ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a study of the goddess Salus with a conceptual approach. It shows that the evidence on salvation and saviours up to the battle of Cynoscephalae. H. U. Instinsky’s main focus was the development of the idea of salvation of the state in early Christianity, and how this was influenced by earlier conceptions. The meaning of salvation connected to sospes and derivatives seems to always refer to a process or a status rather than a concept. The concept of salvation as a process or status seems to have been only later overlapped with salvation as a noun with the emergence of the goddess Salus in the late fourth century BC. Excluding the Ciceronian evidence, the aspect of physical health seem to be very strong in the forms of ‘salvation’ associated with human ‘saviours’, and there is no direct equivalent of the Greek custom of referring to patrons and benefactors as ‘saviours’.
