Valerianus, of Illyricum

A correspondent named Valerianus associated with Illyricum, known chiefly as the recipient of a letter (Ep. 91) from Basil of Caesarea, who addressed him as a bishop of the Illyrian church during the doctrinal struggles of the 370s. In that letter Basil expressed his joy at finding fellow defenders of orthodoxy in the West and his hope of building communion across the divided empire against the Arian party. Beyond this correspondence Valerianus is otherwise little attested as an individual, and his role and dates remain uncertain. Note: this corpus record appears to conflate the name Valerianus across unrelated collections (Basil of Caesarea, Avitus of Vienne, and Pliny the Younger), so some of the attached letters likely belong to different men of the same common Roman name rather than to a single person.