The Classics Magpie E-Book

Jane Hood

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 278

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Who first thought of atoms? How much can you learn about archaeology from an oil lamp? Who came up with the theory of the 'wandering womb'? Oxford Classicist Jane Hood delves into the history, culture, literature, mythology and philosophy of ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt, using her expert eye to unearth unexpected gems, glittering fragments and quotable nuggets from a lost world. From ancient cosmetics to the earliest known computer, from the deciphering of ancient languages to the amazing things the Romans did with concrete, this is the essential miscellany for all curious minds, whether you learned the Classics at school or not.

Leseprobe

The

Classics Magpie

Also available from Icon Books

The Science Magpie

The Nature Magpie

The Antiques Magpie

The Kitchen Magpie

The

Classics Magpie

From chariot-racing hooligans to debauched dinner parties – a miscellany that shakes the dust off the ancient world

JANE HOOD

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For Bryn, Carys and Elen who are everything.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jane Hood has been a lecturer in Classical Languages and Literature, and in Philosophy, ending up as a fellow in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Oxford, specialising in Aristotle and Ancient Medicine. She has held research fellowships in Philosophy in Paris and in Ancient Medicine with the Wellcome Institute in London. She is also a qualified teacher who has taught people from the ages of four to 72. She likes nothing more than a few peaceful moments by the sea on the Gower in South Wales.

CONTENTS

Introduction

WHAT IT WAS LIKE …

Chariot racing and Roman hooligans

Cosmetics, skincare and how to be beautiful the ancient way

Londinium

The amazing things you can do with concrete

A secret message

How to eat like a Roman

Alexander the Great in India

What you can learn from an oil lamp

An ancient Greek computer

How to offend more or less everybody: the Emperor Elagabalus

ART AND LITERATURE: A SMORGASBORD

The problem with the parallel postulate

Hapax legomena: words used only once

That heifer lowing at the skies: the Elgin Marbles

Prometheus: the trickster, the hero, the literary model

Ancient one-liners

Sex strikes: not just for the Greeks

The Greek version

The modern versions

Trimalchio’s dinner party

Polycleitus: sculpture by numbers

MAGIC AND MEDICINE: IS ANY OF IT RATIONAL?

Spells ancient and modern

The hysterical woman and the wandering womb

The Hippocratic Oath

WHEN THINGS GO WRONG, OR AT LEAST GET TRICKY …

In the beginning was the Logos

The Ode to Man

More opposites

Two serious misunderstandings

The attack on the Druids on Anglesey

The Christians as superstitious cannibals

Roman saints

Interesting deaths

MODERN SCHOLARS, ANCIENT LANGUAGES

Academics at war

Liddell and Scott: a Greek lexicon

Grenfell and Hunt: finding classics in a rubbish dump

How to read a papyrus

The Villa dei Papyri

Vindolanda: Latin letters in the loo

The first public library

The Rosetta Stone: a battle for decipherment

Modern uses of Latin

Some useful Latin

Modern Latin abbreviations

HEAPS, TRIANGLES AND OTHER PHILOSOPHICAL QUANDARIES

Atoms and void

Lucretius on the ethical swerve

The Euthyphro dilemma

Plato’s spinning top, or ‘Have you stopped beating your wife yet?’

Desire vs. reason

Aristotle’s akrasia

The lost city of Atlantis and the importance of triangles

Good and bad actions

Friends: how many kinds are there?

The Heap Paradox

You take yourself wherever you go

All Cretans are liars

SEX, DRUGS AND ROCK AND ROLL

What is love?

Two poets

Catullus’ sparrow

Catullus’ two-liner

Ancient methods of contraception

The old six-string

Now for some answers …

Acknowledgements

Further reading

INTRODUCTION

This is a miscellany. There is no other justification for its content than that it includes the things that I find funny, terrible, entertaining or important. If there is a theme running through this book, it follows the point made by the historian Thucydides when examining the origins of the Peloponnesian War, the war that tore ancient Greece apart. He said that human nature, being what it is, will do the same and similar things again. That is why his history was said by him to be a ktema es aei – a possession for always – because we always make the same mistakes.

When we look at the ancient world, it is as though we are looking in an old mirror: the sort that is speckled with black as the sheen has worn off. The sort where the old glass has started to slip and ever so slightly distort the image that we see. We are looking at ourselves by looking at the ancient world: it is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. It is our culture and it is not.

