyrdom narrative that would later be expanded and elaborated with longer speeches and/or narrative components, I shall approach them as texts in which the form of interrogative dialogue is reduced to its most basic features, maximizing its performative intensity and the sense of immediacy and authenticity conveyed. For a literary reading, exactly how and when it got that way does not really matter.

The Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs consists of dialogue set in a simple narrative frame, with each line introduced by the phrase “X dixit,” or “X said.” For the most part, the speeches are quite short, resulting in a quick-moving and sometimes tense exchange. The text opens by setting the scene concisely: “In those days, when Claudianus presided as consul for the second time, on July 17, Speratus, Nartzalus, Cittinus, Donata, Secunda, and Vestia were brought to the governor’s chambers in Carthage” (Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs 1). The dialogue then begins – seemingly in medias res, as Bremmer notesFootnote ⁴⁰ – with a declaration from the proconsul Saturninus: “You can earn the indulgence of our lord emperor, if you return to your senses” (1). However abrupt the statement, the implication is clear: the six men and women who have been brought to trial are not of sound mind (bona mens); a sense of threat is balanced by the possibility of imperial forbearance. One Speratus responds on behalf of the group. “We have never done wrong,” he insists. “We have acquiesced to no iniquity.” He continues: “We have never spoken ill, but upon being ill treated, we have given thanks, for we honor our emperor” (2). Words related to malus or evil pile up – malefecimus, malediximus, and male accepti. This is clearly a carefully constructed sequence, but it is not obviously relevant to the proconsul’s suggestion that Speratus and his friends are behaving irrationally. An assertion about their mental state has been answered with a set of assertions about their moral state. After all, to be brought to trial is to be suspected of a crime. They have not done wrong, but they have suffered wrong, and they have responded to injury with gratitude. Is that a sign that they are indeed not of sound mind? Perhaps. However, this should be forgiven (Speratus implies) because the crazy gratitude is due to respect for their emperor. So it seems that Speratus has responded to Saturninus after all, in his initial reference to earning the emperor’s indulgence – except, of course, “our emperor” is not “your emperor.” This is doublespeak: Speratus appears to say one thing but means another. Does Saturninus understand that? Is he supposed to? Is Speratus trying to evade punishment or score a point?

Perhaps Saturninus does understand. He responds, as Speratus has responded, with an apparent (but only apparent) non sequitur, pivoting from morality to piety, where before Speratus pivoted from rationality to morality. The dialogue proceeds by a series of strategic slippages that are themselves negotiations. “We too are pious (religiosi), and our piety (religio) is simple,” states the proconsul; all that is required is to swear by the genius, or spirit, of “our lord emperor” and pray for his health, he explains (3). Speratus quickly counters: if the proconsul will listen, “I will tell you the mystery of simplicity,” he offers (4). Saturninus responds just as quickly: since Speratus is abusing their sacred rites (initianti tibi mala de sacris nostris), he will not listen. He no longer suggests but now demands that Speratus “swear by the genius of our lord emperor” (5). The chiastic structure of the textFootnote ⁴¹ – swear/ listen/ mystery/ not mystery/ not listen/ swear – calls attention to the mysterium at the heart of the matter. Speratus is willing to reveal the secret, but the proconsul will have none of it. The gloves are off. Where he earlier cultivated ambiguity with doublespeak, Speratus now makes sharp distinctions: “I do not acknowledge the imperial authority of this world. Rather, I serve that god whom no human has seen, nor can see with these eyes” (6).

In response, Saturninus turns to the other five accused Christians, seemingly giving up on Speratus: “Cease to be of this persuasion,” he urges. Speratus jumps back in, uninvited, reflecting on Saturninus’s own “persuasion”: “It is an evil persuasion to commit homicide”; it is also an evil persuasion “to give false testimony (testimonium),” he adds (7). Saturninus will soon be a murderer, but it would be just as bad if Speratus and his companions were to bear false witness by acquiescing to the demand that they honor the Roman emperor as a god. Truth is on the line. Saturninus tries again to appeal to the others: “Don’t participate in his insanity!” (8) But they pour forth their witness, heedless of his urging. First Cittinus and then Donata declare that they fear no one but their God. Next Vestia cries, “I am a Christian!” and Secunda seconds, in a poignant variation on the theme: “I want to be what I am!” (9) As Moss notes, “the martyrs finish one another’s sentences.”Footnote ⁴² They are of one mind. Only Nartzalus remains silent, but soon he will have his turn.

Saturninus now turns back to Speratus, and for the first time he asks a direct question: “Do you persist as a Christian?” This is an identity that Speratus has thus far claimed only indirectly. Another chiastic passage unfolds. “I am a Christian,” he affirms, echoing his companions in accepting the label. “And they all agreed with him,” adds the text (10). Now that he has pressed the question, Saturninus seems to regret it. “Do you want time to reflect?” he asks. Speratus does not (11). In another apparent non sequitur, Saturninus asks a third question: “What is in your satchel?” “Books and the letters of Paul, a just man,” answers Speratus (12). Moving on without comment, Saturninus once again urges Speratus to take time to think things over. And again Speratus confesses, “I am a Christian,” and again we are told that “they all agreed with him” (13). As David Eastman has pointed out, the chiasmus – confession/ offer of time/ books and epistles/ offer of time/ confession – draws attention to the satchel of scrolls at the center.Footnote ⁴³ At the same time, it harks back to the “mystery of simplicity” nested in the chiasmus above. Mysterium is, after all, Pauline terminology, possibly referring here to baptism and the resurrection that it promises, as Moss suggests.Footnote ⁴⁴

With Speratus’s second confession, the trial concludes. Saturninus delivers his sentence, reading from a tablet that provides a counterbalance to the scrolls in Speratus’s satchel: “Speratus, Nartzalus, Cittinus, Donata, Vestia, Secunda, and the others, having confessed that they live according to Christian custom, because they persisted obstinately when they were offered the opportunity to return to the way of the Romans, are hereby sentenced to death by the sword” (14). Who are these “others,” we may wonder? The ranks are swelling. Meanwhile, the lines have been drawn, as the ritus christianus is contrasted with the mos Romanorum, stubbornness with openness to persuasion of the right kind, insanity with reasonableness. Speratus thanks God when he hears the sentence, a verbal act foreshadowed by his initial claim that the Christians receive evil with thanks (2). And now Nartzalus speaks too: “Today we are martyrs in heaven: thank God” (15). The invocation of the Greek derivative martyr seems to put a seal on the account, just as death will seal the verbal witness made in the trial. It is a fitting ending. But here the text appears to glitch, repeating itself. Once again the death sentence is announced, but this time publicly through a herald, and now there are twelve names called, not six, and all twelve give thanks, not just Speratus and Nartzalus (16). In a line that clearly differentiates the text from a simple court record, the narrator concludes: “And thus they were all crowned together (simul) with martyrdom, and they reign with the Father and Son and Holy Spirit for all the ages of the ages” (17). Repetition is also fullness, as Speratus, whose voice is sharply individuated in the dialogue, is now reabsorbed into an expanding collectivity indistinguishable in the simultaneity of their witnessing deaths. They are, in Pauline terms, a single body.Footnote ⁴⁵

The Acts of Justin conform to a similar pattern. A dialogue set into the concise narrative frame of a trial and execution features an imperial official, the Roman prefect Rusticus, and seven accused Christians; among them, Justin is the primary speaker. Different from the Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs, the dialogue proceeds according to a consistent and even orderly question and answer format; together with the length and theological focus of Justin’s responses, this lends the text a distinctly pedagogical tone. These differences are especially striking, given that Justin is known to us from other writings preserved in his name, in which he identifies as a Christian philosopher, explicating and defending the beliefs of his school. For his part, Rusticus is to be identified with a Stoic philosopher mentioned by Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations.Footnote ⁴⁶ This dialogue reaches us as part of a larger dossier, in other words, though we shall approach it here on its own terms and in relation to the Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs.

The prefect’s opening question is directed to Justin: “What life do you live?”(2.1) “Blameless and unexceptionable in all eyes,” Justin responds succinctly (2.2). Rusticus presses for more: “What teachings (logoi) do you pursue?” Justin responds that he has tried to get to know all teachings before committing himself to the true teachings of the Christians (2.3). Again, Rusticus presses: “These are the teachings that please you?” Justin confirms: “Yes, since we adhere to them as belief (dogma)” (2.4). “What is the belief?” the prefect asks, in a now-predictable follow-up. This is Justin’s cue to deliver a creed-like summary of Christian doctrine, naming the divine creator (demiurgos) of the cosmos, whose son Jesus Christ, “herald of salvation and teacher of good lessons,” was foretold by prophets (2.5). Next, the prefect asks where Christians meet, and Justin responds that they meet wherever they like (3.1), adding that during his stay in Rome, “if anyone wanted to come to my place, I would share with them the teachings (logoi) of the truth” (3.2–3). As with Saturninus’s initial interrogation of Speratus, this section closes with the prefect asking Justin directly if he is a Christian, to which Justin responds, “Yes, I am a Christian” (3.4).

Turning to the others, Rusticus asks each of them the same question and receives the same answer, with variations that layer the theological message: Chariton: “I am a Christian by God’s command” (4.1); Charito: “I am a Christian by the gift of God” (4.2); Euelpistos: “I too am a Christian and participate in the same hope (elpis)” (4.3); Hierax: “Yes, I am a Christian, worshipping the same god” (4.4). At this point, Rusticus interrupts his own line of questioning to ask them whether it was Justin who made them Christians. No one affirms this. Hierax replies, “I have been a Christian for a long time” (4.5). Now Paeon speaks up, without having been asked, “I too am a Christian,” going on to explain that his parents raised him in the faith (4.6); Euelpistos says the same (4.7–8). Rusticus then turns to the last in the group: “You’re not a Christian too, are you?” he asks with apparent exasperation. Liberianos answers in the affirmative: “I too am a pious Christian” (4.9).

