Pantheon
About
The Pantheon everyone pictures was not finished in Trajan's lifetime. Agrippa built a rectangular temple on this ground in 27 BCE; it burned in the great fire of 80 CE, was rebuilt, and burned again around 110 CE after a lightning strike. Work on the replacement — the domed rotunda — began under Trajan in the years after that fire, with brick stamps showing material arriving on site from about 114 CE. In August 117 CE this is a building site: the drum is rising, the dome is not yet closed, and dedication is more than a decade away. Hadrian, who becomes emperor that month, takes the credit for it.
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.
In ancient writing
- CIL VI 896, dedicatory inscription M AGRIPPA L F COS TERTIVM FECIT
The Pantheon's porch frieze names Marcus Agrippa, consul for the third time, as builder - the inscription Hadrian kept from Agrippa's original temple when he rebuilt the Pantheon around it.
- Cassius Dio, Roman History 53.27.2
On Agrippa's original building of 25 BCE and the argument over its name - either because it held images of many gods, or because its vault resembles the heavens.
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
Nearby
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →