The Ancients - The Pantheon

Episode Date: March 27, 2024

The Pantheon is one of the greatest Roman monuments still standing. First built as a pagan temple by Marcus Agrippa during the reign of Caesar Augustus, it was rebuilt in its current form by Emperor Hadrian in AD 126 after a devastating fire and still stands just under two thousand years later almost exactly as the Romans intended. It’s famous free-standing dome is a marvel of Roman architecture and engineering, and makes it one of Rome’s most popular tourist attractions to this day.In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr. Matthew Nicholls to unlock the secrets of this wonder of Ancient Rome and discover how the Romans built a temple with a craftsmanship that rivals the skills of builders today. This episode was produced by Joseph Knight and edited by Aidan Lonergan.We need your help! We’re working on something special and we need your questions about the Roman Empire. Let us know here.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code ANCIENTS - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's episode we are talking about one of the, if not the, greatest ancient Roman monuments still standing. one of the, if not the, greatest ancient Roman monument still standing. It's called the Pantheon, situated near central Rome today, and it's one of the biggest tourist attractions in the city. So no wonder that we dedicate our final Wonders of the World episode this March to this massive temple. Now, the Pantheon is rightly hailed as an architectural marvel. You can't help when

you walk inside the Pantheon today to look up and be absolutely blown away by the massive freestanding dome above you that was built almost 2,000 years ago. To explain all about the Pantheon's story, well, I was delighted to head up to St. John's College in Oxford to interview Professor Matthew Nicholls. Now, Matthew, he is a walking encyclopedia on all the great monuments of Imperial Rome and an absolutely fantastic speaker. This was great fun, and I really do hope you enjoy. So without further ado, here's Matthew. Matthew, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

Nice to be here. Thanks for asking me. Last time we were in person, we were in the depths of the forest of Germania, talking all things The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, a really fun trip. Now, from the comfort of your office in Oxford, we're going to the heart of ancient Rome, the Pantheon. Not only is this one of the most immaculate Roman buildings surviving, but I mean, it is a fan favourite when we're talking about ancient Roman architecture, isn't it? It's one of my very favourites, for sure. And that's partly because it's so well preserved. As you walk up to it and into it, you get this wonderful sense of being in a complete ancient building in pretty much the way the architect intended you to see it. So

that's an unusual experience even in Rome, and I love it. I always get a thrill when I go there. First off, set the scene. What does the Roman Empire, what does ancient Rome look like? What's the situation in those years before construction of the Pantheon begins? So the original Pantheon, which is not the building that survives today, dates from the 20s BC. And it comes from near the beginning of the reign of Rome's first emperor, Augustus. So I don't know how far back you want me to go. But in the years leading up to that, there'd been this very destructive civil war between Julius Caesar and his enemies, and then the assassins of Caesar and Caesar's heirs. And the republican constitution of Rome had been put under enormous strain and essentially fallen to bits in civil war. And out of this decade plus of terrible internecine conflicts and struggle,

Augustus, or Octavian, the future Augustus, emerges as the first emperor and launches a really significant building project in Rome, building program, I should say, that transforms the city of Rome. He says, later in life, I found a city of brick and I left it a city of marble. And really, it's buildings like the Pantheon he's thinking of as an act of conspicuous care for and resurrection and restoration of the city at the heart of the empire. So he's paying a lot of attention to Rome,

glamour buildings like the Pantheon, unglamorous infrastructure like roads and sewers, same guy doing both, Marcus Agrippa. And he's doing all of that at the same time as he's going off conquering new territory. He said we were in the Teutoburg Forest, but he was trying in the end unsuccessfully to conquer Germany. So he's redrawing the map of the Roman Empire.

And at the heart of that, he's rebuilding the city of Rome. Right at the heart, he's rebuilding Rome. And to get a sense of where the Pantheon is in this whole rebuilding project, I mean, geographically, where in Rome are we talking about with this massive monument? So Rome is a city of seven hills, famously, except if you count them, it never adds up to seven. But if you think of Rome as a kind of a plateau intersected and cut through by a series of streams that are all tributaries of the Tiber River, and the Tiber is flowing north to south, and it's making a big east-west loop or bulge. And in the bulge of that floodplain loop of the Tiber

is a flat area outside the hilly centre of the city called the Campus Martius or Field of Mars, and that's where the Pantheon is. At the start of Augustus's reign, that's an open area. It's used for assemblies, for elections. It's used for military assembly. It's kind of flat floodlands. You can't really build on it, but it's big and empty and it's kind of parkland. And over the course of Augustus's reign, it starts to fill up with buildings. And by the High Empire, it's totally full and it becomes actually the centre of the residential medieval city of rome because it's quite near the vatican on the other bank but in our period it's starting to lose its character as open parkland and starting to gain a character of being kind of monumentalized imperial parkland plus a suburban kind of resort area full of

