March 7 is the joint feast of Sts. Perpetua and Felicity, the noblewoman and the slave who were martyred together at Carthage on March 7, 203, in the persecution of Septimius Severus. The Passion of Perpetua, Felicity, and their Companions — written partly by Perpetua herself, in the prison diary she kept before her death — is one of the earliest Christian texts, and the only first-person narrative of a woman martyr in the early Church.
Perpetua was a young noblewoman of a prominent Carthaginian family, a catechumen at the time of her arrest, and the mother of an infant son. Felicity was her slave, eight months pregnant when arrested, who gave birth in prison and saw her daughter taken from her before the martyrdom. The two were thrown to the beasts in the arena at Carthage — the modern Tunis — and were beheaded after the beasts failed to kill them. Perpetua guided the trembling executioner's hand to her own throat.
The feast was kept in the early Roman martyrology and is now in the Eucharistic Prayer I of the Roman Missal, the only early African martyrs named there. The relics of the martyrs were venerated at Carthage until the Arab conquest, and the cult passed to Rome, where the feast was kept from the early Middle Ages. From the Catacombs of Priscilla, where the African martyrs are commemorated in the oldest Roman frescoes, to every church that reads the Passion on March 7, the feast is the feast of the mistress and the slave, martyred as one.