The interrogation would seem complete, now that all have confessed, but Rusticus wants to hear more before delivering his verdict. Does Justin believe that he will ascend to heaven if he is beheaded? The question is both broadly theological and directly relevant to the situation at hand (5.1). Justin confirms that this is his hope, if he perseveres through his trials and lives righteously (5.2). Do you really think so? the proconsul asks again. Rusticus seems skeptical, but Justin is sure of it. In being punished, he will be saved (5.3–5). When Justin proves unmovable, Rusticus finally announces his verdict: “Those who are unwilling to sacrifice to the gods are to be scourged and executed” (5.6). The narrator concludes: “Then the holy witnesses (martyres), praising the God, going out to the usual place, completed their witness (martyrion) by their faithfulness to our savior” (6).

Both dialogue texts place the act of bearing witness squarely in the context of a trial. Such interest in trials resonates with novelistic convention, as we have noted. There, as Schwartz observes, “speeches are the essence of the trial scenes and the ability to speak in court is critical for survival – and victory.”Footnote ⁴⁷ In the acta as in novels, witnessing is first and foremost a verbal act, and especially in the case of the Acts of Justin it takes on a distinctly philosophical tone. Harking back to the figure of Socrates, the philosopher speaks truth at their own risk, exercising what Greek speakers called parrhesia. Bearing witness entails fearless perseverance in the face of forceful efforts of rhetorical persuasion, as well as threats of punishment that include both bodily suffering and death. The exchange is antagonistic, but torture is not involved: this is a “free” witness. Ultimately, the singular voice that speaks truth to power is absorbed back into the collectivity, and just as the threat of suffering and death hangs over the trial, so the power of witnessing is carried over into the execution, expressed as a collective event and explicitly described as a “martyrdom” in both Greek and Latin texts. Physical suffering and death are thus understood to complete the verbal witness. Even in cases where the narrative is almost entirely conveyed by dialogue and the execution happens off stage, the witness of the word is continuous with the witness of the body. And both are ultimately supplemented and displaced by the witness of the text itself.

2 Torture: Letter of the Martyrs of Vienne and Lyons

Presented as minutes of an actual trial, the acta achieve performative intensity through the use of the dialogue form. Other martyrdom accounts exploit the dramatic possibilities of prose narrative. Replete with twists and turns of plot and vivid descriptions reminiscent of novelistic texts of the period, the Letter of the Martyrs of Vienne and Lyons incorporates little direct speech. Correspondingly, whereas the acta place a freely offered verbal confession at the center of the staging of Christian witness, “one of the distinctive aspects of the Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons is the voyeuristic focus on torture and bodily degradation,” as Moss puts it.Footnote ⁴⁸ Verbal interrogation is typically passed over quickly: “Then they were brought to the forum and interrogated” (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 5.1.8).Footnote ⁴⁹ Our attention is directed instead to the physical torment of the witness, whether taking the form of mob violence (“shouts, blows, shovings, plunderings, stonings” [5.1.7]), judicial torture (“red hot bronze plates applied to the tenderest parts of his body” [5.1.20]), abuse in prison (“confinement to the dark, … stretching of the legs to the fifth hole in the rack” [5.1.27]), or a brutal public execution (“whips, … beasts, … griddle” [5.1.56]). By the end, it is difficult to distinguish one form of torment from the other.

Before exploring this difficult account further, let me say more about what kind of text we are dealing with. The letter comes to us as a document embedded in Eusebius of Caesarea’s Ecclesiastical History. Written between 313 and 324, Eusebius’s History is well known for its polyphonic or spoliating style – what Aaron Johnson refers to as the “cumulative aesthetic” of a textual bricolage.Footnote ⁵⁰ While most would not suspect Eusebius of inventing his cited sources, many of which are transmitted independently, it is also the case that contemporaneous novelists make frequent use of fictional letters and other documents, and from a formal perspective, there is little that distinguishes the literary techniques of novelists and historians in this respect. As Owen Hodkinson and Patricia Rosenmeyer put it, “The use of embedded letters to advance the narrative or plot in genres such as historiography, drama, and the novel … mean[s] that letters in antiquity play a crucial role in the development of narrative literature of many kinds.”Footnote ⁵¹ In this case, Eusebius identifies the embedded letter as “a writing (graphē) about the martyrs” of Gaul, sent by the churches of that province to those of Asia and Phrygia (5.1.2). He offers the text as an illustrative example of the many persecutions arising in the seventeenth year of Marcus Aurelius’s reign, 177 ce (5.pref.1; cf. 5.2.1), explaining that he has excerpted the most relevant parts for his History while a full version can be found in his Collection of Ancient Martyrdoms (5.pref.2). The Collection is lost and the text is not otherwise transmitted independently of Eusebius’s History. Thus, we encounter the letter only as fragmented and framed by Eusebius to serve his own literary and theological purposes. One of those purposes is “to portray persecution and martyrdom as universal and essential to Christian identity,” as Jeremy Schott puts it, noting that “Eusebius’s works are imperial texts.”Footnote ⁵² Another purpose is to distinguish good emperors from bad emperors; the tortured bodies of Christians serve “as gruesome signposts and unmistakable monuments to immoral, barbaric leaders,” as James Petitfils argues.Footnote ⁵³ Witnesses, one might say.

Eusebius tells us that he has omitted the preface of the text. This elision has a disorienting effect, as we are dropped directly into a cosmic battleground where the “Adversary” and the “Grace of God” face each other in a violent contest (5.1.5–6). The sense of chaos only gradually clears as the cycle of interrogation, confession, imprisonment, and punishment repeats until the true Christians of the Gallic cities of Vienne and Lyons have all borne witness, thereby ensuring the defeat of the Adversary. If some fail to bear witness, this only proves that they “never possessed a trace of faith” (5.1.48). Despite the fragmentation of the text and the unsettling effect of being confronted with one tortured body after the other, it is possible to trace a narrative trajectory. In brief, the first excerpt describes an initial period of interrogation, torture, and imprisonment; many Christians confess, though some do not, and many die in prison. The second excerpt describes the sentencing of the Christians to fight wild animals in the arena, a form of public punishment known as damnatio ad bestias, or “condemnation to the beasts”;Footnote ⁵⁴ the spectacle is interrupted when it is discovered that one of them is a Roman citizen. After the governor consults with the emperor, the Christians are interrogated and tortured again, ultimately returning to the arena, where they die spectacular deaths. A third, much shorter excerpt describes the abusive treatment of their corpses, and other excerpts offer evidence of the Christians’ humility and mutual love.

In analyzing how witness operates in this narrative, it will be helpful to return to the use of torture in ancient judicial processes. Page duBois points to the range of meanings of the Greek term basanos. Its most basic sense was “touchstone” and, by metaphorical extension, any test by which the genuineness of something could be judged. The word also came to refer more specifically to physical torture, understood as a means of testing the truth of testimony offered in a trial. But not anyone could be tortured, as we have seen. DeBois demonstrates how judicial torture – basanos – helped shore up the boundary separating the free and the enslaved. Indeed, “the maintenance of the distinction between slave and free is one of the matters at stake in the practice of judicial torture, and in its textualization in the literary and legal writings of the ancient city.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Only the enslaved can be tortured, because “the slave has no resources through which to resist submitting to pain and telling all. In contrast, the aristocratic soldier, noble by both birth and training, maintains laconic silence in the face of physical abuse.”Footnote ⁵⁶ The elite male could not be coerced; if he spoke, he spoke freely, and he spoke his own truth. In contrast, the enslaved person waited passively to have truth extracted from their body, a truth that belonged not to them but to the torturer. If they were to speak without coercion, they would tell not the truth but lies. Seen as lacking full rational faculties (logos), the enslaved person was understood to be analogous to the female. Thus, the production of truth through torture could also be seen as a kind of birthing.Footnote ⁵⁷

Turning back to the Letter of the Martyrs of Vienne and Lyons, we shall explore how these classical understandings of torture and truth, enslaved and free, female and male, are appropriated and at the same time radically revised. The account is bracketed by two dramatic instances of free or voluntary verbal witness that resonate with the testimony of figures like Speratus and Justin from the acta: Vettius Epagathus and Alexander are both identified as elite men, well respected in their communities. However, the central figure in the narrative is undoubtedly the enslaved woman Blandina, who endures spectacular tortures, along with her companions Sanctus, Maturus, and Attalus. Blandina’s death in the arena, in which she is implicitly compared to the mother of the Maccabees (2 Maccabees 7), is the climax of the narrative. In this torture-centered account, in which the distinctions between mob violence, judicial torture, abusive prison conditions, and punishment and execution threaten to collapse, the enslaved woman – a doubly torturable subject – naturally takes center stage. If torture is the test of truth, Blandina’s suffering body is its most eloquent expression. But at the same time, her bodily witness is framed by the free speech of elite men; it thereby takes on their agency and authority, and then some, as we shall see.

Vettius Epagathus makes his cameo appearance at the very beginning of the narrative. The Christians who were initially rounded up are being interrogated and tortured for the second time, following the arrival of the governor, who “used every savagery against us,” as the narrator puts it. Unable to bear the judgment that has been brought unreasonably (alogōs) against the Christians, the virtuous young man – who appears to be part of the crowd surrounding the tribunal – steps forward and asks the governor that he be allowed to make a speech in their defense (5.1.9). Refusing the request, the governor “asked only this, if he was a Christian too.” Vettius Epagathus – a “distinguished” man, we are told – makes his confession “in the clearest voice,” thereby joining the ranks of witnesses (martyrōn) (5.1.10). He is not said to be tortured, and there is no need, as he has already volunteered his testimony, nor is his death described or even mentioned directly.

