The public baths there located and such structures as the Theater of Pompey and the Flaminian Circus can, perhaps, be explained later; but a word must be spoken for the one great temple which is here situated away from the center of Rome. The _Pantheon_, dedicated to Mars, Venus, the deified Cæsar, and to all the other deities of the Julian line was the erection of Marcus Agrippa, the mighty coadjutor of Augustus. It has just been rebuilt from its very foundations by Hadrian.[145] Its noble dome shines with the golden tiles. The soaring rotunda inside is encircled with stately altars to the gods the building honors. Already one can stand and look upward 143 feet to that patch of blue 18 feet in diameter through which sun and stars will shine down across at least eighteen centuries of changing history--making the Pantheon the one great building, not a ruin, which shall link the Rome of the Cæsars with the Rome of another day. [Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE PANTHEON: restoration according to Von Falke.] =241. The Daily Gazette (_Acta Diurna_). How Rome Gets Its News.=--One thing, to avoid complexity, we omitted while crossing the old Forum Romanum. It behooves us to return and to explain it. Before a series of tall white boards set up against certain pillars is gathered an elbowing, gesticulating throng. Many of the company have tablets and seem copying vigorously. The crowd is always receiving additions, while others are departing. The white boards (“albums”) when we get near enough are seen to be covered with somewhat fine writing. There is a special rush and flutter in the crowd when a petty official sets up still another white board, and a hundred styli instantly become busy. It is easy to learn the excitement caused by these notices: they constitute the publication of the new _Acta Diurna_. Even without the Acta Diurna (“Daily Doings”) a city like Rome would have its supply of news. There are professional gad-abouts who make themselves desirable guests at dinner-parties merely because they are “very well informed.” They have picked up all the stories about the Parthian king, the new chiefs of the Germans, the number of legionaries mobilized on the Rhine, and the corn prospects in Africa and Egypt, as well as every kind of commercial information. Other wiseacres of a less reliable cast are known as “_subrostrani_,”--“Rostra-haunters,”--for at the Rostra all gossipers have their tryst. These people specialize in rumors of calamity, reports of great military disasters, of the sudden death of magistrates, etc., and take a peculiar glee in circulating vile stories about the Emperors--the danger of repeating such rumors only adding spice to their game. Usually, however, they are too insignificant fry for the government to consider worth prosecuting.