This is a book that picks out the best and the worst of another world, and there are two aspects to the topics chosen. The first is that of the distorted mirror. The second is that of a continuum. There is a story that links us to the past. Each day that we trace it back leads us closer to a world that is no more. It is the reverse of the conundrum of the watchmaker’s watch or Theseus’ ship: you replace each part over time, but is it still the same watch? Is it still the same ship? Each day takes us further from that past, but is it still our past? Of course, it has to be; it is just a little more alien with each day.

The Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians and the people of the Near East, even 2,000 or more years ago, are our brothers and sisters who taught us how to be civilised. If we look at them straight on in the mirror, we can recognise the same problems, the same love affairs, the same wars and the same issues over property. But we also need to assimilate the distance that keeps us apart in order to learn the lessons of history, poetry and philosophy that remain constant.

We love as intensely as they did because we are, essentially, the same animals: the time that has passed is too short for us to be genetically significantly different. But the world operates in a dramatically different way now, and the pressures we face are, most of the time, not comparable. How many ancient Greeks were there complaining about overtime in the office? Or about mortgage rates? Near Eastern children’s toys were stuck together with the bitumen that bubbled naturally to the surface. Would you believe its first use would be as glue today, if oil started flowing in a park in Birmingham?

On the other hand, we have precisely the same struggles. Women (because the buck always stops there) cared very much about effective methods of contraception. Men cared about a night out and the flute girls. Has anything really changed?

There are also long-standing problems. The Greeks brought to us mathematical systems that are the basis of our understanding of the universe. Unfortunately, there is still not one complete version that works in all circumstances. There are atoms, the uncuttable fundamentals of the universe, devised by Democritus and Leucippus, but no one knows yet whether they are matter or waves. What does it mean to be ‘good’? Who really is my friend?

A lot of muttering tweed-wearing old schoolteachers gave Classics a very bad name because, I think, they made the subject incredibly dull, and that notion lives on today. No one, apart from a hardened military historian, really wants to read about precisely when Caesar dug a ditch or built a rampart.

I hope this book will make you think again about it all. Really, there was a world of lust, learning, fighting, food, joy and death that the ancients took part in. They really were a lot like us. They just didn’t have an iPhone. But they did have a computer …

WHAT IT WAS LIKE …

This section is rather a rag bag from the past. But then a lot of history is. It looks at some of the more outré aspects of the past and is intended to give a burst of flavour of the classical world. Like them or hate them: just enjoy.

Chariot racing and Roman hooligans

Roman chariot racing was a bit like a cross between top-flight football and Formula 1 racing. It was prestigious, it was fast, it could easily be deadly and it was exceptionally partisan.

Throughout the Roman period, there were four main chariot racing teams: the Reds and the Whites (the two original superstar teams) and the Blues and the Greens (who were the later superstars), which were associated with different areas of Rome. The Emperor Domitian (AD 51–96) added another two teams, but they were dropped on his death (as was almost everything to do with him, he was so hated). The teams were named after the colours they wore, so they could be spotted easily by their supporters. Rather like a team strip.

Chariot racing was also linked to legend. It is said that Romulus used racing just after he founded Rome to distract the Sabine men, the local tribe. They were so absorbed in the races, they did not notice that Romulus and his men had carried off the Sabine women and that they became the first Roman wives.

Racing took place on a long oval track, called a circus; usually it had ascending tiers of seats, the poor at the bottom in the sun, and the shaded rich above under a sun screen. The most famous is the circus maximus in Rome, which had a direct connection to the royal palace, so the emperor could walk there unmolested and escape, if necessary. The circus was more open at one end because there were a series of sprung traps, or gates, rather like the ones in modern horse racing, which were used to make sure each chariot (whether pulled by two, four or more horses) had a fair start when the emperor dropped the cloth marking the beginning of the race.

In the middle of the oblong racing track was a space called the spina. It separated the two sides of the track and became filled with ornate stone obelisks and columns. One of the tactics encouraged in a race was to try to get your opponents to smash into the spina. This could clearly be deadly, as the Romans had changed technique from the Greeks: the Greeks had held the reins in their hands, but the Romans tied them round their waists. When the Greeks crashed a chariot, they could let go, and so had some chance of surviving. The Romans, however, were often dragged along behind a chariot if it were still moving, until they died. To try to avoid this, they each carried a knife to cut the reins, but that assumed that you were in any state to do so. There were other pretty brutal techniques: you could have several chariots from your team in a race, and that meant you could gang up on the other teams and try to get them smashed into the spina.