Meanwhile, some of the arrested Christians confess, while others do not. Still more are sought out, “so that from the two churches were snatched all the zealous members” (5.1.13). Some non-Christian enslaved persons are brought in too, presumably to testify regarding the Christian slaveholders. In order to avoid torture, they lie, telling the governor what he wants to hear, namely, that the Christians commit atrocious crimes like cannibalism and incest (5.1.14). This enrages both the crowd and the governor, who steps up the torturing of those who have confessed, hoping to get them to divulge similar transgressions. Especially targeted are four confessors, Sanctus, Maturus, Attalus, and the enslaved woman Blandina. Through Blandina, “Christ showed that what seems worthless, without appearance, and contemptible among humans is deemed worthy of great glory in the eyes of God on account of the love for him that is manifested in power and does not boast in appearance,” we read (5.1.17). Despite concern about her frailty, “Blandina was filled with such power that those taking turns to inflict every form of torture on her from dawn to dusk failed and gave up, confessing that they were defeated …. Her entire body was torn and laid open” (5.1.18). Still, all she will say is, “I am a Christian and among us nothing vile happens” (5.1.19). The enslaved persons who are not tortured lie, but the tortured Blandina can only tell the truth. However, it is not the truth that her torturers want to hear, and it is, in some crucial sense, given freely. It is her own truth, her own witness, at once spoken and written on her flesh – her own violation, her own courage, her own endurance. And also, as we shall see, her own (maternal) love.

The tortures of Sanctus, the leader of the church of Vienne, are also described in horrific detail. When interrogated, he refuses to answer any questions, including whether he is free or enslaved, but will only say, in the Latin tongue of his torturers, “I am Christian” (5.1.20). Here confession converges with the noble silence of the free man. Sanctus will not break, even when his body is burned and mutilated beyond recognition – even when, before he has begun to heal, he is tortured again a few days later (5.1.21–24). Miraculously, the second torture effects a kind of healing. His body’s own truth asserts itself, as his limbs straighten (5.1.24). One other among those tortured during this extended period of interrogation is also mentioned by name – Biblis. Having denied her Christianity earlier, she now “recovered her senses in the midst of the torture, and, so to speak, awoke from a deep sleep,” rejecting the accusations of cannibalism and declaring herself a Christian (1.5.26). Torture makes truth. The truth sets us free. It is a truth about the torturer, as well as about the tortured; a truth about the world as it is, as well as about the world as it might be.

The second excerpt shifts the scene from public interrogation to public punishment, from the tribunal to the arena. The actual sentencing has been elided, which facilitates a sense of continuity between interrogation, on the one hand, and punishment and execution, on the other, as well as between official justice and mob violence. “After this, henceforth, the testimonies (martyria) of their departure took every form,” we are told (5.1.36). The narrator compares the witnessing “departures” or deaths to a single, multihued crown woven of all sorts of flowers. The four confessors who were tortured so savagely during their interrogations are brought to the amphitheater to fight against wild animals in a public spectacle of punishment and death. Maturus and Sanctus “endured the row of whips, as is customary there, and the violence of the beasts, and all that the frenzied mob shouted for and commanded from every side. After everything, they endured the iron chair, from which their roasted bodies filled the crowd with an odor of burning flesh” (5.1.39). Still, Sanctus will say no more than “I am a Christian.” Having suffered so mightily and so publicly, the two are finally killed.

Once again, much is made of Blandina’s uncanny power of endurance in the midst of extreme bodily suffering, and she is now explicitly compared to Christ. Hung on a stake in an arena in which wild animals have been released, “she looked like she was hung on a cross.” The other condemned Christians see in her “the one who was crucified for them in order to persuade those who believe in him that all who suffer for Christ’s glory will have communion with the living God” (5.1.41). Invoking Pauline metaphors, the narrator asserts that “though small, weak, and insignificant, she put on the great and unconquerable champion, Christ” (5.1.42). In the end, the animals do not touch her, and she is taken back to the prison, having survived to fight another day. The fourth confessor, Attalus, described as “notable” (5.1.43), is also compared to Christ, as he is paraded around the amphitheater with a board inscribed in Latin, “This is Attalus the Christian” (cf. Matthew 27:37). Whereas the lowly Blandina imitates Christ’s suffering with her body, the noble Attalus imitates Christ’s suffering by being labeled with mocking words. And whereas Blandina is exposed to the wild animals, Attalus (who is not said to have been tortured during the prior interrogations) is now removed from the arena when the governor discovers that he is a Roman citizen.

Once again, the narrative proceeds via interruption, delay, and repetition. The governor must await word from the emperor regarding how to treat those with the rights of citizenship. In the end, all the surviving imprisoned Christians are interrogated again; those who deny their Christianity are released, and those who confess are sentenced to death. Most confess, even if they have previously denied. If they are Roman citizens, they are beheaded; if not, they are sent to the wild animals. It is at this point that we hear of a second voluntary witness, echoing Vettius Epagathus – Alexander, a native Phrygian and physician, “known to almost everyone for his love of God and boldness of speech (parrhēsia tou logou).” Like Vettius Epagathus, he is among the crowd during the interrogations and is encouraging the Christians to confess. “He appeared to those who were around the tribunal like someone giving birth” (5.1.49). What is being birthed is his own confession, as the governor calls him up and asks who he is. The answer, of course, is “I am a Christian.” Subsequently Alexander and Attalus, elite men both, are sentenced to the wild animals, despite the latter’s acknowledged status as a citizen. They are killed only after enduring every form of brutal punishment. Alexander remains silent to the end. Attalus jokes: sniffing his own roasting flesh, he addresses the crowd in Latin, turning the accusation of cannibalism back on them.

Blandina must be killed last, in a culminating witness that exceeds the frame of free male testimony. Brought back into the amphitheater on the last day of the spectacles, she is paired with a teenage boy named Ponticus. “Every day they had been brought in to watch the punishments of the others. Attempts were made to compel them to swear by the idols” (5.1.53). Now the officials subject them to every form of suffering, “trying again and again to compel them to swear” (5.1.54). We see once more how the text blurs the distinction between interrogatory torture and punishment. Blandina encourages Ponticus to make his confession, and he dies, having remained strong. “And last of all, the blessed Blandina, just like a wellborn mother who has encouraged her children and sent them ahead in victory to the king, suffering herself through all the contests of her children, hastened to them, rejoicing and exulting in her departure” (5.1.55). In this passage the enslaved Blandina is compared to the noble mother of the Maccabees, who watches her seven sons be tortured and executed before suffering the same fate herself (2 Maccabees 7). Elsewhere, Eusebius invokes the mother of the Maccabees to honor the ties of family and community that he deems crucial to Christian piety.Footnote ⁵⁸ Here too Blandina, in the guise of the Maccabean mother, sums up the mutual love and support that unite the Gallic Christians in the witness of their shared suffering. At the same time, she is at home among the plucky heroines of the Greek novels, who likewise frequently face trials and tortures.

In one of the closing excerpts, the text records that “though they were in such a state of glory after bearing witness not once, not twice, but many times, and were taken back from the beasts, and were covered with burns, bruises, and wounds, neither did they proclaim themselves witnesses (martyres), nor indeed did they allow us to address them with this name” (5.2.2). Only those who have “sealed their witness (martyria) through their departure” are true martyrs, the confessors insist (5.2.3). Here and throughout the longer excerpts, there is a tension between the association of witness with torture, on the one hand, and the understanding that only death secures the witness, on the other. The excerpted text favors repetition, prolongation, and suspense within torture, much as the acta favor repetition, prolongation, and suspense within verbal testimony. Death must be deferred again and again for a spectacular witness like Blandina’s, whose truth is put to the test like no other. At the same time, where witnessing remains in suspense within torture, it also remains vulnerable to retraction: that is, after all, the aim of torture, to break the witness’s resolve. Torture’s witness, like verbal witness, must ultimately culminate in death.

3 Contest: Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas

The Letter of the Martyrs of Vienne and Lyons is embedded within the larger literary framework of Eusebius’s patchwork History, as we have seen; it is thereby granted a documentary status that in turn lends authenticity to Eusebius’s text as a whole. “Including a letter in a larger narrative is one of the most common ways to authenticate an ancient Greek text,” as Hodkinson and Rosenmeyer note.Footnote ⁵⁹ The same is true for other ancient literature. The Latin Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, set in Carthage in the early third century, is itself a patchwork text, incorporating two first-person accounts into a larger framework. Of these, the longer and more faceted is Perpetua’s “diary,” as it is often called, which records a young woman’s experiences in prison leading up to her execution; it also embeds her descriptions of four divinely granted visions. Her companion Saturus’s narrative, much shorter, describes a vision in which Perpetua features.

