Quo Vadis

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 worldwide 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 Slavs 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.

I

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, 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 ephebiae 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 jeweler Idomeneus had promised to send him for examination that day. It appeared that the weather was beautiful, with a light breeze from the Alban 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 nomenclator 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. Petronius 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 profligacy; this, Petronius prized above everything.

“A greeting to Petronius,” said the young man, entering the tepidarium with a springy step. “May all the gods grant thee success, but especially Asclepius and Cypris, for under their double protection nothing evil can meet one.”

“I greet thee in Rome, and may thy rest be sweet after war,” replied Petronius, extending his hand from between the folds of soft karbas stuff in which he was wrapped. “What’s to be heard in Armenia; or since thou wert in Asia, didst thou not stumble into Bithynia?”

Petronius on a time had been proconsul in Bithynia, and, what is more, he had governed with energy and justice. This was a marvelous contrast in the character of a man noted for effeminacy and love of luxury; hence he was fond of mentioning those times, as they were a proof of what he had been, and of what he might have become had it pleased him.

“I happened to visit Heraclea,” answered Vinicius. “Corbulo sent me there with an order to assemble reinforcements.”

“Ah, Heraclea! I knew at Heraclea a certain maiden from Colchis, for whom I would have given all the divorced women of this city, not excluding Poppaea. But these are old stories. Tell me now, rather, what is to be heard from the Parthian boundary. It is true that they weary me every Vologeses of them, and Tiridates and Tigranes—those barbarians who, as young Arulenus insists, walk on all fours at home, and pretend to be human only when in our presence. But now people in Rome speak much of them, if only for the reason that it is dangerous to speak of aught else.”

“The war is going badly, and but for Corbulo might be turned to defeat.”

“Corbulo! by Bacchus! a real god of war, a genuine Mars, a great leader, at the same time quick-tempered, honest, and dull. I love him, even for this—that Nero is afraid of him.”

“Corbulo is not a dull man.”

“Perhaps thou art right, but for that matter it is all one. Dullness, as Pyrrho says, is in no way worse than wisdom, and differs from it in nothing.”

Vinicius began to talk of the war; but when Petronius closed his eyes again, the young man, seeing his uncle’s tired and somewhat emaciated face, changed the conversation, and inquired with a certain interest about his health.

Petronius opened his eyes again.

Health!—No. He did not feel well. He had not gone so far yet, it is true, as young Sissena, who had lost sensation to such a degree that when he was brought to the bath in the morning he inquired, “Am I sitting?” But he was not well. Vinicius had just committed him to the care of Asclepius and Cypris. But he, Petronius, did not believe in Asclepius. It was not known even whose son that Asclepius was, the son of Arsinoe or Koronis; and if the mother was doubtful, what was to be said of the father? Who, in that time, could be sure who his own father was?

Hereupon Petronius began to laugh; then he continued—“Two years ago, it is true, I sent to Epidaurus three dozen live blackbirds and a goblet of gold; but dost thou know why? I said to myself, ‘Whether this helps or not, it will do me no harm.’ Though people make offerings to the gods yet, I believe that all think as I do—all, with the exception, perhaps, of mule-drivers hired at the Porta Capena by travelers. Besides Asclepius, I have had dealings with sons of Asclepius. When I was troubled a little last year in the bladder, they performed an incubation for me. I saw that they were tricksters, but I said to myself: ‘What harm! The world stands on deceit, and life is an illusion. The soul is an illusion too. But one must have reason enough to distinguish pleasant from painful illusions.’ I shall give command to burn in my hypocaustum, cedarwood sprinkled with ambergris, for during life I prefer perfumes to stenches. As to Cypris, to whom thou hast also confided me, I have known her guardianship to the extent that I have twinges in my right foot. But as to the rest she is a good goddess! I suppose that thou wilt bear sooner or later white doves to her altar.”

“True,” answered Vinicius. “The arrows of the Parthians have not reached my body, but a dart of Amor has struck me—unexpectedly, a few stadia from a gate of this city.”

“By the white knees of the Graces! thou wilt tell me of this at a leisure hour.”

“I have come purposely to get thy advice,” answered Marcus.

But at that moment the epilatores came, and occupied themselves with Petronius. Marcus, throwing aside his tunic, entered a bath of tepid water, for Petronius invited him to a plunge bath.

“Ah, I have not even asked whether thy feeling is reciprocated,” said Petronius, looking at the youthful body of Marcus, which was as if cut out of marble. “Had Lysippos seen thee, thou wouldst be ornamenting now the gate leading to the Palatine, as a statue of Hercules in youth.”

The young man smiled with satisfaction, and began to sink in the bath, splashing warm water abundantly on the mosaic which represented Hera at the moment when she was imploring Sleep to lull Zeus to rest. Petronius looked at him with the satisfied eye of an artist.