The Novel of Neronian Rome and its Multimedial Transformations: Sienkiewicz's Quo vadis (Classical Presences) 9780198867531, 0198867530

Table of contents :
Cover
The Novel of Neronian Rome and its Multimedial Transformations: Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis
Copyright
Funding Acknowledgement
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Notes on Contributors
Chapter 1: Introduction
Classical Reception, Nationalisms, and the Historical Novel
Quo vadis: the Novel of Neronian Rome in Late Nineteenth-century Poland
Quo vadis: Multimedial Transformations in the Twentieth Century
Classical Reception and Popular Culture
Part I: Literary Context
Chapter 2: The Paradoxes of Quo vadis: the Polish Classical Tradition in Action
Latin in Polish
Nero’s Rome in the Late Nineteenth Century
Chapter 3: Sienkiewicz and the Topography of Ancient Rome: the Riddle of Ostrianum in Quo vadis
Chapter 4: Costumes in Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis and their Literary and Painterly Sources
Collective Costuming
Protagonists’ Attire
Imperial Costumes
Drawing Inspiration from Paintings
Latin Terminology
Chapter 5: Quo vadis and Ancient Rome in the United States, 1896–1905
Petronius
Nero’s Reign
Sensationalism, the Christians, and Gibbon
Chapter 6: Comparing the Reception of Quo vadis and Ben-Hur in the United States, 1896–1913
Part II: Quo Vadis up to the Second World War
Chapter 7: Quo vadis on the Stage
Chapter 8: Dangerous Liaisons: Quo vadis? (1913, dir. Enrico Guazzoni) and the Previous Theatrical Adaptations of Sienkiewicz’s Novel
Cinema as a Constructor of Worlds
Selective Transmediality
Tableau-illustration: the Adaptations by Silvano D’Arborio and Émile Moreau
Densification: Quo Vadis? by Henri Cain and Jean Nouguès
Conclusion
Chapter 9: Word and Image: Competitive Adaptation in the Feature Film Quo vadis? (1913)
Cinema as Adaptation
The Mission of Cinema
The Politics of Cinema
The Art of Cinema
The Commerce of Cinema
The Victory of the Image
Chapter 10: Illustrating Quo vadis in Italy (1900–1925): between Cultivated Tradition and Popular Culture
The Paratexts and their Context
Same Choices, Different Meanings
One Scene, Several Strategies
Conclusion
Chapter 11: Horror amid Sweetness: Kitsch and the Intertextual Strategies of Quo vadis Postcards
Part III: Quo Vadis After the Second World War
Chapter 12: ‘A more permanent world’: Quo vadis (1951), Runaway Production, and the Internationalization of Hollywood
Before the Epic
Romans on the Run
Shooting in Rome
Legacy
Chapter 13: MGM’s Quo vadis: from Historical Fiction to Screen Spectacle
Nero: Qualis artifex!
Lygia: Spectacle
God: Quo vadis, Domine?
4. Return of The Big One
Chapter 14: ‘O omnivorous powers, hail!: ’Film Dialogue in Quo vadis (1951)
Dialogue in Historical Films
Hollywood on the Tiber: Quo Vadis, AD 1951
Third Cousin Once Removed: the Italian TV Series Quo vadis? (1985)
An (Un)happy Return: the Polish Quo vadis (2001)
Chapter 15: Ursus as a Serial Figure
Adapting Quo vadis for the Screen
From Ursus to Maciste & Co.
Ursus as Maciste, and Vice Versa
Chapter 16: The (In)discreet Charm of the Romans: Quo vadis (dir. Jerzy Kawalerowicz, 2001)
The Novels of Sienkiewicz, Polish ‘Heritage Cinema’ and Vernacular Colonial Fantasy
Sienkiewicz’s Novel: an Allegory of the National Past and Present
Lygia: a Pious Object of (Barbarian) Desire
Petronius: Bogusław Linda and Polish Masculine Fantasies
Faithful Slaves: Eunice and Ursus
All (Polish) Roads Lead to Rome
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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C L A S SIC A L P R E SE N C E S General Editors lorna hardwick  james i. porter

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CLASSICAL PRESENCES Attempts to receive the texts, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome inevitably run the risk of appropriating the past in order to authenticate the present. Exploring the ways in which the classical past has been mapped over the centuries allows us to trace the avowal and disavowal of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.