Given the paucity of female-authored writings surviving from antiquity, scholars have been especially eager to affirm the authenticity of the diary. Recently, however, Ellen Muehlberger has made a provocative case that Perpetua’s narrative, as well as the Passion as a whole, is most likely a late fourth- or early fifth-century literary invention, though she still imagines that the author (or authors) of the first-person narratives are different from the “redactor” who produced the framing text.Footnote ⁶⁰ For our purposes, it is not necessary either to take a position on the dating of the text or to posit different stages or layers of authorship. What is most relevant is that the first-person account ascribed to Perpetua creates a very strong literary effect of authenticity, and it does so in collusion with the framing text. Functioning much like an embedded letter, the so-called diary purports to “offer an unmediated glimpse into the soul” of its writer.Footnote ⁶¹ In addition, by multiplying voices and perspectives, the introduction of Perpetua’s self-writing adds significantly to the complexity of a text that is notable “for its inextricable web of real events and fiction, for its vertiginous overlapping of life and literature,” as Formisano puts it.Footnote ⁶²

We recall that the Letter of the Martyrs of Vienne and Lyons opens with a reference to the cosmic contest between the “Adversary” (antikeimenos) and the “Grace of God,” who “counterattacks” (antestratēgei) (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 5.4.5–6). It closes with an account of the “gladiatorial show” (monomachia) in which Blandina faces, and is killed by, a bull (5.4.56). As Mieke Bal points out, the Passion too “is framed on both ends by contests.”Footnote ⁶³ Indeed, for the Passion, contest, conflict, or competition is arguably even more central than it is for the Letter. There the spectacle of the tortured body ultimately claims our attention, whereas here it is the athletic body, as we shall see. In the context of the Roman shows (munera), public execution mimics and morphs into a kind of sport.Footnote ⁶⁴ Much as Christian accounts seize on the ambiguity of the tortured witness, so too do they seize on the ambiguity of the shows of the arena, as the criminal becomes a contestant, the victim a victor, shameful punishment an opportunity for glory. Here martyrs sidle up to gladiators.Footnote ⁶⁵

As Bal argues, the contest in the arena, with which the narrative concludes, is only the most obvious of the dynamics of conflict and competition that structure the text. The Passion opens by establishing a contest between eras, as the prologue pits new writings against old ones. “Ancient examples … have been written down (in litteris … digesta), so that by reading them aloud (lectione eorum) God might be honored and humans strengthened,” we read. So too should “new lessons (documenta) also be published (digerantur)” (Passion 1.1).Footnote ⁶⁶ The text returns to this competition between old and new in closing: those who honor the martyrs whose stories have just been recounted “ought to read (legere) these examples aloud”; they are worth “no less than the ancient ones” (21.11). As Bal observes, despite such a strong framing, “the contest between antiquity and recent times does not lead to the victory of recent history but to that of the story that serves as its exemplar.”Footnote ⁶⁷

As the prologue comes to an end, the narrative commences somewhat abruptly by introducing five catechumens who have been arrested, including the well-born Vibia Perpetua, twenty-two years old and mother of an infant son. Perpetua has left us her story, we are told, “as written by her own hand and according to her own understanding (conscriptum manu sua et sua sensu)” (2.2). The intimate materiality of writing is emphasized, and we are drawn strongly into the present of the narrative itself. Before she is done, Perpetua will bring us with her to the very brink of her death: “I have taken this account up to the day before the games; as for the record of the games themselves, if anyone wishes, let them write (si quis voluerit, scribat)” (10.15). Here Perpetua seems in control, as she invites another to finish her account, but as is often observed, the supplemental narrative competes with Perpetua’s own voice and perspective. Thus, an initial contest between old and new examples and writings gives way to a subsequent contest over how the story of Perpetua and her companions will be told. In the meantime, a kind of double frame has been put in place, the outer one thematizing the contest of eras, the inner one inscribing a third-person narrative. Together, they work to contain and distance the immediacy of first-person accounts in which an envisioned future is always overtaking the present moment of address.

Perpetua’s diary is itself permeated by conflict. She opens in medias res by staging a mock trial. Improvising with familiar forms of dialogue, she places herself in the role of the interrogator; her father, who wants to persuade her to renounce her faith, is on the witness stand. “‘Father,’ I said, ‘do you see, for example, this vase (vas) lying here, this little jug (urceolum), or whatever?’ And he said, ‘I see it.’ And I said to him, ‘Can it be called by any other name than what it is?’ And he said, ‘No.’ ‘So too I cannot pronounce myself anything other than what I am, a Christian’” (3.1–3). As Judith Perkins (among others) notes, there is a paradox at work here: “the girl’s difficulty in specifying a name for the vase undermines the question she posed: ‘Is it able to be called by any other name than what it is?’”Footnote ⁶⁸ Nonetheless, the text would have us understand that Perpetua prevails in this contest of words, winning a victory that assures others to come. To start with, her father is made complicit in confessing her Christian identity, the very thing he is trying to suppress. At the same time, the analogy that Perpetua establishes does its work in part by breaking down. On the one hand, like the common vessel that lies before her, unmistakable in its identity, Perpetua simply is what she is and can be no other. On the other hand, while the vessel can be called by a range of names (vase, little jug, whatever), her own name is crucial to her identity. To misname the vessel would not change its essence, but to deny Perpetua her proper name would do just that. “I am a Christian” is a performative, rather than a constative, utterance, in other words: such language creates the reality that it names. In the context of a trial, to call oneself a Christian is to become one. Like Secunda of the Scillitan martyrs, Perpetua wants to be what she is, and to do so, she must lay claim to the name. She must bear witness to her own identity.

This opening dialogue already encapsulates the narrative arc of the Passion, and indeed a compressed and layered temporality is typical of the text. If Perpetua has already confessed herself a Christian through her initial interrogation of her father, she both repeats and completes the action when brought from the prison to a hearing in the forum. As she reports, “When questioned, all the others confessed. Then it was my turn …. Hilarianus the procurator … said: ‘Spare your father’s gray hair, spare your infant son. Make the sacrifice for the health of the emperors.’ And I responded: ‘I will not.’ Hilarianus said: ‘Are you a Christian?’ And I responded: ‘I am a Christian.’ … Then the procurator sentenced all of us and condemned us to the beasts” (6.2–4). This much of the script follows a familiar pattern. However, as in the opening scene, Perpetua’s father haunts the narrative, complicating its dynamics. He and the procurator are natural allies: both of these older men want to persuade the young mother to deny her faith. Yet while the procurator comports himself with authority, Perpetua’s father is rendered pathetic as he begs his daughter to recant, weeping and rending his beard. Hilarion orders him thrown down and whipped, and Perpetua is deeply saddened: “It was as if I were being whipped myself” (6.5). Once again, the daughter, addressed by her father as “lady (domina)” (5.5), has the upper hand. She can afford compassion.

The diary is steeped in the language of emotion and preoccupied with family relations. Perpetua’s adversarial, but still loving, relationship with her father looms large. After their opening dialogue, he leaps toward her “as if to tear out [her] eyes” and shakes her; she is relieved not to see him for a few days (3.3). Yet she “grieves” (dolebam) on his behalf when he later visits and is frantic to save her from a death sentence; he himself leaves “deeply saddened” (contristatus) (5.6). As we have just seen, she is once again “grieved” (doluit, dolui) when he is whipped after her trial, feeling his pain as if it were hers (6.5). Her relationship with her infant son also looms large, perhaps unsurprisingly. Upon her initial imprisonment she is “tortured” (macareabar) by worry for her child (3.6), “anxious” (sollicita) on his behalf (3.8), and relieved of her anxiety when he is allowed to stay with her (3.9) and again when he is instantly weaned, so that she is not tortured (macerarer) either by worry or by pain in her breasts when he is taken away (6.8). Perpetua is also “devastated” (tabescebam) because she sees that her mother and brother are themselves devastated by her arrest (3.8). The fate of another brother, who died at age seven, has her “groaning and crying” (7.10). In a sense, these affective ties are what she must overcome: she associates her father’s attempts to save her with “the devil and his arguments” (3.3). She must also contend with her fear of the conditions of the prison: “I had never experienced such darkness …. The heat was intense … ” (3.5–6).

The four interspersed visions translate and transform those emotions and challenges. They translate Perpetua herself to different landscapes and conditions, and ultimately they transform her very body and gender. Like the Gallic martyrs featured in the Letter, Perpetua and her companions are condemned to death ad bestias, that is, by wild animals (6.6), an event that combines public execution with entertainment. Prior to their sentencing, Perpetua receives a vision in which she must climb a narrow bronze ladder edged with iron blades and reaching to the heavens; under the ladder a menacing and monstrous serpent crouches (4.3). “And we understood that our suffering (passionem) would come, and we began to hold no hope for this world,” she records (4.8). However, in her final vision, which occurs on the eve of her execution, the emphasis is not so much on suffering as on combat. By the time she records it, that emphasis is inflecting her framing of the anticipated event itself: “The day before we were to fight (pugnaremus), I see this in a vision” (10.1); “I have taken this account up to the day before the games (muneris)” (10.15). Perpetua is not a condemned criminal awaiting death; she is a trained athlete preparing to compete and determined to win.

In the vision, this shift takes her by surprise: “I was amazed that no beasts were sent at me” (10.5). Instead, she sees an “Egyptian, foul of face,” whom she is to fight. He is surrounded by his attendants, she by hers, the latter described as “handsome young men” (10.6). “And I was stripped naked, and I became male (facta sum masculus),” she reports, with gender-bending grammar, adding that her assistants “began to rub [her] with oil, as is the custom in such a contest” (10.7). She seems to find her physical transformation no more or less remarkable than the fact that she is fighting at all. A tall and elaborately clad referee announces that if the Egyptian wins, her opponent will kill Perpetua by sword; if she wins, she will receive a branch with golden apples as her prize. Brent Shaw suggests that the fight that ensues “is a combination of the Greek-style ‘no-holds-barred’ martial arts contest known as the pankration and elements of gladiatorial combat.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Set in a dreamscape, it is almost cartoonlike. Perpetua initially kicks the Egyptian in the face while he tries to grab her feet. He then lifts her in the air while she continues to hit him. Finally, she grabs his head with both hands and forces him to the ground, stepping on his head as she claims her victory (10.11). The crowd shouts, her assistants sing, and the referee hands her the prize. She exits the arena triumphant (10.12–13). “Then I woke up,” she writes. “And I understood that I would not go to the beasts but would fight against the devil” (10.14).

