Quo Vadis

Marcus Vinicius is a young Roman patrician, just home from the wars, when he falls violently in love with Lygia—a barbarian king's daughter raised in a Roman house and held as a hostage of the empire. He means to possess her as a Roman possesses a beautiful thing. He does not yet understand that she is a Christian, one of a secret, despised sect spreading through the slums and great houses of Nero's capital, and that her faith will refuse him on terms he has no way to comprehend.

Around that collision Sienkiewicz raises the whole glittering, monstrous machinery of imperial Rome: Nero himself, vain and gifted and murderous; the giant Ursus, Lygia's devoted protector; the cynical informer Chilo; and, presiding over the corruption of the court, Petronius—Vinicius's worldly uncle, the arbiter of taste, an exquisite skeptic who believes in nothing but beauty. Against their polished paganism stands the plain conviction of the Christians, among them the old apostle Peter, bewildered to find himself in the capital of the world.

Then Rome burns. In the great catastrophe of the year 64 the emperor sets fire to his own city for the sake of a spectacle—and, needing someone to blame, looses upon the Christians the persecution that fills the novel's closing pages with fire, beasts, and crosses. Through it all runs the question of the title, Quo vadis?—“Whither goest Thou?”—the words the fleeing Peter speaks to a figure on the Appian Way, and the question every life in the book must finally answer.

Sweeping, spectacular, and finally a story of conversion told through love rather than argument, Quo Vadis was translated into more than fifty languages, became a best-seller across Europe and America, helped win Sienkiewicz the 1905 Nobel Prize, and has been filmed again and again. This edition presents the complete public-domain English translation by Jeremiah Curtin.