  We identify a parametrically light dilaton by studying the perturbations of
metastable vacua along a branch of regular supergravity backgrounds that are
dual to four-dimensional confining field theories. The branch includes also
stable and unstable solutions. The former encompass, as a special case, the
geometry proposed by Witten as a holographic model of confinement. The latter
approach a supersymmetric solution, by enhancing a condensate in the dual field
theory. A phase transition separates the space of stable backgrounds from the
metastable ones. In proximity of the phase transition, one of the lightest
scalar states inherits some of the properties of the dilaton, despite not being
particularly light.