This vision brings the diary to a close, standing in for an account of the death that Perpetua cannot give us. It might have been enough, but the Passion has Perpetua hand the narrative off to another to complete, as we have seen. The hand-off is not seamless. Saturus’s first-person account of his own vision intrudes. And when the anonymous narrator who introduces the Passion takes up the story again, the shift in voice and perspective is noticeable. Whereas Perpetua dreams herself a naked, male, oiled body, fighting an Egyptian alone in the arena, the narrator depicts her as an “alluring girl” (puella delicata) (20.3), facing a ferocious cow together with a female companion and modestly covering herself and pinning up her hair when she is knocked down (20.4–5). Ultimately, she is killed by the sword (21.9), precisely the death refused in her vision.

Thus, the Passion presents the diary of Perpetua within a frame – indeed, a double frame – that the diary itself contests. As Formisano puts it, “the voice of the martyr presents itself as ‘imprisoned’ in another narrative.”Footnote ⁷⁰ We might say that the Passion thereby bears witness to the impossibility of bearing witness, where only death puts the seal on testimony. It shows us that witnessing always requires a supplement – a witness to the witness – and that the supplement once again puts truth into question. Who will pick up the pen and write? What and how much do they have on the line? Whose story is it now? At the same time, through a kind of literary sleight of hand, the Passion almost (but only almost) overcomes the very impossibility that it exposes. By placing the diary within a controlling narrative framework, the Passion gives us a text that resists the certainties of history-telling. By placing the diary within a framing contest of ancient and new times, reminding us that what is new will eventually be old (1.2), the Passion gives us a text that resists linear chronologies and is, instead, temporally structured by anticipation and the possibility of transformation – not just recent but present in its moment of telling, where the future is always breaking in. Perpetua may look like just another pretty puella – or just another victim – but in truth she is (always becoming) a fighter. She has seen it in a vision, and now we have too.

4 Sacrifice: Martyrdom of Polycarp

The Martyrdom of Polycarp is distinctive in offering the account of a single martyr, Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna, a figure also known to us from other texts. Understood to have been written by an eyewitness soon after the death of its protagonist, an event dated sometime between 155 and 168 ce, the text is traditionally placed at the beginning of the history of martyrdom literature. Seen not only as origin but also as paradigm for the emergent genre, it is especially noted for its early use of the “technical” language of martyrdom and for its extensive development of the witnessing death as one that is “in accord with the gospel” (1.1, 19.1) – martyrdom as imitatio Christi, as this is typically interpreted. Scholars are accustomed to taking their cues from the Martyrdom of Polycarp in interpreting martyrdom literature more broadly, especially regarding the centrality of the imitatio Christi.

Here we turn to the work not at the beginning but near the end of our survey. By this point it will come as no surprise that some have recently questioned the early dating of the Martyrdom of Polycarp. Moss has made a strong case that the text is more likely to have been written in the early third century than in the mid second.Footnote ⁷¹ Thus, we need not view the Martyrdom of Polycarp as either the origin or the paradigm of martyrdom literature but can place it alongside the other texts we are considering, all of them participating in the broader, and ongoing, discursive formation of ancient Christian martyrdom. Like the Letter of the Martyrs of Vienne and Lyons, the Martyrdom of Polycarp is written in epistolary form and appears as a “document” in Eusebius’s early fourth-century Ecclesiastical History. Unlike the Letter, it also travels independently of Eusebius’s text. Like the Letter, it opens by referencing torture, blurring the distinction between interrogatory torture and torture accompanying punishment and death in the arena: “They endured being so torn to shreds by whips that the structure of their body was exposed down to the inner veins and arteries”; they “endured terrible punishments, laid on beds of pointy shells and punished by various other tortures, in order that he [the devil] might, if possible, bend them to denial through persistent punishment” (Martyrdom of Polycarp 2.2, 4).Footnote ⁷² Unlike the Letter, the Martyrdom of Polycarp fairly quickly leaves torture behind

Moss notes that “the mimetic relationship between the martyr and Christ … is everywhere assumed but nowhere dissected” by scholars. She herself sets out “to examine the details and function of this imitation.”Footnote ⁷³ We might do well also to question its “everywhere assumed” universality and to take more seriously its particular deployment in the Martyrdom of Polycarp. I take Formisano’s point that imitation as such is crucial to the literary structuring of martyrdom and of sainthood more generallyFootnote ⁷⁴ – but not necessarily, I would say, imitation of Christ. Even the Martyrdom of Polycarp leans heavily on Polycarp’s imitation of Socrates as well as of Christ, as Stephanie Cobb has shown.Footnote ⁷⁵ Nor would I deny that the trope of imitatio Christi is significant across much martyrdom literature: we think of Blandina nailed to a stake and appearing to her companions as the crucified Christ (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 41). But perhaps it is no more significant than, for example, interrogation, torture, or contest, as a facet of martyrdom literature. And sometimes imitation just does not capture the nature of the posited relationship of the witness to Christ, as when Perpetua’s companion Felicitas states, “Now I suffer what I suffer, but there [in the arena] another will be in me, who will suffer for me, because I am to suffer for him” (Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas 15.7). Felicitas does not say that she is suffering in imitation of Christ, but that she is suffering “for him” (pro illo), just as he suffers not in imitation of her but “for her.” The relationship is one of reciprocity and also of intimacy: Christ is “in her.”

Here I want to consider imitation in relation to sacrifice in the Martyrdom of Polycarp, but we will approach the topic somewhat indirectly. As noted in the introduction, the Martyrdom of Polycarp critiques so-called voluntary martyrdom via the negative example of one Quintus, “who forcefully induced himself and others to surrender voluntarily,” only to be “overcome by cowardice when he saw the beasts” (4). As Moss points out, here and elsewhere such a critique serves to legitimate and justify the actions of those who withdraw in the face of persecution, as Polycarp does.Footnote ⁷⁶ More positively, I would suggest, it also allows the text to thematize Polycarp’s agency. Although he is not initially inclined to flee, when urged by his followers, the old man withdraws from the city to evade arrest. In his first hiding place, he receives a vision in which his pillow is consumed by fire; from this he understands that it is necessary for him “to be burned alive” (5.2). Despite this confirmation, he retreats to a second hiding place when pursued again. There the soldiers find him after torturing an enslaved member of his household who discloses Polycarp’s whereabouts. “He could have departed from there to another place,” we read, “but he did not want to and he said: ‘The will of God be done’” (7.1). The two withdrawals thus function as deferrals, opening space in which Polycarp can, first, know himself chosen and, second, make his own choice. His too is a voluntary witness, then, but it is one in which divine and human wills coincide. This makes Polycarp, among other things, an appropriate sacrificial victim. As Kimberley Patton notes, according to the logic of the sacrificial ritual that was central to traditional Greco–Roman religion, “the animal is virtually never divested of agency or free will. Instead, it is understood to assent to its own demise.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Without the victim’s assent, the sacrifice is not effective. But the victim must also be chosen as such.

Polycarp is chosen, as every sacrificial victim is, because of his godlike perfection. As Patton puts it, “the animal’s perfection is a microcosmic reflection, mirroring the perfection of the god to which it is offered. As well as representing a perfect gift or offering to God (‘fit for a king’), at a deeper but related level, the animal is like God, expressing through its own form God’s perfection.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Thus, imitation of, or likeness to, the deity is deeply embedded in the sacrificial economy in this text. Just so, Polycarp is described as “filled with the grace of God,” a “godly” (theoprepēs) old man (7.3), as he greets the soldiers graciously and offers them food and drink, asking only for an hour to pray – an hour that unfolds into two, amazing those present. At this point in the text, the parallels with gospel traditions proliferate: to take only the most obvious examples, Polycarp, like Jesus, enters the city on a donkey (8.1) and is interrogated by an official named Herod (8.2). Parallels with Socrates proliferate as well: Polycarp is accused of being “a teacher of impiety” who “overthrows our gods and who teaches many not to sacrifice and not to worship” (12.2), much as Socrates is accused of “corrupting the minds of the young and of believing in deities of his own invention instead of the gods recognized by the state” (Plato, Socrates’ Apology 24b); when brought to trial, neither man is willing to back down. Polycarp is an appropriate sacrifice because he is like his God and also because he is like other godlike men.

As his vision has predicted, Polycarp is sentenced to death by fire. Stripping off his own clothes in preparation, he refuses to be nailed to the stake. “Leave me thus, for he who allows me to endure the fire will also allow me, even without the security of the nails, to remain on the pyre without moving” (13.3). Is he attempting to outdo Jesus, who was nailed to a cross? Or is he imitating a different model? This is a sacrifice, not an execution by crucifixion, and the direct model is not Jesus but Isaac. “They did not nail him down, but they tied him,” we read (14.1). Just so, Abraham binds Isaac and lays him on a pyre, preparing a knife for his slaughter; famously, God provides a ram as a substitute just in the nick of time (Genesis 22.9–13). Outdoing Isaac (if not also Jesus), Polycarp needs no substitute. “With his hands placed behind him and bound, like a ram marked out from a great flock for an offering, prepared as a burnt offering acceptable to God,” he receives his fate gladly (14.1). “May I be accepted among these [i.e., God’s witnesses] in your presence today, in a rich and acceptable sacrifice,” the old man prays (cf. Psalm 20:4) (14.2).

