Quo Vadis

Marcus Vinicius, a young Roman officer returning from service in Asia Minor, falls hard for Lygia, a hostage held in a Roman household as a symbol of a conquered barbarian people, and Sienkiewicz spends the novel's first stretch on Vinicius pursuing her with the confident cruelty of a man who assumes any woman he wants is simply his for the taking. Lygia turns out to belong to a persecuted, still mostly hidden sect, Christianity, and when Vinicius's crude pursuit of her fails, her fellow believers spirit her away into hiding, forcing him to search Nero's Rome for a woman who wants nothing more to do with him. Wounded and nursed back to health inside the very Christian community he had set out to raid, Vinicius begins to understand what he had dismissed as barbarian superstition, and his slow conversion runs alongside the novel's real turning point: Nero, blamed for the great fire that burns much of Rome, blames the Christians instead and sends them into the arena. Sienkiewicz stages that persecution at full scale, and Lygia is saved from death only when her enormous bodyguard Ursus defeats a charging aurochs bare handed in front of a crowd that turns on the emperor's cruelty at the sight of it. Vinicius and Lygia marry and leave Rome for Sicily as open Christians, while the novel closes with the deaths of Peter and Paul and, not long after, Nero's own downfall.

Sienkiewicz writes the spectacle of ancient Rome, its fires, its games, its casual violence, with total narrative confidence, and readers looking for a big historical adventure rather than a delicate character study tend to get the most out of it; the persecution scenes especially are built to be read quickly, with real dread behind them. It suits a reader who wants Roman history dramatized at full volume, with the small, quiet faith of the hunted Christians deliberately set against the empire's noise.