Quo Vadis. Henryk Sienkiewicz

Quo Vadis - Henryk Sienkiewicz


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href="#ulink_8e9e5d3a-7baf-5f32-97b6-70b4bc124f25">Chapter L

       Chapter LI

       Chapter LII

       Chapter LIII

       Chapter LIV

       Chapter LV

       Chapter LVI

       Chapter LVII

       Chapter LVIII

       Chapter LIX

       Chapter LX

       Chapter LXI

       Chapter LXII

       Chapter LXIII

       Chapter LXIV

       Chapter LXV

       Chapter LXVI

       Chapter LXVII

       Chapter LXVIII

       Chapter LXIX

       Chapter LXX

       Chapter LXXI

       Chapter LXXII

       VINICIUS to PETRONIUS

       Chapter LXXIII

       EPILOGUE

       Table of Contents

      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

       Table of Contents

       Table of Contents

       Table of Contents

      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 weather, and then about gems which the jeweller 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


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