Miraculously, the fire does not kill Polycarp, whose body remains intact in its center. He is not burned but transformed and refined “like bread that is baked or like gold and silver that are tested in a furnace”; a scent like frankincense ascends to the heavens like an offering (15.2). When an executioner steps in with a dagger to finish the job – again mimicking sacrifice, albeit with the sequence of slaughter and burning reversed – the libation of blood rushes out so abundantly that it extinguishes the fire (16.1). Dying, Polycarp is exalted and transformed – indeed, “crowned with a crown of immortality” (17.1). As Patton observes, “the sacrificial animal is both elevated and individuated,” a temporary status often rendered permanent, “its eschatological future assured in a kind of glistening light.”Footnote ⁷⁹

Like other martyrs, Polycarp refuses to make a token offering to the emperor (8.2). Instead, he makes an extravagant offering to his own God. Or rather, he himself becomes the substituted offering. Is this “self-sacrifice”? Yes and no. The agency of sacrifice, like that of bearing witness, is ambivalent and fraught. The one sacrificed must be chosen and must also choose their victimhood. They must be willing to give up everything in order to gain everything, for themselves, their community, their world. In this text, bearing witness is aligned with sacrifice; it is understood to be a sacrificial act. That, arguably, is what makes the witness “in accord with the gospel.” Conversely, the sacrifice is a witness. Death is a witness. That is to say, it is a kind of truth-telling. To what does it testify? To the preciousness and fragility of every life, perhaps; to what it might mean if we ceased to hold life cheaply; and to who bears the costs of our failure to do so.

But by what right can we possibly assume that this sacrifice is the victim’s choice? The text insists that it is. However, that is the problem: as ever, a witnessing death requires a textual supplement, and this complicates questions of agency and voice. As Formisano argues, the Martyrdom of Polycarp calls attention to its literariness even more than most martyrdom texts, as the strong thematizing of imitation both undergirds and undermines its claims of authenticity.Footnote ⁸⁰ We know that Polycarp is a true witness because he is like Christ, as well as Socrates. But the very fact that he is modelled on these other figures puts his distinctiveness and even his reality into doubt. Where sacrifice is both a model to be imitated and a prophecy to be fulfilled, his death left for others to tell, Polycarp’s choice – and indeed the choice of everyone who dies a witnessing death – must remain uncertain. Sacrifice highlights this uncertainty insofar as it assimilates the human witness to the muteness of the nonhuman. Who can know the mind of a ram chosen for slaughter? Or, for that matter, of a tree that is felled? Who can comprehend the many-voiced logos of the more-than-human world? Who can claim to speak for them all?

5 Sexual Violence: Acts of Thecla

As we have seen, bearing witness translates the coercive violence conveyed by state interrogation, torture, and execution into a kind of freedom – the freedom to denounce that violence, to assert one’s own worthiness, to name one’s own truth. The freedom the Greeks called parrhēsia. Athletic contest and religious sacrifice are lenses through which ancient martyrdom literature interprets that translated freedom and the costs it entails. Another lens is virginity, framed as resistance to sexual violence. Sexual violence is arguably implicit in all the operations of interrogation, torture, and execution described in this literature. It becomes explicit in stories featuring young girls. Such stories are extremely popular in the late fourth century and beyond,Footnote ⁸¹ but they have a precedent in the Acts of Thecla, which may have been composed as early as the late second century and circulated both independently and as a part of the Acts of the Apostle Paul.

Whether the Acts of Thecla should be included in the category of martyrdom literature is a debatable question on several counts. Most relevant, perhaps, is that the text is not focused on the protagonist’s witnessing death but instead adopts and adapts the plot line of a romance novel in narrating the story of her conversion and ministry. In fact, Thecla does not die a martyr’s death; in some versions, she does not die at all but is taken directly up to heaven. Nonetheless, the narrative includes key elements familiar to us from other martyrdom literature, such as arrest, trial, interrogation, and sentencing to death in the arena, and its particular novelistic affinities help us see, once again, how martyrdom narratives more broadly partake of novelistic elements. Moreover, the lack of a witnessing death is relevant to the centrality of sexual threat in the narrative. Because the narrative aligns Christian faith with sexual purity and persecution with sexual violence, it becomes necessary for Thecla to resist execution along with rape if she is to lay claim to her Christian identity. In this context, it is her miraculous survival in the arena – the failure of attempted execution as well as attempted rape – that puts the seal on her witness, not her death.

The story will be familiar to many readers: its narrative arc covers the young Thecla’s conversion to Christianity by the apostle Paul, her subsequent trials and tribulations, and her ultimate success in taking up a life of Christian ministry. Here I will focus only on the “martyrdom” scenes, of which there are two. In the first, Thecla is brought before the governor of her hometown of Iconium for judgment because she has renounced marriage after hearing Paul preach about the importance of sexual continence. The governor asks her, “Why do you not marry Thamyris, according to the law of the Iconians?” (Acts of Paul and Thecla 20).Footnote ⁸² Thecla is silent, and the silence is enigmatic. Is it a reflection of her nobility, indicating a refusal to be coerced? Is it a sign of feminine modesty, or alternatively (as seems suggested) of lovesick distraction? “She stood looking earnestly at Paul” (20). Her mother, Theoclia, clearly interprets her daughter’s silence as an expression of rebellion. She cries out, “Burn her who will not marry in the midst of the theater, that all the women who have been taught by this man may be afraid” (20). The governor complies, condemning Thecla to death by fire, and the people of Iconium gather in the theater, where a pyre is constructed and Thecla, stripped naked, is forced to mount it. The governor himself is moved to tears at the sight of her strength and beauty. The pyre is lit but, as with Polycarp, as well as the heroine of Heliodorus’s novel (Ethiopian Tale 8.9), the flames do not touch her. Then God causes an earthquake and a storm that extinguishes the fire. Thecla lives and goes free.

Subsequently Thecla follows Paul to the nearby town of Antioch where she is assaulted by one Alexander, a leading citizen who “became enamored of her” and “embraced her in the street” (26). Now the young woman, who was silent in Iconium, finds her voice: “Do not force the stranger; do not force the servant of God; I am one of the chief persons of the Iconians, and because I would not marry Thamyris I have been cast out of the city” (7.4). Having defended herself verbally, she grabs Alexander, tears his coat, and rips the crown from his head, shaming him with her actions as well as her words. Rather than protecting the stranger who begs hospitality, as custom dictates, he has attempted to take advantage of her vulnerability. When the enraged Alexander brings her before the governor, she confesses, and she is condemned to execution by wild animals. Eventually, she is brought to the amphitheater, stripped, and exposed to lions and bears. A “fierce” lioness approaches Thecla and lies down at her feet (33), going on to defend Thecla first from a female bear, whom she kills, and then from a male lion. The lioness dies killing the lion. As more wild animals are released, Thecla is again saved, first by women in the crowd who throw precious perfumes into the arena to sedate the animals, and second by the noble woman Tryphaena, who faints, thereby distracting the governor and Alexander. Once again, the governor questions Thecla: “Who are you?” Her response is somewhat more elaborate than “I am a Christian,” as she pronounces herself “a servant of the living God” and offers a brief discourse on Christian belief (37). The governor orders her clothes to be brought, but she expresses no gratitude; it is not the governor but her God who has provided. The governor pronounces her free: “I release to you the pious Thecla, the servant of God” (38). This act of mercy, too, is attributed to divine agency, as the women in the crowd cry out: “One is the God who saved Thecla” (38).

Focusing on hagiographical literature, Jennifer Barry makes a strong case that gender-based violence pervades the fantasies of ancient Christian writers.Footnote ⁸³ Certainly the Acts of Thecla and later tales of virgin martyrs such as Agnes also support such a position, as David Frankfurter argues in an essay titled, tellingly, “Martyrology and the Prurient Gaze.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Yet I would suggest that while martyrdom literature does indeed entice the prurient gaze, it also condemns it, forcing the voyeur either to align themselves with the rapaciousness of the persecutor or to look with new eyes. To quote Saidiya Hartman again, “At issue here is the precariousness of empathy and the uncertain line between witness and spectator.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Some will find it convenient to indulge their own violent fantasies while projecting them onto demonized others, to be sure. Nonetheless, the main import of the Acts is to expose the brutality of a patriarchy that would burn a woman for refusing to marry and sentence her to death by wild animals for resisting sexual assault. The text also insists that such violence does not have the last word. Thecla baptizes herself (34) after Paul has refused to do so (25); she rejects the vulnerability of the femininity assigned to her, dressing in masculine clothing (40);Footnote ⁸⁶ and she goes on to preach the word of God as Paul does (43). She witnesses by surviving when she should not have and by continuing to put her life on the line, refusing to be cowed by the rage directed against her.

Thecla borrows much from other ancient novelistic heroines who face the threat of sexual violence with vocal defiance.Footnote ⁸⁷ She also stands at the beginning of a long line of Christian virgins who, unlike Thecla, die a proper martyr’s death while also preserving their purity. Figures of “wronged vulnerability,” these virgin martyrs are imbued with the highest degree of moral authority. They are also given voice: strikingly, their witness is as much verbal as it is bodily, even in its most sexualized dimensions. This voice could be, and often was, appropriated by men who claimed to speak on the virgin’s behalf, as Kate Cooper has argued persuasively.Footnote ⁸⁸ As the poet Prudentius imagines it, the young Agnes expresses herself with scandalous directness upon confronting her executioner: “I am ecstatic such a man has come – a sworded man who’s cruel and wild – and not some languid, perfumed, epicene, and limp young thing” (Hymn for Agnes 69–73). This martyrdom is voluntary, and then some! A male fantasy? No doubt. But however often appropriated, the virgin’s voice could not be suppressed, and it remained to be claimed by others – and not only men, I would add.Footnote ⁸⁹ As Mira Balberg and Ellen Muehlberger suggest, late ancient Christian authors and the scholars who study them often focus, perhaps unduly, on the internally divided (and implicitly male) will.Footnote ⁹⁰ But there is another direction we might look. In contrast to the divided will often associated with Augustine, the virgin martyr’s will and desire, forged in the resistance to gender violence, was understood to be one, her voice pure and true, a distillation of the power of ancient parrhēsia. Virginity expressed both the single-mindedness and the oppositional force of witness.