groves and porticos and baths and lakes and pools and temples of which the pantheon is one kind of showing off how great the person in charge is as well i'm guessing oh absolutely it's all absolutely linked to augustus personally his tomb is at the northern extremity of this the altar that celebrates his return from war the arapacus is also in the middle of it so is his monumental sundial which has a captured egyptian obelisk as its pointer so is the pantheon so is r Rome's first public bathhouse. It's drained by a monumental canal that he puts in. I mean, the whole thing is transformed by him in his circle, chiefly his, Lieutenant Agrippa. And this gets noticed. So contemporaries like Strabo, who's a Greek, but writing about Romans in Rome, says that the Campus Martius is like a

whole other city, and it's completely splendid, and that it's the most amazingly elaborate, kind of beautified, adorned space anywhere in world and the Stray Bay really goes to some length to say how marvellous this new space is so it's a great extension of Rome into a sort of yes suburban extramural parkland paradise full of great monuments. Parkland paradise I love that indeed I mean so Augustus seems to almost be the face of this project. But as you hinted at there, it's not him who seems to be personally overseeing the construction of the Pantheon. This incredibly important figure of Agrippa. Now, I've been corrected in the past for just saying that he was Augustus's aide. So who was Agrippa and what role does he play? Agrippa is an absolutely vital part of the augustan regime he is of no particularly grand

aristocratic background himself which is very useful to augustus because he can never be a threat right unlike all these senators augustus has to hold carefully at arm's length and by the way we're saying augustus and i'll keep saying augustus he took that title in 27 bc our story starts just a little before that when he's octavian but let's just call him augustus augustus has to manage this this senate full of rivals and, and he does that very well, but he relies on an inner circle who are no threat to him, and Agrippa is one of those. And he's just one of history's great fixers. He wins the Battle of Actium for Augustus, the naval battle in 31 by which Augustus finally defeats Mark Antony, and then he builds aqueducts and he organizes labor for building projects.

And he kind of just runs trunks of the business of running the city of Rome and the empire. He marries into the imperial family. He then gets a step closer and marries Augustus's daughter. So he's the son-in-law. And for a while, he's the heir designate. When Augustus gets ill, he gives Agrippa his signet ring. The succession bounces around.

It's a whole other story. And eventually Agrippa and Agrippa's children get eased out in favor of Livius' child Tiberius the next emperor but for a while it looks like actually Agrippa's children, grandchildren, will become the future emperors of Rome. So for a while it looks like Agrippa's children, Augustus's grandchildren, will become the future emperors of Rome and though that doesn't work out it puts him very close to the centre of power. Puts him very close to the centre of power and Puts him very close to the centre of power, and of course, also kind of emphasised by him being the person who's given the task of building massive monuments key to Augustus's legacy, like the first Pantheon. I'd like to ask a bit about

the word Pantheon, because does that kind of hint at what the intended purpose was for this building? It does hint at it, but it's a hint hint it's not an absolutely clear statement of what the building was for so we have a much later greek historian dio who calls it the pantheon and there's a later imperial inscription from the severan dynasty the end of the second century a.d on the lintel of the building that also calls it a pantheon so that is the ancient name and it sort of means temple of all the gods right in greek pantheon and we know that there were statues of all the gods there and you can count the number of niches and kind of work out there's a niche for every planetary god. And clearly it's dedicated in some sense to all the gods, but no one ever explicitly calls it a temple formally dedicated to all the gods. So we don't quite know how it worked

religiously, what kind of rituals are celebrated there. It's in many ways quite an unusual building for a Roman temple. To my mind, it's also connected to the quasi-divine status of the emperor himself. There's this elaborate bit of pantomime in the first pantheon where Agrippa says to Augustus, I want to put a statue of you, O emperor, in the temple with all the gods. And Augustus says, oh no, no, I couldn't possibly, my dear man, no, you can't do that. And Agrippa says, okay, well, I'll put Julius Caesar inside and I'll put your statue in the porch just outside. And Augustus says, yeah, that's fine. So it's clearly meant to show the divinizing, quasi-divine, nearly a god role of Augustus. But also it's an opportunity for Augustus to refute divine status and make this kind of deliberate show of saying, no, I am not a god.

I cannot be with the gods. My dear late adopted father is a god now, and he can justifiably be with the deities inside but i must wait outside there's a careful piece of choreography so i think somewhere in there is a hint as to the temple's function at least the original temple is to locate the emperor in the realm of the divine divine without quite saying he's a god because we're going to get to the architectural style of the later temple in a bit but you highlighted those sources there so do we have snippets of information from the time of augustus to get a sense of what this original temple looks like yeah we do so taking a step back the campus marsh as we said earlier was open flat parkland that's starting to fill up and then at this date there's a great canal put in a grip is a great hydraulic

engineer he sails through the sewers of rome in a boat wow you know these days when politicians want to look seriously put on a high-vis vest and yellow hat this is a gripper he does this all the time so he does the engineering to make it drained and buildable and then he puts rome's first public bathhouse just to the south of the pantheon and he builds a big lake and augustus's mausoleum is built up to the north of the pantheon it's about the same size it's round the two buildings look at each other across the interstitial kind of flat plain. So what's going on here is a great complex actually of buildings on the north-south axis. It's all part of a program. So we can, even without knowing about the architecture of the Agrippan Pantheon, start to put it in this urban topography where

