Quo Vadis

Quo Vadis, by Henryk
Sienkiewicz

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Title: Quo Vadis A Narrative of the Time of Nero
Author: Henryk Sienkiewicz
Release Date: October, 2001 [EBook #2853] [This file was updated on

November 23, 2003]
Edition: 11
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, QUO
VADIS ***

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QUO VADIS
A Narrative of the Time of Nero
by Henryk Sienkiewicz
Translated from the Polish by Jeremiah Curtin
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
QUO VADIS

Quo Vadis A Narrative of the Time of Nero
by Henryk Sienkiewicz
Translated from the Polish by Jeremiah Cuurtin
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 elæothesium, that is, the last division of the bath,
as if he had risen from the dead, with eyes gleaming from wit and
gladness, rejuvenated, 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 admiration 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