ABSTRACT
Joyce Salisbury (1997:142) comments that the crowd could have been offended because the lactating breasts might have mimicked the procession of Artemis/Isis in which male priests dripped milk through the multinippled breasts of the goddess. Or they might have been concerned that motherhood and martyrdom did not go together. In the arena, Perpetua was attacked and tossed by a wild heifer. Her first concern after being thrown in the air was to rear-range her tunic, which being ripped was showing too much thigh. Then she asked for a hairpin, ‘for it was not right that a martyr should die with her hair in disorder, lest she might seem to be mourning in her hour of triumph’ (Musurillo 1972:129). The two women then had to wait a day before they were taken to the killing-platform, located to maximise the crowd’s view of the swords going in-‘that their eyes might be the guilty witnesses of the sword that pierced their flesh’ (ibid.: 131). Perpetua, the last to die, had to help her young killer, whose inexperience saw the first thrust hit a bone.
