All Saints' Dag. NOVEMBER 1. Fall the magnificence of imperial Rome, the best preserved monument is that sublime and wonderful structure known of old as the Pantheon, and in Christian times as Santa Maria della Rotonda. The beauty of this building has been the amazement and delight of nearly nineteen centuries; and its name has long been reckoned synonymous with architectural perfection. It is unanimously conceded to be beyond criticism; and has been described, so far as we know, without cavil, as more than faultless." The characteristics of the Pantheon have been summed up in a line of Lord Byron's Childe Harold : "Simple, erect, severe, austere, sublime." It is one of the edifices, "complura et egregia," mentioned in the mass by Suetonius as having been conferred on Rome by the taste and magnificence of M. Agrippa, a distinguished friend and partisan of the Emperor Augustus, whose nephew and son-in-law he successively became by the last two of the three marriages, which, in the course of his life, he contracted. On the frieze of the Pantheon, the portico if not the whole of which is thereby still authentically referred to Agrippa, appears the inscription M. AGRIPPA L. F. Cos. TERTIUM FECIT. The third consulship of Agrippa, which is thus fixed as the era of the DEDICATION OF THE PANTHEON. 483 completion of the Pantheon, coincided with the year 27 before Christ. With the name of its founder, however, and the date of its dedication, the precise history of the very earliest objects of the Pantheon determines. The popular belief -which, to confine ourselves to home-bred authors, the venerable Bede adopted, which Bishop Andrewes approved, and which Lord Byron poetically endorsed-that the Pantheon was dedicated to all the gods of antiquity, celestial, terrestial, and infernal, is à priori shaken by the fact that the religious practice of the Romans demanded the devotion of a separate temple to a separate divinity. An argument of this kind, however, is not conclusive; for it would be absurd to deny the possibility of innovations: and there are some trusted historians who do not hesitate to say that the Pantheon " was dedicated to the gods connected with the Julian gens, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, J. Cæsar, and others." An alternative rationale of its ancient designation is given by Dion, who prefers to settle its name on a mingled base of etymology and symbolism-its dome represented the heavens, and the heavens were the residence of all the gods. But other accounts present us with a plentiful variety. One of these sets forth that the Pantheon was dedicated to Jupiter the Avenger, in compliment to Augustus upon his victory at Actium over Antony and Cleopatra; and a second, given by an anonymous writer in Montfaucon, is to the effect that "the Pantheon was vowed by Agrippa to Cybele and Neptune." If we may invest the last-named deity with the Homeric attributes of Oceanus, it will be seen that, according to this account, the popular belief is all but amply justified; for all the gods might be said to be worshipped, in effect, where their ancestors and representatives were enshrined. The asserted dedication to Cybele and Neptune is thus understood as an almost absolutely comprehensive one. But after all, our conclusion must be inconclusive and we must consent to add the dedication of the Pantheon to those countless subjects, so feelingly known to the seeker after historical accuracy, about which investigation vindicates itself as a process by which we successfully arrive at indecision. When Christianity first became the dominant religion of the Roman empire, the superstitious forces of Paganism were still vivacious and widely spread. It seemed, therefore, too hazardous that its temples should be consecrated to the rites of Christianity, lest the taint of heathen abominations should still linger about them. Destruction, rather than conversion, approved itself as the generally safer course. A series of emperors, beginning with Constantine, carried on, with less or more of vigour, the process of demolition both in the East and West. In the East, the destruction of the temples was well nigh completed by the Emperor Theodosius the younger, in the early part of the fifth century—a particular Rescript occurring in the Code called by his name, that the Pagan temples should be plucked down, as fit to be the dens of devils or unclean spirits. Honorius, the uncle of Theodosius, contented himself with closing the temples of the West, out of a feeling of respect for the former architectural magnificence of the empire. "As we forbid," ran a rescript of Honorius, "the sacrifices of the Gentiles so we will that the ornament of their public works be preserved." It was this æsthetic patriotism which saved, amongst others, the Pantheon, to undergo a subsequent conversion into a Christian church-an event which took place at a time when the purer religion was fondly supposed to have triumphed over the danger of idolatrous observances. In his ecclesiastical direction of the affairs of the Anglo-Saxons, Gregory the Great rather puzzlingly exemplified the practice at once of Theodosius and Honorius. In a letter, dated June 22nd, 601, to the recent convert, Ethelbert, King of Kent, he exhorts that prince CONVERSION OF HEATHEN TEMPLES. 485 to "suppress the worship of idols, and to overthrow the structures of the temples";* although in a letter, addressed five days before to the Abbat Mellitus-then on the eve of proceeding to England, and afterwards successively Bishop of London and Archbishop of Canterburyhe had instructed him "to tell the most reverend Bishop Augustine, that he had upon mature deliberation on the affairs of the English, determined that the temples of the idols in that nation ought not to be destroyed. But let the idols that are in them be destroyed; let holy water be made and sprinkled in the said temples, let altars be erected and relics placed. For if those temples are well built, it is requisite that they be converted from the worship of devils to the service of the true God; that the nation, seeing that their temples are not destroyed, may remove error from their hearts, and, knowing and adoring the true God, may the more familiarly resort to the places to which they have been accustomed."+ About the year 609, Boniface IV., the successor of Gregory, at two or three removes, in the bishopric of Rome, obtained from the Emperor Phocas a grant of the Pantheon for the purpose of consecrating it to the Christian rite. Bede's simple account of this conversion is to the effect that Boniface, "having purified the Pantheon from contamination, dedicated a church to the holy mother of God, and to all Christ's martyrs, to the end that, the devils being excluded, the blessed company of the saints might have therein a perpetual memorial." The sometime heathen temple-the structure of which was preserved unchanged-received at its consecration the designation of Santa Maria ad Martyres; and is now, as we have said already, popularly known as Our Lady of the Rotonda, or, more simply, as the Rotonda. Thus it was that, to the *Bede's Ecclesiastical History; Ditto lib. i. c. 32. lib. i. c. 30. lib. xi. c. 5. |