buildings are part of a complex, they correspond to each other, they correspond to the great north-south arterial road, the Via Flaminiaia that just runs to the east of the pantheon site so we don't think about it in isolation it's part of a plan or a program and that's what strabo responds to so favorably this kind of transformation of the campus marshes we do know a bit about the original agrippa and pantheon so the building that we know and love has agrippa's name over the door which has kind of been confusing for 2000 years he didn't build that version that's a piece of piety by Hadrian, putting the original builder's name over the door rather than his own. But we have now done excavation under the Hadrianic pantheon, and we're fairly sure that the original Agrippid version was round, that it had some kind of square-stepped porch,

that it probably faced north like the current pantheon. It used to be thought it faced south. I think now we think it probably faced north. It round some people think it was hypethral that is open to the air because they're not quite sure that it could have been vaulted in concrete like the later pantheon is maybe it could have had a timber roof but the spans are too big so the architecture is a bit confusing pliny tells us it had bronze column capitals and caryatids that's columns in the shape of women like the eric theon on the acropolis exactly so and then shortly referencing that actually kind of a nod to greek architecture which is another augustan thing that can bring the culture the marble culture of greece into rome so we have snippets of detail about it we know you know roughly its size and shape and location some details of its decoration but then

it burns down in ad80 domitian rebuilds it it burns down again in ad110 and then trajan or hadrian rebuild it and that's the version that we have So we don't know a lot about it, but we know enough to start getting a sense of it. But it's interesting then, so it's not just Hadrian when he monumentalises it even more, and he mentioned concrete, which we'll get into in a second. But that whole kind of hybrid design of the round centre and then the more usual temple-like design. That kind of hybrid of different architectural temple designs, it's right there from the beginning. So this is quite a unique structure in its design and its shape. It is. And a dio writing of the later

building says that it's called the Pantheon because it's like the vault of the heavens. And certainly in the finished building that we have, that huge concrete dome, 43.4 meter diameter dome, is just an enormous kind of representation of the canopy of heaven. Something like that must have been present in the original building. I guess the round shape is a sort of nod to the holistic dedication of the temple and the fact that it somehow encapsulates the whole kind of divine universe with Augustus as ruler. And this is part of a series of buildings as i've said on the site that include this sun dial that kind of marks out augustus's master of the cosmos or at least that the kind of the the circling orbits of the heavens and remember augustus and julius caesar have been

very heavily engaged in calendrical reform as well the kind of circle of the seasons and the months are all part of some divine plan and augustus's birthday is in there so it's kind of nods to the heavens or the universe in the round shape of the temple, I think probably is there from the start. Do you think there could be, I mean, this is a tangent and it may well not be, but as I like focusing on the Hellenistic period, I will ask very quickly, of course, one of those iconic round buildings, although nowhere near the scale of the Pantheon is the Philippaeon at Olympia within the Altus and that obviously dedicates to Philip and Alexander and

the family. Do you think there could be any influence from that too in the design to have a kind of a round temple shape, or am I thinking too much there? No, I think the idea of the tholos, right, which is the word for a round temple, is around in Hellenistic architecture. It's probably around in Alexandria, although not much of Hellenistic Alexandria survives for us now.

But that kind of almost Baroque playfulness in temple forms, I'm sure they did pick up from Hellenisticistic architects so you mentioned one building there's a temple of venus at knidos which is round as well and hadrian later on built a little copy of that it is private villa out at tivoli so this idea of playful architectural forms yeah they're aware of it um they're also round temples in rome right the round temple of the forum boarium sometimes called the temple of hercules victor there's a round temple of Mars as well. I mean, they know about the round temple form, and they're quite happy to use it. And it is just a little bit exotic, maybe. Fair enough. Well, let's move on to Hadrian, this great building that seems so iconic, well,

so important to the story of the pantheon that we see today. I'd like to ask about him kind of approaching the building of the pantheon. Do we know much about the actual construction of the Pantheon that we see today under the Emperor Hadrian? We do, and there's also some debate about whether it was under the Emperor Hadrian. There's this later biographical source that names him as the building's dedicator, and that seems fairly certain. But some of the brick stamps in the building are from the previous reign of the Emperor Trajan, who was a magnificent and prolific builder and whose architect apollodorus of damascus was undoubtedly a genius and could have designed a building as wonderful as the pantheon but we also know that hadrian was really personally deeply invested and interested in architecture

particularly interested we think in domed and vaulted architecture and the pantheon is the world's greatest vault or dome so it fits for hadrian's personality and interest it kind of also fits for trajan maybe we can say that after it burned down in 110 Trajan at least laid some of the plans for the building we can see we might get onto this in the construction of the building those plans changed over time in a couple of ways like adaptations made I'd be quite happy to continue to attribute it to Hadrian but we might see the influence of the previous generation in there as well. And what types of materials are we talking about when building this particular pantheon? Is it all a locally quarried stone? I'm kind of guessing not, if this is the height of Imperial Rome and you want to display your power. That is absolutely right. So the absolute local quarried stone in

Rome is tufa, which is horrible. I mean, you can build city walls and gates and stuff out of it, or foundations, but it's kind of grey-brown and full of lumps, and you can't take a fine edge to it, let alone a polish. So tufa is a kind of archaic building material. And then as Rome expands, it gets access to lunar marble, it gets access to travertine, which is kind of the decent local building stone, but you wouldn't build a whole temple like the Pantheon out of it.

