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.

David Lambert - Present and Future Judgement in Salvian

Salvian of Marseille is generally associated with the idea, put forward at length in his De gubernatione Dei (c. 440), that God intervenes in human history to punish the sins of Christians in the present world by disasters such as defeat and conquest by barbarians. However, in his other surviving full length work, Ad ecclesiam, written a few years earlier, this idea is completely absent, even though the work otherwise deals with many of the same issues. In Ad ecclesiam, rather than the punishment of whole communities in this world, Salvian uses the threat of post-mortem punishment of the individual. Ad ecclesiam contains some of the most sustained, rhetorically highly-developed, descriptions of Hell in western patristic literature, yet this element, in turn, is almost entirely absent from De gubernatione Dei. 

This paper examines the nature of this radical change in Salvian’s ideas about the judgement of sin. It investigates the theological and rhetorical reasoning which may have motivated such a development, and it attempts to trace the development which the change implies in Salvian’s ideas about the nature of Christian community.

Joseph Grzywaczewski - Religion of the Barbarians and of the Romans according to Salvian of Marseilles

Salvian divided the Barbarians in two groups: pagans and heretics. The Barbarians – pagans are cruel, perverse and inhuman; they are influenced by demons. They have a very bad image about the Christians and they persecute them. The Barbarians – heretics have some knowledge of the Christ teaching but very limited. They are not able to make studies, they do not know the God’s Law, they have no culture; they practice their religion by tradition. Their way of living is wrong, but they try to act according to their belief. The Romans have the true faith, they make studies on the Bible and on the Gold’s Law, but they do not live according to their faith and knowledge. One of the biggest faults of the Romans is a disorder in the sexual matter. Salvian noticed the ignorance (ignorantia) by the Barbarians and the transgression (praevaricatio) by the Romans. For this reason, he pointed out that the Romans are worse than the Barbarians. Surely, his opinion was simplified and nowadays it is not considered as completely correct.