Pagus

In ancient Rome, the Latin word pagus (plural pagi) was an administrative term designating a rural subdivision of a tribal territory, which included individual farms, villages (vici), and strongholds (oppida) serving as refuges, as well as an early medieval geographical term. From the reign of Diocletian (284–305 AD) onwards, the pagus referred to the smallest administrative unit of a province. These geographical units were used to describe territories in the Merovingian and Carolingian periods, without any political or administrative meaning. Pāgus is a native Latin word from a root pāg-, a lengthened grade of Indo-European *paǵ-, a verbal root, "fasten" (pango); it may be translated in the word as "boundary staked out on the ground". In semantics, *pag- used in pāgus is a stative verb with an unmarked lexical aspect of state resulting from completed action: "it is having been staked out", converted into a noun by -us, a type recognizable in English adjectives such as surveyed, defined, noted, etc. English does not use the noun: "the surveyed", but Latin characteristically does. Considering that the ancients marked out municipal districts with boundary stones, the root meaning is nothing more than land surveyed for a municipality with stakes and later marked by boundary stones, a process that has not changed over the millennia. Earlier hypotheses concerning the derivation of pāgus suggested that it is a Greek loan from either pége, or págos. William Smith opposed these on the grounds that neither the well nor the hill-fort appear in the meaning of pāgus. The word pagus is the origin of the word for country in Romance languages, such as pays (French) and país (Spanish), and more remotely, for English "peasant". Corresponding adjective paganus served as the source for "pagan". In classical Latin, pagus referred to a country district or to a community within a larger polity; Julius Caesar, for instance, refers to pagi within the greater polity of the Celtic Helvetii.