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The Novel of Neronian Rome and its Multimedial Transformations Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis Edited by

M O N I KA WO Ź N IA K A N D M A R IA W Y K E

1

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2020 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2020 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020937406 ISBN 978–0–19–886753–1 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198867531.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Funding Acknowledgement The costs of publication have been generously supported by the Faculty of Letters of the University of Wrocław from a research grant awarded by Poland’s National Programme for Advances in the Humanities (NPRH, research grant no. 0136/NPRH4/H2b/83/2016).

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Contents List of Illustrations List of Tables Notes on Contributors

1 . Introduction Monika Woźniak and Maria Wyke

ix xi xiii

1

PA RT I   L I T E R A RY C O N T E X T 2. The Paradoxes of Quo vadis: the Polish Classical Tradition in Action Jerzy Axer

29

3. Sienkiewicz and the Topography of Ancient Rome: the Riddle of Ostrianum in Quo vadis39 Adam Ziółkowski 4. Costumes in Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis and their Literary and Painterly Sources Ewa Skwara 5 . Quo vadis and Ancient Rome in the United States, 1896–1905 Ruth Scodel 6. Comparing the Reception of Quo vadis and Ben-Hur in the United States, 1896–1913 Jon Solomon

55 73

87

PA RT I I   QU O VA DI S U P T O T H E SE C O N D WO R L D WA R 7. Quo vadis on the Stage David Mayer

107

8 . Dangerous Liaisons: Quo vadis? (1913, dir. Enrico Guazzoni) and the Previous Theatrical Adaptations of Sienkiewicz’s Novel 123 Stella Dagna

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viii Contents

9. Word and Image: Competitive Adaptation in the Feature Film Quo vadis? (1913) Maria Wyke

143

1 0. Illustrating Quo vadis in Italy (1900–1925): between Cultivated Tradition and Popular Culture Raffaele De Berti and Elisabetta Gagetti

165

11. Horror amid Sweetness: Kitsch and the Intertextual Strategies of Quo vadis Postcards Ewa Górecka

193

PA RT I I I   QU O VA DI S A F T E R T H E SE C O N D WO R L D WA R 12. ‘A more permanent world’: Quo Vadis (1951), Runaway Production, and the Internationalization of Hollywood Jonathan Stubbs 1 3. MGM’s Quo Vadis: from Historical Fiction to Screen Spectacle Martin M. Winkler 14. ‘O omnivorous powers, hail!’: Film Dialogue in Quo Vadis (1951) Monika Woźniak 15. Ursus as a Serial Figure Monica Dall’Asta and Alessandro Faccioli

211 227

245 263

16. The (In)discreet Charm of the Romans: Quo vadis (dir. Jerzy Kawalerowicz, 2001) Elżbieta Ostrowska

281

Bibliography Index

301 321

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List of Illustrations 3.1. St Peter’s locations in Rome, according to the novel Quo vadis 44 3.2. Vinicius’s route to Ostrianum

48

4.1. Nero’s Torches (1876), Henryk Siemiradzki

67

4.2. Christian Dirce (1897), Henryk Siemiradzki

68

7.1. Poster for Wilson Barrett’s production of Quo vadis in 1900

115

7.2. Ursus and Vinicius display the unconscious Lygia below the emperor’s box

121

7.3. Accident at the Stade Vélodrome Buffalo in Paris, 1926

122

8.1. Christ appears to Peter on the Appian Way; illustrated postcard no. 12

130

8.2. Last scene of ‘The testament of Petronius’ in the adaptation by Émile Moreau 133 8.3. Spectacular tableau of the arena scene in a poster by Robert Boullier

135

8.4. Reaction of the audience to the death of Chilon at the premiere of the Nouguès opera

137

8.5. ‘The Palatine Terrace’, photograph of the setting of Quo vadis? staged in 1920

139

9.1. Petronius writing at his desk; screenshot from Quo vadis? (1913)

146

9.2. Christ frees the faithful from their chains; screenshot from Quo vadis? (1913)

151

10.1. Masthead of the weekly newspaper Quo Vadis?, published by Nerbini

169

10.2. Postcard depicting a scene from a staging of Quo vadis written by Silvano D’Arborio

172

10.3. Subject selection and variation: (a) Vinicius at Petronius’s; (b) Vinicius at Petronius’s; (c) last image in the Cines brochure (1912); (d) In Sicily

