Two names, one letter apart
The words look alike because both are Greek. Parthenon comes from parthénos, a word that means "maiden, girl" as well as "virgin, unmarried woman," and was the title attached to Athena, whose gold-and-ivory statue stood inside. Pantheon comes from Pantheion, "[temple] of all the gods." So the names already tell you the core difference: one temple for one goddess, one temple for the whole divine household.
Everything else follows from that and from geography. The Parthenon is in Athens, Greece. The Pantheon is in Rome, Italy, roughly 1,050 kilometers away as the crow flies.
The Parthenon in its setting
The Parthenon was never meant to be seen alone. UNESCO, which inscribed the Acropolis of Athens on the World Heritage List in 1987, describes it as part of an ambitious building programme the Athenians carried out in the 5th century BC under Pericles, after their victory over the Persians. The same programme produced the Propylaia, the monumental gateway designed by Mnesikles, the small Temple of Athena Nike and the Erechtheion. UNESCO credits the Parthenon to the architects Iktinos and Kallikrates working with the sculptor Pheidias, and dates it 447 to 432 BC. The Pantheon began in a different kind of setting: Agrippa built the first one as part of a complex on his own property in the Campus Martius in 29 to 19 BC, alongside the Baths of Agrippa and the Basilica of Neptune.
A dated timeline of both buildings
Read the two columns together and the overlap is small: by the time Agrippa's first Pantheon went up under Augustus, the Parthenon was already more than four centuries old.
| Year | Parthenon (Athens) | Pantheon (Rome) |
|---|---|---|
| 480-479 BC | Persian forces destroy the Older Parthenon on the site | |
| 447 BC | Construction begins under Pericles | |
| 438 BC | Temple dedicated | |
| 432 BC | Sculptural decoration completed | |
| Reign of Augustus (27 BC-AD 14) | Marcus Agrippa builds the first Pantheon | |
| AD 80 | Agrippa's building destroyed in a fire; Domitian rebuilds it | |
| AD 110 | Burns again | |
| c. AD 126 | Hadrian's rebuilt rotunda, probably dedicated | |
| Final decade of the 6th century AD | Converted into a church of the Virgin Mary | |
| 13 May 609 | Consecrated as the church of St. Mary and the Martyrs | |
| Mid-15th century | Becomes a mosque after the Ottoman conquest | |
| 26 September 1687 | Venetian mortar round ignites the gunpowder stored inside | |
| 1800-1803 | Lord Elgin removes many surviving sculptures to England |
The Pantheon's date carries a known trap. Hadrian put Agrippa's original inscription, M. AGRIPPA L. F. COS. TERTIUM FECIT ("Marcus Agrippa, son of Lucius, made this when consul for the third time"), back on the new portico, so the facade names a builder who had been dead for well over a century. The construction date is uncertain for exactly this reason.
Side by side on design
| Parthenon | Pantheon | |
|---|---|---|
| Plan | Rectangular, colonnade on all four sides | Circular rotunda behind a rectangular porch |
| Footprint / scale | 69.5 by 30.9 m; 13.72 m high | Rotunda 43.3 m across and 43.3 m to the oculus |
| Main material | Pentelic marble | Roman concrete, with granite porch columns |
| Column order | Doric | Corinthian (eight in front, two groups of four behind) |
| Signature feature | Sculpted frieze, metopes and pediments | Coffered dome with an open oculus; the oculus ring is 9.1 m across |
| Dedicated to | Athena | All the gods |
| Roof today | None; wrecked by the 1687 explosion | Intact; still in use as a church |
The dome figure is the one most often garbled. Inside the Pantheon, the interior diameter and the height to the oculus are both 43.3 meters, so a sphere of that size would fit exactly within the rotunda. Nearly nineteen centuries on, the dome is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world. The concrete itself changes with height: travertine aggregate at the thickest point, then terracotta tiles, then light tufa and pumice near the top, where the dome's total weight of about 4,535 tonnes most needs lightening.
What it took to build each one
The Parthenon was a stone-by-stone job. HISTORY estimates that about 13,400 stones went into it, at a cost of roughly 470 silver talents, and that Pericles commissioned the architects Ictinus and Callicrates with Phidias overseeing the sculpture. The same article puts the vanished Athena Parthenos statue at about 12 meters (39 feet), made of wood covered in ivory and gold.
The Pantheon's builders worked in poured concrete, which is why its interior could be one uninterrupted circular space. The portico also preserves a construction puzzle: traces of a second pediment suggest the porch was meant to have taller columns, 50 Roman feet against the 40-foot shafts actually installed, and scholars still argue about why the design was scaled back.
What each building was used for
Neither was only a place of worship. The Parthenon also served for a time as the treasury of the Delian League, the alliance that later became the Athenian Empire. Some scholars have argued that it was not a temple in the conventional sense at all: a small shrine has been excavated inside, but the building apparently never hosted the official cult of Athena Polias, the city's patron, whose cult image was kept elsewhere on the Acropolis.
The Pantheon's afterlife has been architectural as much as religious. Filippo Brunelleschi was among the architects who studied it for ideas. In the 15th century its interior was decorated with paintings, of which the best known is an Annunciation by Melozzo da Forlì. The Parthenon's afterlife has been one of repair: since 1975, large-scale restoration projects have worked to stabilize what the 1687 explosion left standing.
Why one has a roof and the other doesn't
Both buildings became churches, and that is the main reason either survives at all. In 609 the Byzantine emperor Phocas gave the Pantheon to Pope Boniface IV, who consecrated it on 13 May of that year, and continuous use kept it in continuous repair. Since the Renaissance it has also been a burial place; the painter Raphael is buried there.
The Parthenon was a church for centuries too, then a mosque under Ottoman rule. During the Venetian siege of the Acropolis the Ottomans used it as a gunpowder magazine, and on 26 September 1687 a Venetian mortar round blew it up. Between 1800 and 1803 Lord Elgin removed many of the surviving sculptures to England, where they remain the subject of a long-running dispute.
If you came here from the gods' side of the question, our Athena profile covers the goddess the Parthenon was built for, and the twelve Olympians guide includes how the Parthenon frieze chose which gods to show. The Roman building's age question gets its own page in how old is the Pantheon.