So no, the surface sheen that you see at the Pantheon is imported stone from all over the empire, and that's of the point right it's numidian yellow from north africa it's aswan granite from egypt phrygian purple i mean this wonderful kind of galaxy of stones from every corner of the empire phrygia that's central turkey today isn't it that's right so anywhere with a decent marble quarry in the empire is providing beautiful polished colored stone for this building but actually what really builds the Pantheon, what makes it possible, is concrete. And the Romans always cover their concrete often in a kind of thin veneer of marble, so you see marble. But actually, structurally, it's a testament to Roman engineering and to the versatility and strength and flexibility of

concrete. And this concrete, is that still quite a new invention at the time of Trajan? I mean, how long has it been around in the Roman Empire up to that point it's not new but they got more and more confident with it so they're using kind of lime mortars right the 6th century bc in the bay of naples and they put volcanic sand local pots a lot of stand into it and it becomes a useful building substance it's there in rome in the second century bc depending on when we date a structure called the porticus amelia or navalia but it's used for kind of unglamorous foundations and kind of behind the scenes buildings. But they get better and better and more and more confident with it. They start facing it in brick, which turns almost into like a production line for construction, because you can make millions of bricks in

specialised brickyards outside the city in standardised sizes, bring them on site. You can mix up the concrete using powdered lime and aggregate like stone fillings and pots of sand and water so you're not carting massive multi-ton blocks of stone to site and lifting with elaborate cranes i mean you're just bringing stuff in sacks on people's backs so you can turn the whole building process into almost like a production line of kind of low and semi-skilled labor and very portable materials and that means you can build quickly and massively and they get more and more confident with this and then they start working out that they can build vaults so they build a lot of these in bathhouses if you've been to pompeii

or by or stay behind the bay of naples you have these kind of bathhouse vaults they're useful for bathhouses because there's no timber in them so they don't catch fire or rot and gradually they get more and more confident and experimental with their vaults hadrian is particularly interested in this he likes these multi-ribbed pumpkin or gourd vaults. And so what you see is it's been called a Roman architectural revolution. The architecture of the Greeks is post and lintel architecture, or trabeated architecture. It's like vertical columns and horizontal lintels.

And you build something like the Parthenon, like the classical temple in Athens, is a grid of columns holding up a pitch roof. So it's all straight lines and angles but with concrete you can lay it over wooden formwork in any shape you want almost like a jelly mold if you think of it like that an inverted jelly mold so you can make curved shapes and very complicated geometrical shapes and massive vaults and they get better and better at this and really the crowning glory of it is the pantheon with its enormous unsupported dome the largest single span masonry dome in the world for millennia and that's really the triumph

of the pantheon it's using concrete now as as a material with all its virtues of kind of strength durability moldability flexibility are on display in that building of course like all these great monuments of antiquity i mean the logistics logistics of varying these materials at the Tiber, instructing where things go, all these architects looking on, you can imagine it would have been a massive building site. I must also ask about mechanical aid. The word polysphaston immediately comes to mind. I'm guessing they've got lots of cranes, lots of devices to help them build the structure alongside the massive manpower they must have had. Yeah, it's a huge, huge building project. They have enormous manpower and they have maybe rather lax health and safety regulations by our standards. So they can build rather quicker maybe than we would do with the materials on hand.

But the logistics of it, and this is why you need someone like a gripper, like an organiser. You've got to send the order out to the quarries in egypt for these granite monolith shafts years in advance because you can only bring them on barges and ships when the sailing season is on and it's going to take months to move them let alone to quarry them and then bring them to site and haul them upright and they actually get it wrong in the pantheon we'll come on to that you need to estimate the number of bricks you need then order them have them delivered to site and have somewhere to store them you've got to estimate the number the amount of concrete you need the amount amount of labour you need, who's going to feed all that labour, where are they going to live, how much grain do you need to make the bread to keep

the staff fed. And you need an awful lot of space, like a huge building yard. Interestingly, there's a pavement to the north outside Augustus's mausoleum, a stone pavement, and incised into that are layout marks by masons for the pediment of the pantheon. So they're finding a big flat area of paving, kind of roughly in the vicinity, and they're laying out the blocks that make up the pediment of the temple on that, using inscribed marks on the pavement as a cutting guide for the masons. So that's a hint at the logistical operation that would have been needed for this enormous temple. Wow. And the workforce themselves, would it be largely slaves or are these kind of skilled laborers?

