Sienkiewicz_-_Quo_Vadis.pdf

Quo Vadis

Sienkiewicz, Henryk

(Translator: Jeremiah Curtin)

Published: 1896

Type(s): Novels, Romance, Religion

Source: http://www.gutenberg.org

Cette oeuvre est disponible pour les pays où le droit d'auteur est de 70 ans après mort de

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TO AUGUSTE COMTE,

Of San Francisco, Cal.,

MY DEAR FRIEND AND CLASSMATE, I BEG TO DEDICATE THIS VOLUME.

JEREMIAH CURTIN

Introductory

IN the trilogy "With Fire and Sword," "The Deluge," and "Pan Michael," Sienkiewicz has

given pictures of a great and decisive epoch in modern history. The results of the struggle

begun under Bogdan Hmelnitski have been felt for more than two centuries, and they are

growing daily in importance. The Russia which rose out of that struggle has become a power

not only of European but of world-wide significance, and, to all human seeming, she is yet in

an early stage of her career.

In "Quo Vadis" the author gives us pictures of opening scenes in the conflict of moral ideas

with the Roman Empire, — a conflict from which Christianity issued as the leading force in

history.

The Slays are not so well known to Western Europe or to us as they are sure to be in the

near future; hence the trilogy, with all its popularity and merit, is not appreciated yet as it

will be.

The conflict described in "Quo Vadis" is of supreme interest to a vast number of persons

reading English; and this book will rouse, I think, more attention at first than anything

written by Sienkiewicz hitherto.

JEREMIAH CURTIN

ILOM, NORTHERN GUATEMALA,

June, 1896

Chapter 1

PETRONIUS woke only about midday, and as usual greatly wearied. The evening before

he had been at one of Nero's feasts, which was prolonged till late at night. For some time his

health had been failing. He said himself that he woke up benumbed, as it were, and without

power of collecting his thoughts. But the morning bath and careful kneading of the body by

trained slaves hastened gradually the course of his slothful blood, roused him, quickened

him, restored his strength, so that he issued from the elaeothesium, that is, the last division

of the bath, as if he had risen from the dead, with eyes gleaming from wit and gladness, re-

juvenated, filled with life, exquisite, so unapproachable that Otho himself could not compare

with him, and was really that which he had been called, — arbiter elegantiarum.

He visited the public baths rarely, only when some rhetor happened there who roused ad-

miration and who was spoken of in the city, or when in the ephebias there were combats of

exceptional interest. Moreover, he had in his own "insula" private baths which Celer, the

famous contemporary of Severus, had extended for him, reconstructed and arranged with

such uncommon taste that Nero himself acknowledged their excellence over those of the

Emperor, though the imperial baths were more extensive and finished with incomparably

greater luxury.

After that feast, at which he was bored by the jesting of Vatinius with Nero, Lucan, and

Seneca, he took part in a diatribe as to whether woman has a soul. Rising late, he used, as

was his custom, the baths. Two enormous balneatores laid him on a cypress table covered

with snow-white Egyptian byssus, and with hands dipped in perfumed olive oil began to rub

his shapely body; and he waited with closed eyes till the heat of the laconicum and the heat

of their hands passed through him and expelled weariness.

But after a certain time he spoke, and opened his eyes; he inquired about the weather,

and then about gems which the jeweller Idomeneus had promised to send him for examina-

tion that day. It appeared that the weather was beautiful, with a light breeze from the Al-

ban hills, and that the gems had not been brought. Petronius closed his eyes again, and had

given command to bear him to the tepidarium, when from behind the curtain the nomen-

clator looked in, announcing that young Marcus Vinicius, recently returned from Asia

Minor, had come to visit him.

Petronius ordered to admit the guest to the tepidarium, to which he was borne himself.

Vinicius was the son of his oldest sister, who years before had married Marcus Vinicius, a

man of consular dignity from the time of Tiberius. The young man was serving then under

Corbulo against the Parthians, and at the close of the war had returned to the city. Petroni-

us had for him a certain weakness bordering on attachment, for Marcus was beautiful and

athletic, a young man who knew how to preserve a certain aesthetic measure in his prof-

ligacy; this, Petronius prized above everything.

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