AD METALLA. - The sentence to forced labor in the mines ad metalla was, after the death penalty, the most severe punishment, and was therefore called proxima morti (Dig. XLVIII, 19, 28). Unknown in the republic, it was introduced by Tiberius in 23 A.D. to punish plebeians and slaves guilty of crimes against the State or of common offenses, without limits of age or sex; it was subsequently applied often against Christians.
It was, in general, a perpetual penalty, but if this had not been declared in the sentence, it was regarded as a ten-year condemnation (Dig. XLVIII, 19, 22). The free man lost his liberty, passing into the ownership of the State, a slave of his punishment, servus poenae (Dig. XXVIII, 1, 8, 4). The penalty was preceded by flogging; the condemned were branded with fire, with the head half shaved (semitonsi, Cyprian Ep. 76, 2), chained (compedes), with their feet held by bars (traversaria), forced to sleep on the bare ground, with insufficient food and clothing. Between the condemnation ad metalla and that in opus metallum there existed no other difference than in the chains, which were less heavy in the second case. Women were generally assigned to tasks auxiliary to the service of the mines: in ministerio metallicorum or in the salt works; they retained their citizenship if condemned for a fixed term.
Dionysius, bishop of Corinth, writes in 170 to Pope Soter (166-75) thanking him because the community of Rome "provides sustenance for the brethren who groan in the mines; by this liberality which you practiced from the earliest times you have remained faithful to a tradition inherited from your Roman fathers, which your worthy bishop Soter has not only confirmed, but increased and strengthened" (Eusebius, Hist. Eccl., IV, 23, 10). Tertullian also attests that Christians condemned in the mines were assisted: si quis in metallis, dumtaxat ex causa Dei sectae (Apol., 30). Under the emperor Commodus (176-92) a group of Christians labored in the mines of Sardinia, for whom Marcia obtained pardon from the emperor; among these was Callistus (Hippolytus, Philosophumena, IX, 2: PG 16, 3). To a band of African bishops, deacons and faithful condemned in the mines in 257 "in metallis constitutis... martyribus Dei Patris" the bishop of Carthage St. Cyprian sent substantial aid collected among the faithful of his community (Cyprian, Ep. 77: PL 4, 427 ff.). The condemned replied with three letters preserved for us in the collection of the epistles of St. Cyprian (Ep. 78-80: ibid., 434-36). The mines could be of marble or of metals, etc., in Sardinia, Greece, Africa, Egypt, Palestine, where, especially in the copper quarries of Phaenos, the work of extraction was particularly painful (Eusebius, De Martyrib. Palestinae, VII-VIII: PG 20, 1481 ff.). In the Ambrosian liturgy there is preserved an oratio pro fratribus in metallis constitutis; in the Missale Gothicum prayer is offered pro fratribus et sororibus in metallis deputatis.
Bibliography2 works
Enrico Josi