Oh, it would be a mix. I mean mean i think we might see some enslaved labor there but actually emperors use urban building projects as make work schemes for the urban poor there's a nice story about the emperor vespasian where an engineer came to him and said you know my lord i found this marvelous new way of moving columns it will slash the labor force you need to move the column isn't this great and vespasian said very clever but i won't adopt this because then who would feed my people was his answer i inefficient labor is actually quite good because you can employ thousands of people to move your columns around and then you're you're stopping them from rioting because you're paying them a bit and it's so it's like another part of the bread and circuses regime of the roman emperors so i don't think we have to see it as slave labor

i think there'd be a lot of paid labor and a lot of very skilled engineering and architectural labor at the top of that pyramid and then the beauty of Roman construction is that a few kind of skilled professional guys can direct a large force of semi-skilled and unskilled labour because bricks and concrete

are actually quite easy to lay as long as someone's telling you where to put them explain the entranceway to us matthew what would you see as you walked and kind of went into the entranceway of the pantheon you'd see the porch of what looked like a conventional temple so if your listeners have been to rome or seen a picture of Pantheon, it now sits in a little piazza. And that would have been an appreciably bigger space in antiquity. That space would have had a square portico around it and the floor level, the ground level, would be substantially lower. And all of those factors mean that more of the current building was masked in antiquity than it is now. You're looking up at

it from an angle and it's flanked by these porticos that kind of close in the drum. So what you're mostly seeing is the porch of the temple. And it looks like a conventional pedimental classical temple. That is, it's a row of columns with a triangle, a pitched roof carried above those columns. And you look at it and think, oh, I know what that is. That's a temple, right? And I mentioned the Parthenon earlier. It's the kind of classical temple. It looks very conventional, albeit it looks very ornate and elaborate it's large it's got these enormous monolithic granite shafts across the front and this is show-off architecture the greeks built their columns out of drums you slice up a column like a banana if you imagine it and

you put you stack the slices on each other so you only have to lift a little bit of stone at a time but these are monolithic shafts and that's a deliberate piece of ostentation because you've carved them in a block in the quarry in egypt ship them up the nile put them on an ocean going vessel sail them off to portus ostia put them on another barge drag that up the tiber put them on a cart taking that through the streets of rome got them to site and hauled them upright you mentioned cranes and lifting devices and these things are tens and tens and tens of tons each and they're enormously heavy so you're right at the limit of what ancient architecture can do, actually.

The tensile strength of wood and rope is their limiting factor. And they can really do very elaborate things with that. So these columns are architectural bling. And then there's a triangle impediment. And in there, all the decoration's now gone, but there's like this pattern of dowel holes in the marble that we think probably held maybe like Jupiter's eagle

and imperial wreath and fillets and stuff. So maybe bronze or gilded bronze decoration. The inscription across the pediment, maybe statue groups on the roof and a chariot group and stuff. And then the bronze of the dome you would see, that was in gilded bronze tiles or sheets, where it's now lead, but it was shiny bronze back in the original period.

So you'd see like a lot of colourful, rich decoration, but your prevailing impression would be of a pedimental temple. I mean, that's the key word I was about to ask. I mean, colour. I mean, today it's still really impressive, but you don't see lots of different colours at the front of the Pantheon. Back then, some 2,000, almost 2,000 years ago, we should imagine it being even more colourful to the person looking at it.

I think so. I mean, colour, architectural colour is an area of live debate in Roman architecture. I think what you now prevailingly get the impression of is brick, because you see the great bulk of the rotunda, and that's now bare brick, but that would have been stuccoed, so that's plaster with marble dust in it. So the basic building is probably white, and then you've got a lot of colour in the columns, the bronze decorations, the statues are probably coloured. You can imagine on festival days, garlands hanging between the columns, you know, quite a lot of brightness and color and variety let's talk

about these columns a little more because you hinted at it earlier so as you mentioned architectural bling but we're only human they make mistakes what's the potential gaping mistake that seems to have happened with these columns this is a very interesting story and you imagine someone probably suffered for it so if you look at the pantheon if i say columns. This is a very interesting story, and you imagine someone probably suffered for it. So if you look at the Pantheon, if I say the porch block is a round building, it's a rotunda, and it's got a square rectangular porch block that mediates between the triangular pedimental porch

and the round bit. So that rectangular block has got the current pediment sitting against it, but it's got the outline of a triangular pediment higher up. And it looks like the porch was originally intended to be higher up than it that it was built and doing some measurements of the porch and the columns in particular we find that it's probably designed to have 50 foot column shafts 50 roman feet column shafts and the shaft has installed a 40 foot so that has a number of consequences because the shafts the columns are shorter they're also narrower so the gaps

between them are too big it mucks up the relationship of the palaces the square columns on the back wall of the porch which are now too narrow for their depth so actually rhythmically and in terms of strict rules of proportion it's it's kind of a bodge job it looks lovely and it's very handsome but it's not quite what it was designed to look like it was meant to be even taller and would have masked even more sight of the drum from the the approach so we don't know what happened but either the columns turned up and they were you know the wrong size which is embarrassing for everybody but you can't send them back or the 50 foot shafts were needed for some other project elsewhere in rome or the boat sank or the shaft cracked or you know something went wrong and they midway through the building process had to

reorganize everything for these shorter column shafts i'd have hated to have been that person who'd overseen that and then they see the columns arrive and the hearts almost drops as you realize they're slightly too short probably as you hinted at didn't end well for that person probably not hadrian had a bit of a temper there's a famous story of him poking someone's eye out with in it with his pen when he got in a rage so to to go up to hadrian to say my lord you know that temple that you asked me to build? I've got some news about that. It wouldn't be a good morning. It wouldn't be a good morning indeed.