The metae were at the far ends of the spinae: they were the large, gilded turning posts that demanded Formula 1 style cornering in order to get ahead. They were the place for horrific crashes. The Romans called the smashed chariots naufragiae: shipwrecks.

The races were, with this level of danger, necessarily short, seven or five laps only. That meant that there could be, on average, 24 races a day, and races could be held on 66 days of the year. Why so many race days? Well, one answer that almost always fits with the Romans is money. The more races you have, the more betting there can be. Another answer is that the poor had nothing to do by the time of the Empire. Beforehand, under the Republic, there had been much in terms of trade and the military for them to be absorbed into. By the time the Empire was in full swing, everything had become more professional, so the best you could do was to entertain them and so keep them quiet: panem et circenses (bread and circuses).

The charioteers themselves, the aurigae, could be hero-worshipped just like modern footballers or racing drivers. Interestingly, most were slaves, hoping to win enough prize money to buy their freedom. Of course, you had to live long enough to reach stardom, which was rare, though some cases have been documented. One was called Scorpus. He is said to have won over 2,000 races before a fatal crash when he was 27 years old. The most notable of all, however, was the illiterate Romano-Hispanic Gaius Appuleius Diocles. He won 1,462 races, over a quarter of all races he took part in. He is said to have retired at the very old age of 42 (in charioteer terms), with winnings totalling 35,863,120 Roman sesterces. That would have been enough money to provide grain for the entire city of Rome for a year. It has been calculated to be equivalent to approximately US$15 billion now. As Professor Peter Struck has rightly pointed out, that would make him the best-paid sportsman of all time.

Modern football is known for the often highly partisan nature of fans devoted to their teams. Likewise, extreme violence could erupt due to devotion to chariot teams, and the way the fans behaved has much in common with modern hooliganism.

Serious tensions between the Reds and the Whites were already established by AD 77, together with the extreme emotions that can go along with such rivalry. At that time, a funeral was held for a Red charioteer and one of his fans threw himself on his funeral pyre. There were clashes between different groups of supporters during the races and also at designated, pre-arranged places away from the stadium.

Nowadays sometimes footballers on the team you don’t favour have coins and small missiles thrown at them on the pitch. The Romans had a no-holds-barred take on spectator involvement, as there is evidence that the fans would throw lead curse charms that were studded with nails at a charioteer who was interfering with the progress of their favoured team.

The circus was the only time that the emperor showed himself to a mass gathering of the populace. This, clearly, led to political undertones in the dealings that the audience had with the emperor and also the chariot teams. It is recorded that the audience even used to shout out to the emperor about policies they didn’t like to try to dissuade him from them. Why would he care what the masses thought? Well, there could be trouble.

Chariot-focused violence reached its height in the Byzantine period in Constantinople (modern Istanbul), then the capital city of the Empire, in AD 532. This was because violent factions of fans had grown powerful and politically-focused in Byzantium under the Emperor Justinian I. This included supporting those who wanted either to oust or support the present emperor as well as taking sides on theological issues that were a hot topic. It had reached the point that the Imperial guards could not maintain order during the races without the help of the supporting factions.

But it all went horribly wrong. As a result of violent hooliganism after a chariot race, in AD 531 several fans of the Blues (Justinian’s own favoured team) and the Greens were arrested for murder and were due to be hanged. However, in 532, two escaped and sought sanctuary in a church.

Justinian was trying to broker peace with the Persians with whom he was in conflict at the time, so the last thing he needed was clear weakness at home. To try to calm it all down, he said there would be an extra chariot race and that the two could be imprisoned rather than killed. An angry crowd demanded that they were completely set free.

Unfortunately, geography was against Justinian as the Byzantine racetrack called the Hippodrome was next to the palace area. The cheers in the stadium suddenly changed from supporting teams to ‘Nika’, ‘Win!’ The mob grew angrier and angrier and finally attacked the palace and held it under siege for five days. The fires the mob started burnt down most of the city.

