Gender & History ISSN 0953-5233 Kate Cooper,‘A Father, a Daughter and a Procurator: Authority and Resistance in the Prison Memoir of Perpetua of Carthage’ Gender & History, Vol.23 No.3 November 2011, pp. 685–702. A Father, a Daughter and a Procurator: Authority and Resistance in the Prison Memoir of Perpetua of Carthage Kate Cooper Sometime in the winter or early spring of the year 203, a group of catechumens, neophyte Christians undertaking instruction for baptism, were arrested in Africa Pro- consularis. An uncertain tradition records that they came from the town of Thuburbo Minus, a Roman colony established in the fertile grain lands along the river Bagrada around forty-five kilometres to the west of the Roman governor’s capital at Carthage. Once the Christian group had been apprehended – perhaps interrupted during a prayer meeting or rounded up after being identified by a hostile informer – they were arrested and taken to Carthage for questioning by the procurator, the emperor’s personal repre- sentative in the province. Eventually, they would be executed as criminals: condemned to be attacked by wild animals during special gladiatorial games held in the amphi- theatre at Carthage, to celebrate the fourteenth birthday of Geta, the younger son of the reigning emperor Septimius Severus. 1 In many ways, the story of Perpetua and her companions is one of a thousand stories that could be told about individuals and families in the Roman provinces who fell foul of the imperial authorities. What marks out this North African group from other early Christian martyrs is not the fact that they were arrested, or even that they were consigned to such a spectacular execution. Rather, it is the curious fact that their story – at least part of it – has come down to us in their own words. Two members of the group, a young mother called Perpetua and her spiritual brother Saturus, are believed to have written memoirs during their imprisonment. The narratives were preserved by the Christian community at Carthage where they died, as a precious testimony of their commitment to the faith. Whether these texts were in fact written by the martyrs themselves has not been definitively resolved, and need not concern us here. 2 Our focus in the present discussion is in the vision of household and empire evoked by the first-person voice of the narrator ‘Perpetua’. This is a question of equal interest, mutatis mutandis, whether Perpetua’s prison memoir was in fact written by the historical person Perpetua or whether it represents a roughly contemporary writer’s attempt to imagine the thoughts and experiences of such a person. In either case, the narrative invites its reader or hearer to share the thought-world of a narrator, Perpetua, who has to be distinguished C  2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.