175

10.4. Eunice’s kiss: (a) by Giuseppe Rossi; (b) by Piotr Stachiewicz; (c) by Jan Styka

188

10.5. Eunice’s kiss: (a) by Domenico Mastroianni; (b) by Fabio Fabbi

188

10.6. Eunice’s kiss: (a) from Quo vadis? (1913); (b) from Quo vadis? (1924)

190

11.1. Detail from The Martyrdom of Christians in Nero’s Circus (1899) by Jan Styka

197

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x  List of Illustrations 11.2. Postcard displaying a design of Nero parading before the burning Christians198 11.3. Nero gazes upon the crucified Crispus; postcard design by Garibaldi Giuseppe Bruno

199

11.4. Rendition of female martyrs as nudes; postcard design by Otto Peter

202

11.5. Female martyrdom as kitsch in postcard design by Henri Courcelles-Dumont 205 11.6. The death of Nero; postcard design by Domenico Mastroianni

207

12.1. Advertisement in the Motion Picture Daily, 31 October 1950

222

13.1. MGM poster for Quo Vadis 228 13.2. Peter Ustinov as Nero the artist

229

13.3. Bodybuilder Buddy Baer as Ursus, with Lygia in the background

239

13.4. The divine epiphany in Quo Vadis 242 14.1. Marcus Vinicius demands an audience at Nero’s palace

252

15.1. Ursus fights the bull; screenshot from Ursus (1961)

276

16.1. Extreme close-up shot from the first scene of Kawalerowicz’s Quo vadis (2001)

282

16.2. Sexualisation of the female body, in Kawalerowicz’s Quo vadis (2001)

282

16.3. Athlete Rafał Kubacki as Ursus, in Kawalerowicz’s Quo vadis (2001)

294

16.4. Ursus as a small figure in the arena, in Kawalerowicz’s Quo vadis (2001)

295

16.5. Opening shot of the contemporary Colosseum, in Kawalerowicz’s Quo vadis (2001)

297

16.6. Apostle Peter looks at Rome in the closing shot of Kawalerowicz’s Quo vadis (2001)

298

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List of Tables 10.1. Subjects of the thirty-postcard series and eighteen-postcard series by D. Mastroianni

180

14.1. Examples of forms of address in Quo Vadis (1951)

251

14.2. Examples of St Peter’s utterances in Quo Vadis (1951)

253

14.3. Examples of St Paul’s utterances in Quo Vadis (1951)

254

14.4. Poetry and pseudo-poetry in Quo Vadis (1951)

254

14.5. Comparison between lines uttered by Petronius in Curtin’s translation of the novel and LeRoy’s film

256

14.6. Nero’s monologue in Curtin’s translation of the novel and the Hollywood film

258

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Notes on Contributors Jerzy Axer is Professor ordinarius since 1986 at the University of Warsaw; founder of the Centre for Studies on the Classical Tradition in Poland and East-Central Europe (OBTA, University of Warsaw, 1992); Dean of the Faculty ‘Artes Liberales’ (2012–16); and Director of the Collegium Artes Liberales (2016 onwards). His academic interests include Latin studies (rhetoric and Ciceronian studies); Neo-Latin studies (particularly epistolography and historical sources); History of diplomacy; Textology (esp. of historical sources of artistic value); Theatrical studies; Classical Tradition (in Polish and European culture of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries). He is editor or ­co-editor of many collections about Sienkiewicz, most significantly the book devoted to Quo vadis: Z Rzymu do Rzymu (Quo vadis: From Rome to Rome, coll. M. Bokszczanin, 2002). He is also co-editor of the international series Sienkiewicz–nowe odczytania (Sienkiewicz: New Readings, 5 volumes, 2007–17). Stella Dagna  has worked at the Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino (Italy) since 2005, where she specializes in film restoration and development of the museum’s collection of silent films. Her research interests are concentrated on the subjects of film res­tor­ ation, digital transition, and analysis of formal structures in Italian silent film. She has published many essays and articles on her research themes and she is the author of Perché restaurare i film? (ETS, 2014) and Ma l’amor mio non muore! (Mimesis, 2014). Monica Dall’Asta is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Bologna. She has written widely on Italian silent cinema, the histories of film theories, and film seriality. She is the author of Trame spezzate. Archeologia del film seriale (2009). She collaborates with Jane Gaines and Radha Vatsal in the Women Film Pioneers Project (https://wfpp.cdrs.columbia.edu). Raffaele De Berti is Associate Professor at the Università Statale degli Studi di Milano. His research focuses on the history of Italian film from the beginning of the twentieth century until the 1960s, with particular attention to film criticism and the study of film’s paratexts in the broad meaning of the term (photonovels, posters, feature articles on film, illustrated magazines), to interventions on cinema made by intellectuals, and discussion of cinema rubrics in journals of literature and other arts. Furthermore, his research has covered the relationships between cinema, pho­tog­raphy, and other media, from the 1920s to the 1950s in Italy and Europe. Besides numerous articles, he has published the monographs Il volo del cinema. Miti moderni nell’Italia fascista (Mimesis, 2012) and Dallo schermo alla carta (Vita e Pensiero, 2000); and co-edited, with Elisabetta Gagetti and Fabrizio Slavazzi, Fellini-Satyricon e l’immaginario dell’antico (Cisalpino, 2009).

