Re: Perpetual Perpetua: Part I & II

>I know that Nemesis has issued a cease and desist order, and I should have
>written this days ago; however, Iíve been over my ears in publication
>deadlines (and still am), so I havenít been paying close attention to this
>thread. However, I would like to respond, briefly, to JBís assumption that I
>take the Passio Perpetuae completely and utterly at face value, and that I
>consider every word of it a transparently accurate transcript of actual
>events.
>
>The short rebuttal is: Not so.

>EV

And I will say only that your comparison with the violence in the NFL --
which is unquestionably a reality -- strongly suggests that the events in
the PP were taken as equally real.
The end.

Except that I must point out in response to Nigel Kennell's extremely
thoughtful and thorough and scholarly posting (which surely does deserve a
response for that very reason), that
1) the samples of the prose of Saturus and Perpetua allegedly contained in
this work are surely too brief (the former especially) for statistically
significant analysis of their clausulae, though I will try to track down
Fridh;
2) emendation doesn't necessarily solve the problem of the discrepancy over
the name of the governor (I'm all for emending to what an author actually
wrote, but while it's just possible that Minucius Timinianus -- in a text
that is not notably corrupted in its transmission -- is really Minicius
Opimianus, and that Opimianus was corrupted to Oppianos in the Greek
version, so much is required to make this "work" that I don't find it
particularly plausible, especially in a work that has been lauded for its
accuracy), and it certainly doesn't solve the discrepancy over dating
between the Greek and Latin versions;
3) on the names, Saturninus seems to me the only exception to the
"well-omened" names (and among the pagans surely "Pudens" ought to be
suspicious as the name of the soldier who shows respect for the Christian
captives);
4) I'm well aware of the reference in Tertullian, and have no difficulty
with believing that the work was composed in the early 3rd century, and in
N. Africa (I have previously noted that the reference to the priests of
Saturn seems to make this an absolute certainty), but the discrepancy
between his reference and the text that we have might be evidence (like the
differences between ms A and the other mss, or those between the Latin and
the Greek versions) for a "template" that was adapted by several
individuals in different ways;
5) I have no difficulty at all with the summation that
>So, we are dealing with an authentic document of the early third century. To
>me, it makes no difference whether or not the PP is "authentic." It was
>written or concocted so close to the events it purports to describe that it
>must inevitably reflect the language, preoccupations, and institutions of
>the author's time.
But I would point out that some things in the narrative are just "too good
to be true": for example, the way that Saturus predicts his death from a
single bite of a leopard, then just happens to be thrown to a leopard, who
takes one big bloody bite out of him -- hard not to connect this with the
comment about Christian prophecies in the introduction.

And, as to this statement,
>Incidentally, it doesn't make any difference whether we accept the PP's vers
>ion of events in the arena; enough other evidence exists - literary,
>epigraphical, archaeological - for no one to doubt the abominations that
>were paraded under the guise of Roman 'justice'.

my point -- which is sort of how this all started -- is that those other
"real" categories of evidence, not the PP, should be used as our evidence
for what happened in the Roman arena. After all, if we're going to give
credence to obviously tendentious texts like Christian martyrologies, then
we should also believe that, at Saturnalia, a Roman soldier would dress up
like Saturn, act licentiously and diabolically for 30 days, then kill
himself on the altar of Saturn -- described as a normal custom in the
Passion of St Dasius.


James L. P. Butrica
St. John's NL  A1C 5S7
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