By Tracy Lee Simmons
Celebrated with enthusiasm and read to tatters by literature enthusiasts up until, say, 1960, Quo Vadis held a place of honor on the living room bookshelves, when living rooms still had bookshelves. Today, it is more likely to be found in second-hand bookstores than in the big corporate chains. In other words, the book currently remains comfortably out of sight, out of mind, and, of course, out of fashion; but perhaps precisely for that reason Quo Vadis makes a just and renewed claim today on the consideration of educated people—and those who would like to be. It is called to be recovered in an era of waning literacy and little faith.
The source of the book’s popularity for nearly seventy years, however, requires no explanation, especially if we recall the leisurely, readerly, tobacco-tinged elocution of the Victorian period from which it emerged, an era in which attention spans were longer and more reliably mature. It is a well-paced story—though not breakneck—centered on characters, set in the thick of a remote time, and blending, in equal parts, faith, history, and romance.
And during those early decades of the twentieth century, when people knew more about both faith and history than we do now, immersing oneself in this novel must have been akin to devouring a miniseries on streaming today. It is absorbing reading. But for many Christians, and for many Catholics in particular, familiarity with this book was also de rigueur. Not bad for a novel originally published in Polish.
Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846–1916) was born into a noble but impoverished Polish family, educated with the severity typical of the era, and, upon reaching adulthood and feeling the urge to write, embarked on a path in journalism and travel literature, with an eye for the picturesque and the politically dramatic, traveling across Europe and even to America to recount what he saw.
And although he later tried his hand as a newspaper editor, it was ultimately the art of fiction that attracted and channeled his greatest talents. Fiction was also what, over time, provided him with the financial security necessary to practice his craft and fulfill his vocation full-time. For that was the century of Dickens and serialized novels, when readers around the world eagerly awaited—biting their nails—the appearance of the next installment of epics in popular magazines and newspapers, turning the best novelists of the time into something like today’s celebrated filmmakers.
They told the stories that people talked about. It was a vibrant literary culture. As entertainers, novelists connected with the public’s taste, but as artists they also sought to shape that taste, amusing and enlightening that public through a skillful and expansive handling of words. Thus, one generation’s intelligent entertainment became the next’s respected literature.
Quo Vadis presents itself as one of Sienkiewicz’s mature works, originally published in installments. Written in Polish and published in full book form in 1896, it achieved immediate success and was translated profusely into dozens of languages as its fame grew. And grow it did, without a doubt. The novel gave rise to theatrical productions and, later, to several film and television adaptations, making the story familiar even to generations that never read the book. It is the author’s masterpiece. In recognition of his long and distinguished literary work aimed at a broad audience, Sienkiewicz received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1905.
Although this book is a work of fiction, not everything it contains is purely fictional. Sienkiewicz transports us to ancient Rome in the 60s A.D., to the days, weeks, and months of Emperor Nero’s reign. Rome was suffocated by degraded corruption, the Great Fire destroyed vast areas of the city, and a small sect originating in provincial Judea, with Jewish roots and called “Christians,” was slowly infiltrating the depraved capital of the world’s most powerful empire to bring a salvation from sin that most sophisticated Romans neither recognized nor could even imagine. It was the century in which the secular and the sacred met in the most spectacular way; Rome was a spiritual battlefield. It was no small task for a novelist.
The historical setting, however, posed an artistic problem. When this novel was written, the West was more firmly Christian, informed and strengthened by Christian assumptions and references; even the skeptical atheist easily grasped the biblical allusions. But Sienkiewicz faced the difficulty of making the Christian Church, overwhelmingly familiar and triumphant in his time, seem incredibly small and weak in its days of birth. To achieve this, he combined historically verifiable figures—Nero, Petronius, Seneca, Paul of Tarsus, the apostle Peter et alia—with fictional characters, such as Marcus Vinicius and his beloved Ligia, who parade together across the narrative stage. And the fictional characters, though somewhat idealized as types, drive the rhythm and capture the sympathy of good readers.
The historical novel is always a gamble, for the artifices of art can threaten to falsify the facts of the past and dull their edge. But Sienkiewicz did his reading and managed to revive that remote time and place with penetrating verisimilitude, without clogging the plot’s gears with superfluous details.
The characters are presented to us as real people who acquire a solidity that only the best history books know how to bestow. The narration reads with majesty even for the reader unfamiliar with ancient Roman history or that of the early Christians. But if the reader knows something of that era, the story rises from the page and resonates with echoes in the imagination.
We see the pagan world in all its maturity and overripe putrefaction, and some scenes can still shock with their brazenness and cruelty (though today we know that reality was often much worse). Even so, we see another light rising from the East and beginning to penetrate that darkness: a new faith in ferment, a faith that propels every character, real and fictional, in one direction or another, inexorably toward the end.
Quo vadis, Domine? Peter asks Christ on the road to Rome, according to legend. “Where are you going, Lord?” Where, indeed? But the question is immediately reflexive. For every character in the novel, the choice is essential, and the title’s question is the ultimate one on which everything else depends. It is a work of historical fiction, but also a work of devotional fiction.
The author’s treatment of historical figures is certainly debatable, but easily defensible. Sienkiewicz read deeply in the main Roman sources—Suetonius and Tacitus, above all—to create his fictional world. And the scenes and events he constructed, whether they happened exactly that way or not, remain plausible according to the historical record.
He takes the side, for example, of those who believe that Nero, that supreme model of villainy, intentionally started the Great Fire of 64 A.D. and then blamed the Christians, an act that justified mass persecution. Perhaps. Or perhaps not. What is beyond doubt is that the fire occurred, many died, much was destroyed, and the persecution and slaughter of Christians continued for many years afterward, until the early fourth century.
A possible drawback of this novel for the modern reader may be the archaic language— a decision by Sienkiewicz’s translators, not necessarily by Sienkiewicz himself—peppered with thees and thous, in which “Where are you going?” is translated as Whither thou goest?. Certainly, this practice may repel some readers, but it is a venerable biblical device for conveying reverence.
For we must not forget that, despite all its crimes and corruptions—and though here and there we see flashes of pagan charm—it was a world that aspired to the ceremonial in language, thought, and action. A distancing language can help modern readers imaginatively transport themselves to another time.
We see and experience here an era of sin and sacrifice, a world of depraved banquets, furtive assignations, political intrigues, and supreme acts of devotion and commitment, all against the backdrop of Roman sunsets, witty conversations, glasses of wine, and the tall silhouettes of pines and cypresses, all long lost, but made almost sacramentally present again by literary art.
It is a story that reminds us that the classical world was a populated one, beset by all the temptations and triumphs of human and superhuman nature, and that it still has much to say to us more than 700,000 sunsets later.
About the author
Tracy Lee Simmons is the author of Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin.