The inscription assigns its completion to the year B.C. 27, the third consulship of Agrippa. For a long time the mistaken notion prevailed that the building was dedicated to Juppiter Ultor, a misapprehension arising from a corrupt reading in a passage of Pliny, where the words Jovis Ultoris had been inserted instead of diribitori. The original name, Pantheon, taken in connection with the numerous niches for statues of the gods in the interior, seems to contradict the idea that it was dedicated to any peculiar deity or class of deities. The seven principal niches may have been intended for the seven superior deities, and the eight ædiculæ for the next in dignity, while the twelve niches in the upper ring were occupied by the inferior inhabitants of Olympus. Dion hints at this explanation when he suggests that the name was taken from the resemblance of the dome to the vault of heaven.[94] Originally, to all appearance, the Pantheon was not intended for a temple, but for a part of Agrippa’s Thermæ. Its shape corresponds very closely with the description given by Vitruvius of the Laconicum or Sudatio attached to all Roman Thermæ. He recommends a dome-shaped building, with a round opening like that of the Pantheon at the crown, which can be opened or closed at pleasure, so as to lower or raise the temperature, by the removal or application of a lid (clypeum) moved by chains. And on an examination of the pronaos it will be found that the stones in its upper part, which abut on the central building, are not bonded into it, but are only placed against it, showing that the pronaos was an after-thought, and was not erected till the rotunda had been finished. Agrippa must have changed the design of the building after the completion of the dome, and, perhaps because he found it too vast for the purposes of a sudatio, or because he thought it too splendid a building to be employed for such a purpose, have determined to dedicate it to the gods of heathendom. The bronze gilt statuary, the work of Diogenes of Athens, with which the temple was decorated, was much admired by the Roman connoisseurs, and in particular the group upon the pediment and the Caryatides. The statue of Venus was adorned with the two divided halves of the famous pearl of Cleopatra, fellow to the one which Cleopatra is said to have dissolved in vinegar in order to win her wager that she could spend ten million sesterces in one dinner. In the fire of A.D. 80 the Pantheon suffered with the rest of the buildings in this part of the Campus Martius, but from the solidity of its construction the injury done was not great, and was repaired soon afterwards by Domitian. It was damaged by lightning in the reign of Trajan, but restored by Hadrian, who used it frequently as a court of justice.