Conclusion: Bearing Witness, Now

The study of religion has often fractured into defenders of tradition versus critics, and the same is true for the specific study of religion in late antiquity. This tension reflects both the continuing influence of the discipline of theology on these fields and the strong resistance to theology that has accompanied the forging of religious studies as a separate and resolutely secular discipline. Exposing the dangerous effects of the discourse of martyrdom has been important work for religious studies scholarship that rightly resists the taint of theological apologetics. These effects include, as Castelli notes, “undermining sustainable critiques of the fact of suffering itself and the conditions that generate and nurture that suffering”;Footnote ⁹¹ or, as Rob Nixon frames the thought in a different context, allowing “the singular figure” to become “uncoupled from the broader social movement” while “sanctifying suffering and forbearance.”Footnote ⁹² Martyrdom’s risk includes as well its paradoxical entanglements with the very triumphalism that it also resists, and the discourse has been appropriated for all manner of causes. This flexibility can itself be disturbing, as if martyrdom were a rhetorical weapon – and an extraordinarily powerful one at that – that could be wielded indiscriminately, by anyone and for any purpose. But at the same time, it is not the case that anything goes, so to speak, and I have tried to ground these reflections in readings of ancient texts that allow us to understand better not only the specific dangers but also the particular power of the discourse of martyrdom as witness. In so doing, I have wanted not so much to stand outside and criticize as to think both critically and sympathetically from within the late antique discourse of martyrdom, in all its complexity. If that means yet again risking a lapse into theology, so be it.

To bear witness is to lay claim to the truth in the strongest possible terms, under conditions of extreme duress. For ancient Christians, as I have argued (following a hint from Clement of Alexandria), this is a threefold truth about the worthiness of the one who bears witness, the tyrannical violence to which they have been subjected, and the possibility of another, more just world that beckons on the horizon. Martyrdom as witness is shaped fundamentally, on the one hand, by ideals of parrhēsia or courageous speech that addresses truth to power and, on the other hand, by practices of judicial torture directed against those enslaved or otherwise disenfranchised, whose involuntary suffering becomes the touchstone of valid testimony. These traditions both converge and conflict, and the revised understanding of witness that emerges is not identical with either. Within ancient Christian discourse, courageous speech is no longer the special province of the elite male, and the tortured witness is granted agency and honor. Whether enslaved or free, the Christian martyr as witness testifies from a position of risk and vulnerability that is both chosen and forced upon them, as they take on suffering, even to the point of death, rather than forsake the truth as they understand it. As vividly imagined in late antique literary accounts, their witness is at once verbal and bodily, rational and defiant, combative and sacrificial, passionate and pure.

The figure of the martyr, fixed in the spectacle of suffering witness, bears a heavy weight of authority, to say the least. As Nixon puts it, writing of environmental activists in Brazil, “To be a martyr is to die for a cause in a manner that confers on your being posthumous power and purpose.”Footnote ⁹³ Indeed, the martyr’s power and purpose not only endure beyond their death but also extend beyond their subjectivity. Bearing witness requires an initiating act and also requires a supplement to that act – an ongoing chain of writing and reading, in the cases we have considered. Between life and death and between death and its supplement, where does the agency of witnessing lie? How much discontinuity can be tolerated? “‘Martyrdom’ is forced on us; we do not choose it,” Black philosopher of religion Biko Gray insists, in a significant critique that pushes back against then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s reference to George Floyd (1973–2020) as a martyr.Footnote ⁹⁴ Yet in different circumstances others may discern a meaningful witness in even the most involuntary of deaths, whether that of Floyd, a Black man brutally murdered by a white police officer, or Matthew Shepard (1976–1998), a young gay man viciously tortured and left to die. Both deaths inspired movements of protest and change. For Gray himself, it is of utmost importance that we “sit with” the lives as well as the deaths of victims of anti-Black racismFootnote ⁹⁵ and others. I would add that the deaths are always already inflected by the lives, and vice versa. Is there not risk, does it not require courage, simply to live and love, to move through the world as freely as possible, if you are Black or gay (for example)? This risk, this courage, becomes sharply visible from the vantage point of death. If bearing witness takes place, on the one hand, in the space of death’s deferral and anticipation, and on the other, between the death and its supplement (ever untimely!), there is danger that this will be overlooked or misunderstood – that the literary will be reduced to the literal, the witness reduced to a hero of a very different sort, an ambivalent agency reduced to a straightforward choice, a threefold testimony reduced to a single one.

However forceful in its expression, bearing witness remains crucially an act of persuasion, not coercion. It seeks assent. And it necessarily allows for dissent. Your witness, whether I judge it heartfelt or superficially performative, spontaneous or strategic, may not persuade me, nor mine you. I may not finally be able or willing to recognize your worthiness, your suffering, or your commitments and aspirations, or you mine. As I write, Black pastors (among others) are speaking out against the claim that the American political activist Charlie Kirk (1993–2025), who was fatally shot at a public speaking event, should be viewed as a martyr. They find it impossible to identify true testimony in one who affirmed the oppressive forces of racism rather than witnessing against them.Footnote ⁹⁶ Bearing witness evokes discernment and judgment, then. But dissent is not necessarily opposition: the same Black pastors who challenge Kirk’s status as a martyr also lament his violent death. Admittedly, bearing witness does risk an oppositional stance, for it exposes the world in its most dangerously polarized state: as we have seen, in the imaginations of ancient Christians, martyrdom unfolds on a cosmic battlefield. In this context, we may find ourselves drawn to the thrill of combat and the comfort of self-righteousness that bearing witness may seem to invite; or we may find ourselves defensively entrenched in reaction. However, I would argue that is not what bearing witness wants or intends. It is, rather, a call for radical empathy. Nothing else will break the cycle of violence and suffering that the witness exposes.

As James Baldwin puts it, “the line which separates a witness from an actor is a very thin line indeed; nevertheless, the line is real.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Activists can also be witnesses, not least through their deaths, and witnessing can itself provoke social and political change. The two go hand in hand. Nonetheless, witnessing – which for Baldwin as a writer and thinker demands a certain distancing – remains distinct from activism. The activist wants to change the world, at least a little bit, by creating a better society (for example). The witness wants to change us – to make us witnesses too – by exposing inconvenient truths. And the witness has a different relationship than the activist to hope. One can bear witness even when hope is all but lost – when we are up against “last chances,” to borrow Catherine Keller’s words.Footnote ⁹⁸ Indeed, witnessing may carry the most power precisely when there is nothing else left to do. Activists who continue to act without any reasonable expectation of success are bearing witness too. And although I have just suggested that witness and activism go hand in hand, there is also an important sense in which witness is complete in itself, as action.

This makes bearing witness especially relevant to a moment like ours, when climate change seems set to blast past one tipping point after another and (not unrelated, as an effect of modern colonialism) anti-Black racism has proven even more deeply embedded in the U.S. psyche and social order than many of us had imagined (though Baldwin, among others, always saw it clearly), while patriarchy (literally) rages, and democracy appears beyond repair. And so on. We are not living in promising times, and robust, forward-leaning theological appeals to hope are likely to ring false, at best. And yet, in bearing witness, we persist, we endure – endurance (Greek hypomone, Latin patientia) being the signal virtue of the suffering witness. We bear witness even amidst grief and despair, in whatever way we can, to all that is precious in this world, to all that has been lost, to all that might have been, that might still be, if only. In this persistence, this insistence, arises … not hope, but something like hope. An opening, perhaps.

* * * * *

I will conclude by considering a contemporary artistic expression and exploration of witnessing, as a kind of coda to this (mostly) historical essay. In December of 2023, I attended Kehinde Wiley’s exhibition “Archaeology of Silence” at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and was deeply struck by the work and by the power of its interpretive insight with respect to ancient Christian martyrdom. Wiley (b. 1977, Los Angeles) is a subtle reader of past traditions;Footnote ⁹⁹ he also brings these past traditions fully, vibrantly, into the present moment, where they can surprise and move us anew. As he names his goal, “I want art to be able to do more than point; I want it to have a heart that beats and responds to the world, the beautiful and terrible world that we live in.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

“An Archaeology of Silence” consists of twenty-six paintings and sculptures representing fallen or prone figures. As the introduction to the catalogue frames it, the exhibition “literally and conceptually repositions the bodies of young Black people slain amid an epidemic of racist brutality, using poses that evoke the passion of the martyrs, the purity of the saints, and the nobility of fallen heroes.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Installed in a series of large, darkened rooms, the works are illumined with spotlights that render them radiant within the dimly lit halls. “Wiley projects his figures into a space of devotion and reverence historically reserved for Christ and his followers and, by extension, whiteness,” notes San Francisco curator Claudia Schmuckli.Footnote ¹⁰² Visitors instinctively speak in hushed tones, or not at all, as they circulate slowly among the works, many of which are extremely large in scale, while others are relatively small, the effect of the whole at once overpowering and intimate, overwhelming and contemplative, even restful. Journalist Emil Wilbekin observes that not only do the figures depicted often seem to be resting, but the exhibit as such affords the much-needed opportunity of time and space “to grieve, heal, or rest,” “to process the loss of life and mourn the victims.”Footnote ¹⁰³ As Wiley himself puts it, “What I wanted to do is almost create a kind of religious feeling. The presentation is quoting the language of a museum … but also borrowing from the language of the sacred and insisting on both the sacred and the profane.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ At the same time, “I was trying to create something that is very in your face,” he adds.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ “I’ve been blessed enough to be able to bear witness to some of the horrors,” he notes. But the horrors are not the only thing to which Wiley bears witness. As he explains, “Art gives me the power to imagine a set of alternative realities”; he points to the significance of “the notion of the magical, the transformative” for his work. “It is a world, but it’s not the world,” Wiley says of the exhibition. “And that helps in terms of dealing with the world.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Thus, we perceive in Wiley’s words and work something like Clement’s trifold definition – witness to the worthiness of the fallen ones, witness to the horrors of the world that has cut them down, and witness to other worlds of possibility harbored within their silent beauty.

