As it has become commonplace to assume that serious works of fiction cannot appeal to a wide readership, the enduring popularity of a novel with the general public can obscure its literary merits. Such has been the case with Quo Vadis, a work acclaimed by an early reviewer as “one of the great books of our day,” subsequently translated into dozens of languages, and still in print more than a century after its initial publication. Henryk Sienkiewicz’s deft handling of the central characters and focus on external action, coupled with his championing of traditional Christian values, have been both strengths and liabilities. While some have seen Henryk Sienkiewicz as a kind of prophet, revealing in his novel a way out of the moral morass that characterizes the modern era, others have dismissed Quo Vadis as propaganda that does little more than pander to popular sentiment by offering simplistic solutions to complex moral and social dilemmas.

To appreciate the literary merits of the novel, it may be helpful to understand the source of the novelist’s inspiration for the work. During the nineteenth century, there emerged throughout Europe and the United States an interest in the civilizations of Greece and Rome, and writers found in the annals of classical societies fertile material for a number of popular works. Readers throughout the Western Hemisphere were treated to historical tales such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), John Henry Newman’s Callista: A Sketch of the Third Century (1856), and Nicholas Wiseman’s Fabiola (1854) in England (translated into Polish and widely read in Sienkiewicz’s native land), and a number of Polish novels such as Józef Ignacy Kraszewski’s many historical works. Sienkiewicz found a parallel between the moral chaos of his time and the history of Rome. The success of novels set in classical Rome convinced Sienkiewicz that the time was right for him to employ the history of Rome as a means of making a commentary on his own age and on timeless issues of human values.

Like all serious historical novelists, Sienkiewicz chose his materials carefully, so that the period he depicts is one in which a momentous historical crisis is imminent. The Rome of Nero was particularly decadent, and that period’s growing popularity of Christianity as an antidote to the excesses of paganism is a matter of record. The novelist is careful to provide accurate historical details in his work, displaying his wide reading in the literature by classical figures and about life in ancient Rome. Like all good historical novelists, however, he is interested primarily in character and action rather than in setting. Quo Vadis is no mere period piece; rather, it is intended to demonstrate the conflict of values represented by the two great ideologies that dominated the Western world in the early centuries after the birth of Christ: Christianity and paganism as represented by the worship of the Romans, whose rule extended over much of what is now Europe and the Middle East.

Sienkiewicz reveals the conflict between these two opposing worldviews through a number of his central characters, both fictional and historical. The love story of Vinicius and Lygia provides the novelist an opportunity to dramatize the transforming power of Christianity, as readers see Vinicius move from lust for the attractive servant to a mature acceptance not only of his beloved but of her faith as well. The conflict of values is presented to readers most fully through the story of Petronius. This noble pagan is disgusted with the excesses he sees at Nero’s court, and he is ready to see changes take place in...