Justinian wanted to call it a day and flee, especially as some of the senators decided it was the perfect time to overthrow him and so stop the new taxes he proposed. His wife, Theodora, would have none of it, saying that royalty was the best burial shroud and she would never be alive and not called empress. So he stayed.

In the end, playing off the chariot-racing factions saved Justinian. The story goes that he sent a favourite eunuch into the Hippodrome, which was now the seat of rebellion, with a big bag of gold. He went to Justinian’s team, the Blues, and, basically, bought them off, while pointing out that the person they were looking to put in the emperor’s place supported their rivals, the Greens. While in the middle of crowning the new emperor, the Blues stormed out and the guards rushed in, killing the remaining rebels. About 30,000 are said to have died.

Anyone who says that devotion to sporting teams cannot inspire such deep devotion and deep hatred, clearly has not thought about the Nika riots.

Cosmetics, skincare and how to be beautiful the ancient way

For everyone out there slightly addicted to the three-step routine, think about how the ancients had to cope. Good make-up, hairstyling and skincare were the preserve of the wealthy: the ingredients were expensive, you needed to have time to spend on yourself and being beautiful had to be important (rather than your focus being merely on staying alive).

Another thing you might be addicted to is tanning – in the sun, on holiday or in a salon. If so, you are completely out of line with the ancients. They thought pale, fair skin was the height of beauty, along with blonde hair and blue eyes, which were very rare in the Mediterranean. Rather than cooking yourself on the Costas, pale skin meant that you were rich and could spend the heat of the day cloistered inside. You weren’t tanned because you weren’t toiling outside with poor people and slaves. You even had special slaves, cosmetae, who put make-up on for you, often in special rooms that men were not meant to enter.

To get even paler, women used to paint their faces with white lead. This was no more a good idea for skin than was the use of lead pipes in Roman water systems, but even though the Romans might have realised that lead was highly toxic and almost certainly lowered their life expectancy, they still used it. They also used chalk as a face powder: it would wear off very quickly, but at least didn’t kill you.

Skincare was an important part of routine, particularly for upper-class Roman women. Honey was used as a moisturiser and olive oil was used to make skin shine. The Romans are reported not to have liked wrinkles, freckles or blemishes of any kind, and facemasks were common. For instance, freckles were treated with the ashes of snails. Facemasks were made of more or less anything you could think of, and, just as today, there was a spectrum between extravagant claims and more researched, even medical, approaches to skincare. Ingredients included eggs, juice, seeds, placenta, excrement, crocodile dung and animal urine. You can imagine that there were many complaints about the smell.

Some other things don’t change. There was designer make-up. This often came from Egypt, Gaul (roughly, modern France) and Germany. They also led to the fakes that often smelt vile because of their cheap ingredients. Just like a knock-off Chanel handbag that you can buy in a dodgy market, there were copies of the best Roman make-up that never looked quite right either.

The most garish cosmetics were used by prostitutes to mark themselves out, although upper-class Romans did use colours too (as long as they stayed pale). Lenocinium could mean ‘make-up’ or ‘prostitute’. Lipstick was made as a paste often using red clays or iron oxide. Blusher could be made from chalk, rose petals, red lead and crocodile dung. Charcoal and olive oil were used as an eye shadow. Eyebrows were also darkened. Kohl was used a lot. You had to be careful, though: Pliny the Elder (AD 23–79, who died when Mount Vesuvius erupted and buried the city of Pompeii) claimed that a woman’s eyelashes fell out if she had too much sex. So you had to hang onto them to prove that you were chaste!

Freewomen in Greece had long hair, which they wore up with pins, combs and even scarves. Archaeologists have found hats with holes in them, which would allow women to keep their skin pale but expose their hair to the sun. Women also put vinegar on their hair so that it would be lighter (just like we used to use lemon juice at school). Hair was conditioned with olive oil. Only slave women had short hair.

As for any other bodily hair, the Romans didn’t like it, and there were pretty much the same options as today: you could pluck it out, shave it off or do the equivalent of waxing with a paste made from resin. One way of dealing with it that, thankfully, we don’t still employ is scraping it off with a pumice stone … Ouch.

Perfume was also an important part of ancient beauty. If you think how vile an ancient city could have smelt, you can see how important it was to smell sweet, especially as that was linked to being healthy. There was a large and important perfume market that also included making pretty perfume bottles, often out of beautifully blown glass.