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xiv  Notes on Contributors Alessandro Faccioli is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Cultural Heritage of the University of Padua, where he teaches Film History. His research interests include the representation of war in fiction and non-fiction cinema; home movies, amateur cinema, and found footage; and Italian cinema between the two world wars. Elisabetta Gagetti taught Classical Archaeology at Masaryk University (Brno) and at Trnava University from 2005 to 2014. At present, she works as an independent researcher, based at the Università degli Studi di Milano. Her main research field is Hellenistic to early medieval glyptic and its reuse on liturgical objects; and, especially, ancient glyptic in the round (microsculpture). She has published a number of papers on other luxury arts (jewellery, silver plate, and silk textiles as iconographic media). She has also produced a number of studies on the image of antiquity in cinema (mostly in Italian silent films, and Fellini-Satyricon). Ewa Górecka  is an Associate Professor in the Institute of Polish Philology and Cultural Studies of the Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz. Her research focuses on the creation of space in literature, art criticism, and aesthetics. She is the author of monographs entitled Zachować piękno. Kreacja przestrzeni dekadenta w powieściach Henryka Sienkiewicza (To Preserve Beauty. The Creation of Decadent Space in Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Novels, Toruń, 2008), Spotkania. Szkice o człowieku i świecie jego doznań w polskiej literaturze współczesnej (Meetings. Essays about the World of Human Feelings in Contemporary Polish Prose, co-authored with Anna Stempka, Bydgoszcz, 2011), Konstantego Ildefonsa Gałczyńskiego gry barwą z wyobraźnią i kulturą (Konstanty Ildefons Galczynski’s Play of Colour in the Imagination and Culture, Bydgoszcz, 2011), as well as research papers devoted to visions of space in nineteenthcentury prose and contemporary poetry. David Mayer, Emeritus Professor of Drama, University of Manchester, studies British and American popular entertainment of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Recent writings explore links between the Victorian stage and early motion pictures. He is co-founder of The Victorian and Edwardian Stage on Film Project, and a contributing member to The [D.W.] Griffith Project. Books include Harlequin in His Element (1968), Henry Irving and ‘The Bells’ (1980), Four Bars of ‘Agit’: Music for Victorian and Edwardian Melodrama (1983), Playing Out the Empire: Ben-Hur and other Toga-Plays and Films (1994), Stagestruck Filmmaker: D.W.  Griffith and the American Theatre (2009), and Bandits! or The Collapsing Bridge: an Early Film and a Late-Victorian Stage (2015). Elżbieta Ostrowska teaches film at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her publications include Women in Polish Cinema, co-authored with Ewa Mazierska (Berghahn Books, 2006), The Cinema of Roman Polanski: Dark Spaces of the World, co-edited with John Orr (Wallflower, 2006), and The Cinema of Andrzej Wajda: The Art of Irony and Defiance, co-edited with John Orr (Wallflower, 2003). Ruth Scodel,  educated at UC Berkeley and Harvard, is D.  R.  Shackleton Bailey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Latin emerita at the University of Michigan. Her