Well, who would be allowed to enter the temple in Imperial Rome once the Pantheon had been built? We don't know. It's a pretty special space. So you'd imagine that not just anybody could wander in. But what I would say about it is it is designed to have an interior. Like most Roman temples, classically that what we call the the keller the kind of the the inside bit of the temple it's sort of a treasury and it's the holy of holies and it's where the statue of the god

lives and the priest goes in there but the people don't you know we we're used to worship buildings being somewhere where a congregation goes inside that's not the case in most roman temples the the act of sacrifice happens outside almost necessarily because it's messy, and then you burn the meat on the altar and the smoke goes to heaven. So that's an outside activity. In Roman temples generally, the priest stands on the steps and the people stand below looking up, and that's where the religion happens. But this is a building whose interior is spectacular

and is the point of the building. So I think rather more people go into this building than might be expected in a conventional temple. Unlike somewhere, let's say, like Karnak in ancient Egyptian times, where it was just the pharaoh and the priests who could go inside. So that's very interesting to hear that kind of contrast there. As we move into the temple, Romans love big, amazing doors. I'm guessing the Pantheon also has some big, pretty show-offy doors too. Yeah, it has bronze doors, and the bronze doors it still has are

ancient there is some debate about whether they're original to the building they've been there since at least the 15th century but they're a bit small for the aperture and you can see that the marble threshold's been recut to accommodate them so obviously originals not sure are they really really important ancient roman bronze doors and masterpieces of roman bronze carving yes they are and also just to reinforce the point you mentioned earlier of course we were talking earlier about a gripper and that inscription on the top does hadrian decide or do they decide just to mention a gripper to kind of confuse people or to say the original one was made by a gripper well it's an act of pietas an act of consciously honoring the original builder and conspicuous modesty and hadrian does this we're told he

doesn't put his name on anything except the temple of the deified trajan he'd be deified predecessor so and other emperors get a poor reputation for sticking their own names on buildings they've restored you know an emperor called creeper or ivy because his name kind of was chiseled onto buildings he hadn't actually built so hadrian is being conspicuously modest which is a good tactic for a roman emperor to take but he's also of course linking himself to augustus and all emperors want to do this because Augustus is the great granddaddy of the Roman imperial system. So restoring an Augustan building and then very, very modestly not putting your own name on it is itself a kind of an act of linking yourself. And people would have known, right? It says M Agrippa LF Cos III fake it. So Marcus Agrippa,

son of Lucius, consul for the third time, made this. And Agrippa wasF Cos III Fake It. So Marcus Agrippa, son of Lucius, consul for the third time, made this. And Agrippa was the only person apart from Augustus to be consul three times in Augustus' reign. So it's an act of linking himself pretty closely to the original imperial regime. Well, there you go. Well, let's move further into the Pantheon. We've passed the doors, this great circular space. Matthew, what are we greeted by? Well, first, let's just take a moment and catch our breath because this is the most spectacular

architectural transition in the ancient world, I think. You walk through this very nice but quite conventional porch through these bronze doors and you're suddenly in this amazing space. And it is, it literally takes your breath away. I mean, most people who go in there for the first time, stop, look up and gasp.

It's incredible. It's just so big and so beautiful and the the dome it's perfect sphere if you blew up a giant beach ball 43 meter diameter would perfectly fill the space that you're standing in so it's just wow but then you can start looking around and seeing the detail but what you get is this impression of space scale superhuman architectural solidity and elegance and then above you this massive massive concrete dome that somehow floats and what would you see let's start at kind of ground level and work our way up so what would you see if you were looking straight ahead or around i'm guessing there'd be

statues but also kind of hints of temple architecture or roman architecture with vaulted parts and stuff like that yeah it's quite a complex interior but it has a harmony and a symmetry to it so you're walking through the main door and you're in a big round building it's a big drum shaped building with a dame on top and around the perimeter of the drum there's a series of big niches framed by big pairs of yellow marble columns set into the walls and those niches probably held statues of gods probably in some kind of meaningful order as well but actually before you even get to that you're standing on a marble pavement with a very nice pattern of circles and squares and a drain in the middle. And that's the original pavement,

polished marble from all over the Roman Empire, huge carpet of marble. And you think, gosh, this was an expensive, expensive floor. And a drain in the middle too. Yeah, because there's a hole in the roof, so it rains and pigeons get in. So there's a drain in the floor for heavy precipitation. So you walk in, in you've got this drum you see niches with pairs of columns statues in those niches and there's a kind of rhythm to that right it doesn't quite align with the paving but it certainly aligns with the doorway and you can kind of look ahead left right half left half right you get this lovely symmetrical rhythm of the niches and the columns and the statues talking to each other across this big round floor.

And then above that, there's the attic story. So a kind of a vertical stretch of wall that's got marble decoration in it. And most of that replaced in the Renaissance, but there's a small original patch or restored original patch in the building today. And it's kind of slightly fussy, but rhythmical series of pilasters, like square columns and window grills

and coloured marble panels. Then above that, you have the dome. The dome has five rows of diminishing coffers, like kind of square shapes pushed into the dome. They get smaller as you go up, and that lightens the dome structurally, but it also breaks up the kind of the monotony of it into this kind of rows of diminishing coffers.

