I decenni tra l’esilio in Sardegna di Callisto e quello di Ponziano: i rapporti tra cristiani e pagani e la ricostruzione del Tempio Nazionale del Sardus Pater presso i metalla imperiali

Waiting for the integral edition of the inscription of the temple devoted around 213-7 to the Sardus Pater Babai not too far from Metalla on the Roman road a Tibula Sulcos, in the Sulcis-Iglesiente, for initiative of the provincial governor, the problem of the vitality of the pagan salutary cult arises two decades after the first attestation of the exiled Christians of Rome to metalla in Sardinia. The servant’s figures responsible of the failure of Carpoforus’s bank, Callistus (bishop of Rome at the end of the severan age) and Pontianus and Hippolitus, exiled in the age of Maximinus probably in the same area, they document the function of Sardinia as earth of exile and insula nociva. The principal faced problem is that of the forms of the pagan cult for the ‘national’ god of the Sardinians, known as Sid Addir Babay from the Carthaginians, that it appears above all in full expansion thanks to the parallelism with the imperial cult in the age of Caracalla’s illness, while Christianity doesn’t adequately result still rooted in the island.