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Exilium (exile) is a punishment used in antiquity consisting of the expulsion of an individual from the place where he or she lives, either for a given period of time or for life, sending him or her to some concrete location or prohibiting him or her from taking up residence in given places. Due to its advantage of making a person di…

We know of three Christian martyrs (3rd cent. CE) in the Roman Era with this same name, Conon. The first was the bishop of Edessa (evidenced in The Chronicle of Edessa), who laid the foundations of the church of that city and died in 228 or 311 CE; the second, the martyr of Pamphylia who was called “the gardener” (also mentioned as Conan), was executed during the reign of Decius (c. 250 CE), about whom there exist Acts of the Martyrdom, endowed with a veritable worth, and it is these that I will treat in this article; and finally a third, evidenced in the Roman Martyrology, who was executed togeth…

The sentence ad metalla (“to the mines”), included among the poenae  mediocres (“minor punishments”) according to Roman law, along with the sentencing to public works ( opus publicum), consists in making criminals work in the places where minerals are extracted or marble is cut into blocks. This was a commonly adopted measure for penalizing criminals in the ancient world, especially those of low social origin.Antecedents in Ancient EgyptAlready in Egypt, prisoners of war and certain common-law delinquents who had committed crimes such as stealing, tomb robber…

This is the Acts of Martyrs in the form of an epistula (“letter”) written by the Churches of Lyons and Vienne, and it was sent to the sister communities of Asia and Frygia in order to inform them about the events of the year 177 CE, that is to say, the martyrdom suffered by the Christians of Gaul on that date and of which the victim was a very numerous group of individuals from those two cities.Authenticity, Date and ContentIn spite of the fact that almost all the historians from Christianity’s first centuries came across this memorable letter and accepted it as authenti…

These martyrs (3rd cent. CE) were Roman soldiers who belonged to the Legio XII Fulminata, which found itself settled in Malatya/Melitene ( Mart. Hier. 9). As the garrison was sent to Sebaste (Lesser Armenia), during the time of the persecutions (Persecution of Christians) by Licinius, an imperial edict ordered that the entire army should perform sacrifices to the gods, an action that 40 soldiers from this legion refused to carry out. For this reason they were imprisoned and made subject to various tortures, but …