And because they get smaller, they kind of leave the eye up. It's bare concrete today, but it's full of dowel holes. So there's some kind of bronze applique decoration there probably, whether it's like rosettes in the center of the coffers or bronze sheeting over the whole lot, or who knows, like a zodiacal map of the heavens or something. It could be quite spectacular, whatever was on that ceiling originally. And let's, I mean, explain away, talk in detail about kind of the material

construction of the stone because this is fascinating how they're able to make and how it's been able to be sustained the fact that it's not all weighing the same this material i'm guessing it's getting lighter and lighter as it gets higher and higher how did they do it it's an amazing piece of engineering and we've been talking most about the architectural impact but actually when you know about the engineering that's as impressive as well so to start off i've said it's built on a floodplain which is a difficult place to build it's on a kind of clay subsoil so they've got an enormous foundation ring of concrete it's about seven meters wide and then during the building process they make it bigger again it's about 10 meters wide nearly five meters

deep it's huge concrete raft the thing is sitting on so they sink very very substantial foundations and they build the dome out of concrete brick-faced concrete very substantial very solid dome with all sorts of clever relieving arches and stuff to shed and share and spread the architectural weight of the dome and then above that is the dome and it's not quite as simple as it being just a kind of pot lid on the building it's thicker at the bottom and thinner at the top the coffers take weight out of the inside on the outside the haunches of that dome have a series of stepped rings that weigh down the base of the dome to kind of anchor it and put the load on the bottom and then as it goes up it gets thinner but also as you suggested the aggregate in the concrete that is the lumps of

stone in the concrete mix start off very heavy at the bottom with basalt and by the top they're using pumice which is it's so light it floats it's a volcanic stone full of air bubbles and they use that at the very top to make it as light as possible so it's very cleverly engineered and then we don't know how much they knew about the science of this and whether they're building kind of by rule of thumb and by workshop knowledge probably rather than structural calculations but the the cracking in the concrete because as the building settles into its foundations the concrete has cracked and that seems to divide the dome into a series almost of like arches pushing against the central oculus ring at the top and whether they intended for it to behave that way whether it's

just they built it massively enough as it settled it didn't fall down but it's very clever very effective engineering it's it's so impressive and as you highlighted when we kind of entered this space you're you can't help but just gasp and wow when you're there for the first time and you look up just see it and of course right at the top i have in my notes it's called the oculus now is this just is this almost nothing almost it is nothing it's just a whole you can see the sky through it i think sometimes at ascension tide the roman fire brigade go up there and scatter rose petals down on the,

because it's a church. The building is preserved because it's a functioning church. So there are worshipers down there and they now, like the Romans in antiquity, look up and see heaven. And this is part of the point. It also lets light into the building.

That's a practical point because it's too big to illuminate with little oil lamps, right? So you have to get light in there. But it also, there's something meaningful about it. Dio says it's like the heavens and you can see the sky through it the other nice thing it does it emits a shaft of sunlight and as you stand in the building you can see if you stand there long enough you can see the kind of sun trace a pattern on the inside of the dome as it moves through the

hours of the day and through the seasons of the year and people have had theories about working out where the sunlight falls on particular days and other like significant moments when it lines up with the porch and so on so it's quite a spectacular piece of engineering everything to do with the pantheon that you can see today is spectacular we've kind of gone from you know ground level right up to the top we've highlighted big things here probably statues in those niches the marble floor and then how the dome is structured we've kind of talked about the big things, but are there any really small architectural details that we might miss that you'd really like

to highlight that also really kind of emphasise the great detail and amazingness of this structure? So my favourite one that I show students when I take them to the building is you go into the porch and instead of going through the main door of the temple, you turn right and you go over to one of the pilasters on the back wall of the porch. Pilasters are like square flat columns that line the back wall. They line up with the main columns into the porch, and instead of going through the main door of the temple, you turn right, and you go over to one of the pilasters on the back wall of the porch. Pilasters are like square, flat columns that line the back wall. They line up with the main columns of the porch. If you look at those, on one of them, on the fluting, that is the kind of vertical grooves in the face of that pilaster, you can see a dot with a circle around it.

And that is a compass mark from one of the original Masons who would have dropped a plumb line down from the top and marked out where the plumb line crosses and then drawn a circle with his compasses and that sets the width of the fluting that he then carved out to make the kind of grooves of the plaster so that little mason's mark which normally would be polished out in the finish but this one was missed it's just a little hint about how the thing was built so that's tiny that's the size of you know a 50p i really like it and then you can go up in scale from that and start thinking about the relieving arches and the very elaborate staircases that wind up through the thickness of the wall and the so-called grottone or rooms at the back

that seem to be like a structural buttress and it just it's an amazing building you could study it for a whole lifetime there's no more there's no graffitis there from original workers like there is like inside the chamber of the great pyramid of giza them saying like I built this or I was involved in this any of that survive? Not that I know of probably somewhere in the building there would be