Five figures are explicitly identified as martyrs, though I would argue that most of the works in this exhibition could be placed in this category.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Two pieces bear the title “Christian Martyr Tarcisius,” one a large, oval-shaped painting, approximately ten feet long and six and a half feet high, the other a more intimately scaled bronze sculpture, significantly smaller than life size at less than four feet long. Both cite Alexandre Falguière’s 1868 white marble sculpture, “Tarcisius, Christian Martyr,” and both also allude to the Senegalese model El Hadji Malick Gueye, whose name appears parenthetically in the title. Already we are alerted to the complexity of identity at play. With their minute attention to detail, Wiley’s works invite us to experience an encounter with a very particular individual in all their distinctive humanity and poignant dignity; as he puts it, he wants us to ask “Who is [he]? Why is [he] here?”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ At the same time, there is a generic aspect: the figure could represent so many young Black men, struck down, suffering, dying. But there is still more to it than that. The figure is also based on a very particular human model, without simply being a portrait of him; on the artistic model of Falguière’s sculpture, without simply being a reproduction of it; and on the martyr Tarcisius whom Falguière depicted, drawing from Christian tradition, without simply being a representation of him. Finally, the figure is doubled. It is, in all its complexity of identity, refracted through two very different images, the dazzling flat brightness of the monumental painting that achieves a kind of “hyper-visibility,”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ and the more somber, mysterious, and yet approachable bronze, a sculpture in the round, never fully visible at once, inviting circumambulation. Two images, different and the same, calling attention to their artistic nature as such, much as we have seen in our literary texts.

As Schmuckli notes, the “questioning of a specific tradition of masculinity related to dominion” runs throughout the exhibition; this masculinity not only aligns with whiteness but is also projected onto Black men, in a kind of mirroring that takes the forms of both negative stereotypes and internal pressures to repress “any physical, emotional, or mental vulnerability.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Wiley’s project aims to challenge this discourse of dominion not only by exposing its systemic violence but also by holding together “the heroic and the fragile,”Footnote ¹¹¹ power and vulnerability, in his depictions of Black subjects. We see this in the calm strength and gentle dignity of both Tarcisius figures; eyes closed, hands folded as they lean on their arms, they appear to be suffering and mournful yet also suffused with a quiet ecstasy. The subversion of conventional masculinity is perhaps most obvious in the case of the painting. Here, as in some of Wiley’s other works, a decorative, floral, wallpaper-like background seems to take over the painting, moving into the foreground and twining itself around the human figure. We can see in this a reassertion of the irresistible force of life in the face of death – “a kind of growth within the decay,” as Wiley puts it, adding, “We’re becoming. We’re constantly becoming.”Footnote ¹¹² But it is also an attempt to deconstruct the binaries of masculinity and femininity, rationality and madness, order and excess. “What I tried to do,” writes Wiley, “is explode all of those binaries and to allow for this kind of fullness, this kind of hyperdecorative, this type of wall of presence to be at once domineering and intimidating but also vulnerable and decorate.”Footnote ¹¹³

In both versions of Tarcisius, departures from Falguière’s model are revealing. Although there is a tenderness and a sensuality in his handling of the figure of the martyr, Wiley has stepped back from the more highly eroticized version of Falguière. As Janna Keegan notes, in the nineteenth-century marble sculpture, “the figure stretches out in an odalisque-like pose, his … right shoulder bared,” whereas in Wiley’s works “the shoulders are now covered, and the revised poses are less provocative.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Wiley’s figures also represent more mature young men, their vulnerability matched by a sense of strength and dignity, as we have seen. This does not mean that they are immune to the voyeuristic gaze, of course, and Wiley’s works express awareness of, and strive to expose, that ever-present possibility. Hartman’s question – “Are we witnesses … or voyeurs?”Footnote ¹¹⁵ – is one that Wiley also poses to the viewer.

There are three other martyr portraits in the exhibition, all titled “The Virgin Martyr Cecilia.” Again, these include an oval-shaped monumental painting with a floral background, in this case roughly thirteen feet long and seven feet high, and a smaller-than-life-sized bronze sculpture depicting the same figure. The title of the painting includes parenthetically the name of the Senegalese model, Ndey Buri. Both works are also modelled on Stephano Maderno’s 1600 white marble sculpture of Cecilia, itself said to have been modelled on the incorrupt remains of the martyr that were rediscovered in the church of Saint Cecilia in Rome in 1599. The figure lies on her right side, purportedly just as she fell, with her head twisted under her, revealing the back of her wounded neck. Wiley does not choose to reproduce either the wound or the generic – and generically white – robe in which Maderno’s Cecilia is clad. As with the Tarcisius works, Wiley’s treatments are meticulously attentive to detail in both painted and sculpted versions, especially striking in the young woman’s braids. This figure belongs to a very specific time and place. At the same time, the complexity of identity encountered in the Tarcisius works is repeated.

In this case there is also a third work with the same title, a large-scale bronze roughly twelve feet long, in the same pose, though lying on the left side rather than the right and depicting a male rather than a female figure. The size and power of the prone, twisted body, shirtless, clothed in torn jeans and sneakers, and wearing a cross on a chain around the neck, is overwhelming. As Wiley says of another of his largest sculptures, it brings together the monumental and the elegiac, and it is hard to say which wins – the sense of overpowering force or of intimate, mournful encounter.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Equally moving – indeed, almost shocking – is the fact that this work too is titled “The Virgin Martyr Cecilia.” To be sure, the larger-than-life sculpture is not the only place in the exhibition where Wiley plays with disjunctions between the gender of the cited figure and that of the figure in his own work. Nonetheless, this case is especially provocative, given both the monumentality and seemingly unambiguous masculinity of the sculpted figure, on the one hand, and its nominal association with the hyperfeminine, hypersexualized, and hypervulnerable figure of the virgin martyr, on the other. Wiley’s refusal of the projection of a masculinity of domination onto this figure, his insistence on his vulnerability – on her strength – is clearly conveyed.

Returning to the smaller Cecilia sculpture and again experiencing the shift in scale, we note the sense of care that this figure inspires. Her age is ambiguous. She might be a teenager, as the label of “virgin martyr” suggests. Or she might be a young woman, already burdened with more responsibility than she should have to bear. We are reminded of Thecla, of Agnes. As Schmuckli notes, Wiley is attuned to the stereotype of the “strong Black woman,” and many of his works suggest a call to rest as an act of female resistance.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Here, in the small bronze, as with the larger-scale Cecilia works, death and sleep are almost indistinguishable.

All these works evidence an absorption in the moment that both invites and gently resists narrativization. Violence haunts the exhibition: the fallen figures witness implicitly to the forces that have felled them. Violence is also held at bay, as the figures simultaneously bespeak their own “magical” transformation. However, Wiley is reticent with respect to the feelings of his subjects. He allows them their privacy, their silence; he is hesitant to speak for them in any way. He does not even name them; or if he does, he calls them by the names of others – Tarcisius, Cecilia. In addition, Wiley appears to be sharply aware of the dangers of voyeurism, without pretending to be able to protect against it altogether. His figures radiate sensuality, but they are (for the most part) fully clothed and engrossed in their own world (whether in rest, sleep, or death). They inspire respect and tenderness and wonder, but they do not titillate. They are neither victors nor victims – or at least they are much more than that. As Wiley puts it, “It’s not about huge, historic turns in time but rather about whether there is something huge and historic and turning when you pay attention to the people who’ve oftentimes not been seen. That is the revolution; that is the history; that is the war; that is the chest-beating.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Wiley makes something new of martyrdom, then: that goes without saying. He works from an experience of Black suffering and loss that is utterly distinctive (even if it seems to repeat itself endlessly). At the same time, Wiley helps us see things that were there all along but have often been overlooked in traditions of martyrdom: fragility as well as heroism, grief as well as celebration, reticence and mystery as well as the assertion of identity, and the unmaking as well as the making of the masculinity of dominion.

When we lean into the understanding of martyrdom as witness, as I believe Wiley does, we may perceive the martyrs differently, as I have tried to show throughout this essay. If Christian witness seems to yoke truth to death, death itself remains, paradoxically, elusive, always refracted through anticipation or memory, distanced through the displacements of the text. Witnessing takes place, first of all, in the life lived truthfully and courageously, in the face of the threat of violence: Thus, death is held in abeyance. Witnessing also takes place in death’s aftermath: survival is where we stand to mourn and to remember, to paint and to sculpt, to write and to dream. There is, then, another way to frame the trifold character of martyrdom: martyrdom is the witness of the life, it is the witness of the death, and it is the witness of the text or image that preserves their traces. Every witness is multiple and fragmented, both shining with clarity and shadowed with mystery. Every witness is, ultimately, a made (up) thing.

And this means, it seems to me, that there is a fault line running through the foundation of any triumphalist, us-versus-them identity that bases itself on the ancient Christian discourse of martyrdom. For bearing witness does, after all, involve sacrifice – the sacrifice of security and certitude, the taking on of vulnerability and the burden of persuasion. And it invites those with the ears to hear and eyes to see to make this sacrifice as well – to become witnesses rather than mere spectators, as we testify as best we can to “the beautiful and terrible world that we live in.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ In witnessing to the world, we strive to communicate the beauty and terror of that world, and we also address ourselves to it. Witnessing is not only a made-up thing but also a form of address. We call out, without knowing if anyone is listening. We call out, because we must.