Quo Vadis

Henryk Sienkiewicz

Résumé

Rome during the reign of Nero was a glorious place for the Emperor and his court; there were grand feasts, tournaments for poets, and exciting games and circuses filling the days and nights. The pageantry and pretentious displays of excess were sufficient to cloy the senses of participants as well as to offend the sensitive. Petronius, a generous and noble Roman, a man of the world much in favor at the court of Nero, is intrigued by a strange tale related by his nephew Marcus Vinitius of his encounter with a mysterious young woman called Ligia with whom Vinitius falls madly in love. Ligia, a captured King's daughter and a one-time hostage of Rome, is now a foster child of a noble Roman household. She's also a Christian. The setting of the narrative was prepared with utmost care. Sienkiewicz visited the Roman locations many times and thoroughly educated himself in the novel's historical background. As an attempt to create the spirit of antiquity, the novel met with unanimous acclaim, earning Sienkiewicz the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1905. As a vision of ancient Rome and early Christianity it remains unsurpassed more than a century later.