We have been exposed to a great deal of 19th and 20th century literature which has assumed that because the Christian religion was slow to reach the countryside, the word for ‘peasant’ had taken on, at a time when the cities were completely Christianized, the more modern meaning of ‘pagan.’ But from the mid-4th century onwards, Late Antiquity was marked by a resistance to Christianity that originated among the nobility and the world of the academies. It seems therefore most unlikely that even the most optimistic Christian of the day would have actually thought of paganism as a religion exclusively of the countryfolk. Many classical authors, including Pliny, Tacitus, Suetonius, Juvenal and Tertullian, use ‘paganus’ in the sense of ‘civilian’ as opposed to ‘military.’ According to Christine Mohrmann’s seminal work (Encore une fois: Paganus, Études sur le latin des chrétiens 3 (Rome, 1961-65), 277-89), the ‘pagani’ being referred to by these writers were the private individuals who, under the Empire, would have been inferior to the privileged members of the military and the functionaries of government. In Pagans and Christians (London: Penguin, 1986), Robin Lane Fox tells us that the ‘pagani’ were those who had not enlisted as soldiers of Christ against the powers of Satan. This popular use of the word, apparently, evolved among Christian writers in the early centuries to distinguish the ‘pagani’ from members of the ‘militia Christi’, but according to Mohrmann this usage tends to disappear by the 4th century. By this time, ‘paganus’ is said simply to mean someone who is not (yet) baptized and, in several usages which she cites, the word has no trace of any element of polemic or contempt, but appears as a thoroughly objective term.

From On 'Paganus' by Fritz Muntean