but not that I know of but there are I mean there are inscriptions like there's the original inscription on the front and another one underneath saying the Severan emperors kind of rebuilt this

because it had fallen down so there are some ancient messages on the building. Well come on then let's kind of look at the legacy before you mentioned

it ultimately turns into a church so we'll definitely get to that too but as I mean Hadrian's gone now and let's kind of look at the legacy before you mentioned it ultimately turns into a church, so we'll definitely get to that too. But as Hadrian's gone now and the centuries progress, but before Christianity becomes the dominant religion, do we know much about the Pantheon's story during that later time of imperial Rome? Roman buildings of all time. They didn't seem to notice it very much or talk about it. It's a bit sad. It survives like anything that survives in Rome

as a chance survival. It survives, as we said, by its conversion into a church. Loads of other stuff gets robbed out or demolished or falls down or burns down. So who knows whether it would have stood out in antiquity as much as it stands out to us. But I think it must always have been

a pretty remarkable building. No, we don't know much. Dio mentions it in a slightly confused way. He thinks Agrippa built it rather than Hadrian. So he doesn't give credit to the right builder. He doesn't quite know what it's for. Later authors don't mention it very much. So sorry to disappoint you,

but we don't have great accounts of how it was used or what people thought about it. How bizarre. But I guess maybe on the other hand, that's testament to how many of these massive monumental buildings there were in Rome at that time. It's just, oh, it's just another one kind of thing. Yeah, and also maybe to the slightly unusual nature of it.

We said at the beginning, we don't actually know quite what its function was, what its formal dedication was. It's this one-off, strange, kind of almost imperial cult building, but not quite, where the emperor is associated with the gods, but not among them. And it's slightly kind of liminal. we can imagine it's big enough that imperial ceremonies could well have been held there festivals things like that it just doesn't figure much in the later written record so associated with the roman gods so as you kind of hinted at it earlier but let's

explore this in detail when christianity does become the dominant religion of the roman empire from the fourth fifth centuries onwards what happens to the pantheon then? How does it endure? Well, it endures for a couple of reasons. One is it's absolutely massively built and it's intact. And this is going to be useful to the papacy and the Christian community at Rome. They have been underground for centuries and under Constantine they become a legitimate religion and then later they become the ruling religion of the Roman Empire. Christianity establishes itself as the ruling power by the 7th century when this building becomes a church. The popes are kind of in charge and the emperor

gives it to the pope as a gift in AD 609. So it survives by being massively well built and by being useful as a church because it's got a big interior volume so you can i mean the the christian church takes over essentially the basilica architectural form from the roman civic basilicas like law courts and banking halls but they're very useful to christians because you can turn them into cathedrals or use them as a model for cathedral churches the pantheon is a totally different design but it works well as a big church because it's got a big interior space and it's obviously a sacred building right it's got this link to the heavens and you can just take out the statues of gods and put in christ and mary and the martyrs and it works perfectly well so they're also fairly short of architects and builders in the 7th century a.d and they're not

going to look a gift horse in the mouth you know it's a very convertible building like the senate house in the roman forum survives because it was turned into a church almost anything that survives intact in rome was turned into a church uh That's how it didn't get pulled down for building materials or kind of sacked as a pagan temple. So it's preserved by conversion. And also one last question before we completely wrap up. I mean, the durability, it's not just kind of man-made changes like the coming of Christianity and so on. Natural disasters, earthquakes and stuff like that, I'm guessing Rome has had a few of those in its time over the last couple of millennia.

But the Pantheon stays upright during those too. It's a testament to its building. It's extremely well engineered and it doesn't fall down, despite being built on a floodplain in an earthquake-prone part of the world. Lots of other Roman buildings do, like half the Colosseum is missing because it fell away in an earthquake

and then was turned into a stone quarry. The Pantheon doesn't have enough cut stone in it to be useful for reuse it's a brick and concrete building as we said so you could strip out some of the decorations and people do they steal all the bronze off the roof urban the eighth steals all the bronze tiles out the porch in the 17th century so people kind of rob out the stuff they can chisel off the building but the basic structure remains completely intact and it's extremely well built the fact it hasn't fallen down is testament to its engineers absolutely what a great point to end it on i mean matthew is there anything else you'd quickly like to mention about the pantheon

that you absolutely love it's a wonderful building and i just think people should go and see it and take a moment it's very crowded because it's a popular spot on the tourist trail and and rightly so but if you can find a moment to go in there and just take a quiet moment and look up and just think about how long that building has been standing there it really is a special space it is a wonder of the ancient world and the world today matthew it just goes me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today my great pleasure well there you go there was professor matthew nichols talking all things the pantheon this architectural marvel of ancient rome wrapping up our wonders of the world mini series this march i hope you enjoyed today's episode and don't you worry matthew the fantastic speaker that he is he is going to be

back on the podcast in due course to talk through another great monument of ancient rome so stay tuned for that. Now, last thing from me, wherever you're listening to The Ancients, whether that be on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts or elsewhere, make sure that you are subscribed, that you are following the podcast so that you don't miss out

when we release new episodes twice every week. But that's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.