On a time, as the poet said, I came to believe that the word "pagan"
derived from "pagus", the term for the circumscription headed by a
"civitas". Is that correct? Secondly, that the term "pagan" came to be
attributed in the western reaches of Europe within the frontiers of the
Roman Empire to rural populations who remained partly non-Christian after
the cities were converted, and that, with the usual mixed and often
hostile attitudes characteristic of antiquity's urban population or its
leaders toward working farmers (one fully transmitted to us along with the
opposite or georgic tradition), it soon developed an essentially
pejorative meaning. Is that also true? And thirdly, that the formal
Christianization of western Roman rural folk awaited the age of the
barbarian invasions when that group linked up with the officially accepted
religion of the rest of the indigenous population partly out of solidarity
and partly to avoid a worst fate, notably indiscriminate enslavement at
the hands of the invaders. Is any of this truthful? John Mundy
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