The interview with Michele Salzman, a renowned scholar of Late Antiquity at the University of California, Riverside, focuses on issues of reinterpreting the methods of the historian of anti-quity in the face of new research developments. Here Salzman outlines the importance and possibilities of interdisciplinary studies and the global dimension of Late Antiquity, outlining the possible research horizons of the coming decades. Referring to the case of the decline of the Roman Empire, the conversation deals with the ways in which the interpretation of the past can be understood as a reflection of the current desires or fears of societies in times of crisis. Special attention in the conversation was given to the issues of resilience and the role of women in the period of Late Antiquity.

The interview provides a record of a conversation held during the XXIII International Congress of Historical Sciences in Poznan, with late antiquity scholar and epigraphic specialist Ignazio Tantillo (professor at the Università di Napoli “L’Orientale”). The conversation revolves around the matter of understanding the peculiarities of Late Antiquity in terms of an autonomous period in history, the temporal and spatial framework of which remains the subject of deliberations to this day. In the article, Ignazio Tantillo discusses the role of new challenges and hopes for scholars of Late Antiquity in the coming decades. The conversation also includes a reflection upon the nature of the historian's involvement in the public sphere, the (paradigm of public history), especially in the context of the “cancel culture” phenomenon.

In the sixth century, a series of natural disasters struck the Eastern Roman Empire, the most serious of which was the plague that raged from 541 to 542. The contemporary consensus is that Justinian's reign brought a fundamental cultural transformation and, according to Misha Meier's (2016) research, the plague marked a significant caesura in the transition from late antiquity to the Byzantine Middle Ages. The article is based on the assumption that the catastrophic events were a trigger for the transformation of the therapeutic piety, the development of which was conditioned by the ability to project the unreal. The purpose of the paper was to analyse counterfactual projections in rituals created as a response to the disasters besetting in the age of the Emperor Justinian. The author proposes to treat these religious formulas as visualised forms of counterfactual thinking based on the integration of cause and effect, according to the theory of conceptual blending. The article concludes that in case of the 6th century, counterfactual thinking enabled the transformation and development of early mediaeval culture and may have reduced the stress associated with the catastrophic events that affected the society of the Byzantine Empire.