Depending on which women’s magazines you read (if any, of course), you will appreciate that men have always had an uneasy relationship with women’s cosmetics. Some love it when a woman is made up to the nines, some claim they like the purely natural look. The same story can be seen in the ancient world: men found cosmetics, and the changes to the appearance that they can make, very difficult to deal with. The Christians were, generally, completely against them, as you should have the pure appearance that God gave you. Some accused women who wore make-up of being witches who aimed to deceive. The Roman satirist Juvenal said that a woman buys scents and lotions with the intention of adultery. The Stoic Seneca (p. 191) thought that the use of cosmetics was in line with the decline in Roman morality. The poet Ovid is the only one who writes in approval of cosmetics, but he did write the ars amatoria, The Art of Love (an early version of The Joy of Sex).

Men used treatments too, though it was generally frowned upon. It was a difficult game for them: if they did nothing to look after their appearance, they could be seen as rough and uncultured. Freedmen (ex-slaves) and criminals wore leather patches to cover up where they had been branded. But if men cared too much, for instance carrying a mirror around, then they were seen as effeminate. One of the chief offenders was the Emperor Elagabalus (p. 38). His cross-dressing ways eventually led to him being beheaded by his own imperial guard.

Londinium

London: the capital of Britain and one of the chief financial and cultural centres of the world. It started under its present name in the 1st century AD, not as the capital of Roman Britain – that was Colchester – covering only an area about the size of Hyde Park (about 1.4km2). This is when you could have made a killing in property …

From the start, Londinium was about trade and finance. The fiscally aware Emperor Claudius would never have crossed the troublesome Channel in AD 43 if he had not thought there was money to be made. It seems that London began somewhere near the present London Bridge. The remains of a pier have been found here, suggesting that this was the point at which the River Thames was deep enough for ships to pass, but narrow enough for a bridge to be built. There is no evidence of a military base near the pier. That makes it the product of venture capitalism. The archaeology of the cosmopolitan goods found backs this up: if you wanted ships in and out, you were buying and selling, with the potential for some fighting on top.

London has always been under attack. There is the famously brutal attack of the British tribe of the Iceni against London, led by the female warrior, Boudicca, also known as Boadicea. The historian Tacitus (c. AD 56–117) sets out what happened. The Roman general, Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, did not know whether to stand and fight or retreat. He had fewer troops than the enemy, so he sacrificed Londinium to save the province as a whole. He told the inhabitants he was leaving. Those who stayed because they were women, old or attached to the place were slaughtered by the Iceni. It was an almost-annihilation: London from this period is an archaeological level of red dust. That was in about AD 60. London had existed for only about ten years.

The Romans had their revenge. It is claimed that in return they slaughtered 70,000 Britons at the Battle of Watling Street, perhaps near modern King’s Cross. All we are told by Tacitus is that Suetonius found a place with narrow jaws and a forest behind it for his killing field.

Then London burnt down. In AD 122, about the time that the Emperor Hadrian visited London (the bronze head of his statue in the British Museum is a masterpiece), there was a great fire and London had to start again for the second time. There is evidence of villas, baths and public buildings. The population may have made it to about 60,000 at its height. Today, the population is over 8 million. And you wonder why it takes an hour to get anywhere.

It seems that the comparative scale of destruction was similar to that of the Great Fire of 1666. That one began when a maid forgot to put out the fires in one of the king’s bakeries in Pudding Lane. We don’t know the cause of the Roman fire. In 1665, the Great Plague in London wiped out a vast number of the population and caused King Charles I to flee the city. In a strange way, then, London was lucky. The fire pretty much finished the plague off in 1666, sweeping through the poorer areas that were full of rats covered in plague-infested fleas. Roman London doesn’t seem to have had things this way round. First it burnt down, then the plague came towards the end of the 2nd century AD. This was the Antonine Plague (named after the Antonine Emperors) that swept across Europe between AD 165 and 190. This provides a possible explanation for the dramatic slump in London’s population and physical size at this time.

Between AD 190 and 225, the Romans built a defensive wall around the city. In itself, defence is rarely a good idea in the ancient world: instead, being on the attack means that your borders are further away and the enemy is busy there, not taking over your city. This might also be a reason for the London slump. Not only are you sitting there, waiting for someone to attack you behind your wall, but a lack of the bang-crash-wallop of an expanding and exciting city is a massive dampener on trade and economic growth. One interesting point remains: the modern financial City is pretty much defined by the scope of the Roman wall, some of which can still be seen from the Museum of London.

