Pantheon

About

COMPLICATED CASE - marked NOT extant/complete as of August 117 CE, deliberately, per snapshot rules. Agrippa's original rectangular Pantheon (27 BCE) burned in the great fire of 80 CE; Domitian's rebuild burned again after a lightning strike, per Cassius Dio 66.24 (dated to 110 CE under Trajan). Brick-stamp analysis by Lise Hetland ('Dating the Pantheon', JRA 2007) argues the great rotunda now standing was begun by Trajan shortly after the 110 CE fire, with site clearance and material orders underway by c. 114 CE, and was structurally advanced but very likely still an active construction site at Trajan's death in August 117 -- Hadrian (who acceded 11 August 117) gets conventional credit for the building and it was not dedicated until after 125 CE. Because it was not a complete, functioning temple on 8 August 117 CE, extant_117ce is set false; kept on the map (per project guardrails for commissioned-but-unfinished works) flagged as an active building site at the moment of the snapshot.

What happened here

The building itself is a house for the god, and most people never go inside. Everything public happens on the steps and at the altar in front: an animal led up, examined, killed cleanly, its organs read, the meat divided and eaten. The priest covers his head and a flute player keeps up a noise so no ill-omened word is heard. Worshippers leave what they can afford — a terracotta figure, a coin, a model of the body part they want healed — and the accumulated clutter is periodically cleared and buried on site. On festival days the doors are opened and the cult statue is dressed, garlanded, and sometimes carried out through the streets. The temple also holds money, which is why towns keep their treasury in one.

Sources

• Cassius Dio, Roman History 66.24
• Lise Hetland, 'Dating the Pantheon', Journal of Roman Archaeology 20 (2007), summarized at https://erenow.org/ancient/the-pantheon-from-antiquity-to-the-present/3.php
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome