Pelicitas, a saint of the Roman calendar, supposed to have suffered mart3'rdom A.D. 164. According to the legend, she was a woman of high birth, who em- braced Cliristianitj' and brought up her seven sons in the foith. She was denounced to Marcus Aurelius, who ordered an inquirj'. The prefect ordered her to sacrifice to the gods ; she refused, as did her children. After vain efforts to break their constancy, the prefect reported tlie case anew to the emperor, who ordered a trial before special judges. The lady and her children were all put to death. The story is plainly of com- paratively modern invention. Felicitas is commem- orated in the Church of Rome Nov. 13, and her seven sons July IG. The bones of two of her sons are said to be preserved in Germanj'! — BoUand, Acta Sancior. July 10 ; Butler, Lives of Saints, July 10.
Felicitas, an African slave who suffered martyr- dom at Carthage along with Perpetua (q. v.), in the time of Severus, A.D. 202. They are both said by Basnage to have been Montanists, hut cardinal Orsi seems to have disproved this in his Dissert. Apol. pro SS. Perpetua et Felicitate. They were arrested at Car- thage while still catechumens, and were baptized in prison. All efforts were tried in vain to induce them to abandon their faith ; they were condemned to be thrown to the wild beasts at a festival in honor of the anniversary of Geta's nomination (Annales Ca'saris). After this judgment they were remanded to prison to await tlic fatal day. For the account of Perpetua, see Perpetua. "As to Felicitas, on her return to the dungeon she was seized with the pains of labor. The jailer said to hor, ' If thy present sufferings are so great, what wilt thou do when thou art thrown to the wild beasts ? This thou didst not consider when thou refusedst to sacrifice.' She answered, ' I now suffer mi/self all that I suffer ; but then there will be another v,ho shall suffer for me. because I also will suffer for him.' A custom which had come down from the times of human sacrifices, under the bloody Baal-worship of the Carthaginians, still prevailed, of dressing those criminals who were condemned to die by wild beasts in priestly raiment. It was therefore proposed, in the present case, that the men should be clotlied as tlie priests of Saturn, and the women as the priestesses of Ceres. Nobly did their free, Christian spirit protest against such a proceeding. 'We have come here,'
said they, ' of our own will, that we may not suffer our freedom to be taken from us. "We have given up our lives that we maj- not be forced to such abomina- tions.' The pagans themselves acknowledged the jus- tice of their demand, and yielded. After they had been torn b}' the wild beasts, and were about to receive the merciful stroke which was to end their sufferings, they took leave of each other for the last time with the mu- tual kiss of Christian love." Felicitas is commemo- rated in the Church of Rome March 7. — Neander, Ch. Hist. Torrey, i, 123 ; Butler, Lives of Saints, March 7.
Felix (hcippy, Grsecized <I>»)X(^, Acts xxiii-xxiv; in Tacitus, JJist. v, !), called Antonius Felix ; in Sui- das, Claudius Felix ; in Josephus and Acts, simply Felix: so also in Tacitus, Ann. xii, 54), the Roman procurator of Judsa, before whom Paul so "reasoned of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come," that the judge trembled, saying, " Go thy way for this time ; when I have a convenient season I will call for thee" (Acts xxiv, 25 ; see Abicht, De Claudia Felice, Viteb. 17S2 ; Eckhard, Paulli oratio ad Felicem, Isen. 1779). The context states that Felix had expected a bribe from Paul ; and, in order to procure this bribe, he appears to have had several interviews with the apostle. The depravit}' which such an expectation implies is in agreement with the idea which the histor- ical fragments preserved respecting Felix would lead the student to form of the man.
The year in which Felix entered on his oflice cannot be strictly determined. He was appointed bj' the em- peror Claudius, whose freedman he was, on the ban- ishment of Ventidius Cumanus, probably A.D. 53. Tacitus (^Ann. xii, 54) states that Felix and Cumanus were joint procurators, Cumanus having Galilee, and Felix Samaria. In this account Tacitus is directly at issue with Josephus {Ant. xx, 6, 2), and is generally- supposed to be in error ; but his account is verj' cir- cumstantial, and by adopting it we should gain great- er justification for the expression of Paul (Acts xxiv, 10) that Felix had been judge of the nation " for many years." Those words, however, must not even thus be closelj' pressed ; for Cumanus himself only went to Judffia in the eighth year of Claudius (Josephus, Ant. XX, 5, 2). From the words of Josephus {Ant. xx, 7, 1), it appears that his appointment took place before the twelfth j'ear of the emperor Claudius. Eusehius fixes the time of his actually undertaking his duties in the eleventh j'ear of that monarch. Tlie question is fully discussed under Chronology, vol. ii, 311, 312.
Felix was a remarkable instance of the elevation to distinguished station of persons born and bred in the lowest condition. Originally a slave, he rose to lit- tle less than kingly power. For some unknown, but probabh' not very creditable services, he was manu- mitted hy Claudius Ciesar (Sueton. Claudius, 28; Tac- itus, Hist. V, 9), on which account he is said to have taken the prwnomen of Claudius. In Tacitus, how- ever (I. c), he is surnamed Antonius, probably because he was also a freedman of Antonia, the emperor's mother. Felix was the brother of Claudius's power- ful freedman Pallas (Josephus, Tl'flr, ii, 12, 8; Ant. xx, 7, 1) ; and it was to the cii'cumstance of Pallas's influ- ence surviving his master's death (Tacitus, Ann. xiv, G5) that Felix was retained in his procuratorship by Nero. In speaking of Pallas in conjunction with an- other freedman, namely. Narcissus, the imperial pri- vate secretary', Suetonius (Claudius, 28) says that the emperor was eager in heaping upon them the highest honors that a subject could enjo}', and suffered them to carry on a system of plunder and gain to such an extent that, on complaining of the poverty of his ex- chequer, some one had the boldness to remark that he would abound in wealth if he were taken into partner- ship by his two favorite freedmen.