Salvatore Costanza: Il variegato panorama di accezioni dei termini Romanus e barbarus, Christianus e paganus, negli scritti di Salviano

The article belongs to the increasingly promising line of the lexical studies pursuing a historical interpretation of the ancient world and particularly of the late Roman Empire. It explores the kaleidoscopic and varied range of acceptations of the terms Romanus and barbarus, Christianus and paganus, which are diffusely present in the corpus of the historiographer Salvianus, at whom we look with growing interest especially since the last decades of the twentieth century. The more careful grasping than in the past of the meanings and the meaning's nuances, the valences and the peculiarities of such terms, concur to: 1. a more fully understanding of the res that the historiographer of Marseille narrates and also his ideological and mental attitudes that accompany such res; 2. capturing more clearly the historical and social, anthropological and religious horizons of Salvianus; 3. averring more precisely robust continuity of his conception of history, from the Epistulae, through the Ad Ecclesiam, to the De gubernatione Dei.