Beatrices Last Smile

"In early March 203, Vibia Perpetua, a twenty- two- year- old noble Roman mother, was arrested in Thuburbo Minus- a small town on the North African coast- for being Christian, along with three men and a pregnant slave girl named Felicity. She and the other Christians were imprisoned in Carthage. Her dungeon was dark, crowded, and stiflingly hot. "Above all," she wrote in a journal later smuggled out, "I was tormented by anxiety for my baby." For a price, Perpetua was moved to another cell to nurse her newborn son. "Prison suddenly became a palace, so that I didn't want to be anywhere else.""--