Roman London seems not to have recovered properly from this crash. Archaeology has identified dark earth that remains undisturbed: that is not the sign of a flourishing population. The one thing that seems to have given a temporary boost to London in the 3rd century was when the Romans, under the Emperor Septimius Severus, decided really to fight again, this time against Caledonia: Scotland. Hadrian’s Wall (begun AD 122) was the defensive line that marked the Scots out as having their own way. By absorbing lands beyond that, London’s favourite thing could happen again: an expansion in trade.

Of course, what always seems to screw up prosperity is politics. After this time, London had periods when it flourished, but also periods of political infighting, usurpers and invaders. What was it that did for Roman London in the end? A lack of trade and money.

The amazing things you can do with concrete

It is the C-word. Concrete. The horrid grey stuff that seems to be poured constantly over city centres and the countryside in order to boost the economy or create affordable housing. It is often seen as a cheap and nasty way to build something that could have been done in a much nicer way.

In fact, concrete is amazing stuff. Vitruvius, a Roman architect, wrote about it at length, discussing the various types that were used for different projects. The Romans invented it, and it changed the way we build things forever.

Concrete was sometimes used in building Roman roads. I know hardly anyone who got through school without having to draw a cross-section of a Roman road. I know I had to several times, and it never got any more interesting, as it was a copying exercise, not an investigation. It is the sort of thing that can give Classics a bad name.

Roman roads are actually quite interesting too. One theory suggests that they are the reason that Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire: you could travel long distances safely, and so spread your message very easily. They explain how the army could travel fast, for instance to put down rebellions. As Bill Clinton rightly put it, the answer to more or less everything is ‘the economy, stupid’. Roads brought trade and money.

That is just one use of concrete. Another masterly one was in arches. The Egyptians, Persians and Babylonians, for instance, had used arches as support structures underground. So, the Romans didn’t invent the arch, and it was probably the Etruscans who first brought them above ground. But the Romans certainly made them their own.

Arches are amazingly strong. A curved arch shows only half the stresses that you would find if you used two uprights and a horizontal lintel. The shape of the arch causes its weight to ‘compress’ it, rather than bend it, as it transfers the thrust force acting on it to the columns or piers supporting it. This means that an arch is always in the incredibly strong structural state of compression. The hidden trick is to keep the path of thrust within the arch to avoid bending and to have supports capable of resisting the horizontal component of the thrust force.

Arches were built of concrete alone or stone with a concrete core for added strength. Building a concrete arch began with precise carpentry to create a wooden template that was supported by wooden scaffolding. The template had to be exactly the correct shape, as it served as the shuttering (or ‘formwork’) for the concrete that was poured into it; and it had to be strong enough to hold the concrete until it set. A timber construction was also used as the working frame for stone arches, made from tapered stone blocks, with the crucial keystone in the centre that locked the arch in place.

Of course, one arch can be an impressive thing, and the Romans realised this when they built Triumphal arches to celebrate victories, such as the Arch of Constantine in Rome (The Arc de Triomphe in Paris is a 19th-century arch, modelled on Roman designs). However, if you put arches side by side, you can create different structures altogether, such as arcades. And if you put them on top of one another, then you can span deep valleys, as with viaducts and aqueducts (and these needed precise engineering so that the water would flow).

But it doesn’t end there. Imagine taking a round arch and spinning it on its vertical axis. You get a rotunda, or a dome. That is exactly what the Romans did when they built the dome of the Pantheon in Rome, the Temple to All the Gods. The dome is also built of concrete.

The Pantheon in Rome is the largest intact ancient Roman building remaining. The one we have is the second version – brick stamps reveal that this one was built by the Emperor Hadrian between AD 118 and 125 (think how quick that is) – as the first one burnt down in AD 80. But it has the dedication of the first by Marcus Agrippa, the friend of the Emperor Augustus:

M. AGRIPPA.L.F.COSTERTIUM.FECIT

Marcus Agrippa son of Lucius, having been consul three times, made it

The Pantheon has been in use as a temple, and then a Christian church, ever since it was built.

When the Romans built the Pantheon, what they made was a celebration of their engineering knowledge of arches and the subtle use of different grades of concrete.