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Notes on Contributors  xv books include Credible Impossibilities: Conventions and Strategies of Verisimilitude in Homer and Greek Tragedy (1999), Listening to Homer (2002), Epic Facework: Selfpresentation and Social Interaction in Homer (2008), Whither Quo Vadis? Sienkiewicz’s Novel in Film and Television (with Anja Bettenworth, 2009), and An Introduction to Greek Tragedy (2010). Ewa Skwara is Professor at the Institute of Classical Philology at the Adam-Mickiewicz University, Poznań. Her field of research includes Roman Comedy and Roman Theatre. She is the author of monographs devoted to the influence of Plautus and Terence on Polish comedy of the Enlightenment (1996), on the history of Roman Comedy (2001), and on Terence (2016). She has translated a selection of Plautus’s comedies and all the plays of Terence into Polish. She produced the first unabridged Polish translation of Ovid’s Ars amatoria (2008, 2016) and the first Polish translation of the humanist comedy Chrysis by Piccolomini. She has also written extensively on translation theory as well as the reception of antiquity in literature, opera, and film. Jon Solomon is Robert D. Novak Professor of Western Civilization and Culture and Professor of the Classics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is also a member of the faculty of Media & Cinema Studies and the Medieval Studies Program. He has published twelve books and five dozen scholarly articles and chapters on classical reception in cinema, opera, mythology, and ancient Greek music. His most recent books are Ben-Hur: The Original Blockbuster (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and Giovanni Boccaccio: Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, Volume II (I Tatti series, Harvard University Press, 2016). Jonathan Stubbs is a Professor in the Faculty of Communication at Cyprus International University. His research focuses on the representation of history in film, the cultural and economic relations between the American and British film industries, and the role of media in the British Empire. He is the author of Historical Film: A Critical Introduction (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013) and Hollywood and the Invention of England: Projecting the English Past in American Cinema, 1930–2017 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), as well as various journal articles. Martin M. Winkler is University Professor and Professor of Classics at George Mason University in Virginia. His books on classics and cinema include Cinema and Classical Texts: Apollo’s New Light (2009), The Roman Salute: Cinema, History, Ideology (2009), and Arminius the Liberator: Myth and Ideology (2015), Classical Literature on Screen: Affinities of Imagination (2017) and Ovid on Screen; A Montage of Attractions (2020). He has also edited several essay collections on the subject. Monika Woźniak  is Associate Professor of Polish Language and Literature at the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’. Her research has addressed issues of Literary Translation, Children’s Literature and Translation, and Audiovisual Translation. She has co-authored a monograph of Italian–Polish translations of children’s literature (Toruń, 2014), a monograph on translations of historical films, Historia na ekranie. Gatunek filmowy a przekład audiowizualny (History on the Screen. Cinematographic

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xvi  Notes on Contributors Genre and Audiovisual Translation, Kraków, 2017) and a monograph on Quo vadis’s reception in Poland (2020). She has co-edited the volume Cinderella across cultures (Wayne University Press, 2016) and the conference papers Quo vadis: da caso letterario al fenomeno della cultura di massa (Rome, 2016). Maria Wyke is Professor of Latin at University College London. Her research interests include the reception of ancient Rome, especially in popular culture. In both Projecting the Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema and History (Routledge, 1997) and The Roman Mistress: Ancient and Modern Representations (OUP, 2000), she explored cinematic reconstructions of ancient Rome in the film traditions of Italy and Hollywood. She has also published on the reception of Julius Caesar in Western culture, Caesar: A Life in Western Culture (Granta and the University of Chicago Press, 2007), and Caesar in the USA (University of California Press, 2012). Wyke has edited or co-edited eight volumes to date, including The Ancient World in Silent Cinema (CUP, 2013), Julius Caesar in Western Culture (Blackwell, 2006) and The Uses and Abuses of Antiquity (Peter Lang, 1999). She is currently preparing a monograph on Ancient Rome in Silent Cinema (for University of Michigan Press). Adam Ziółkowski  is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Warsaw. His main research areas are Early and Republican Rome, the topography of the city in antiquity and the later Roman Empire. His publications include The Temples of MidRepublican Rome and their Historical and Topographical Context (Rome, 1992), Storia di Roma (Milan, 2000), Sacra Via: Twenty Years After (Warsaw, 2004), and, with Konrad Kokoszkiewicz, Seven Hills of Rome. M.  Terentius Varro De lingua Latina 5.41–56 (Warsaw, 2013).

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1 Introduction Monika Woźniak and Maria Wyke

Quo vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero signals through its title that it will describe, in a crucial scene, the Church legend according to which, fleeing Nero’s persecutions in Rome, the Apostle Peter encountered a vision of Christ on the via Appia. When Peter asks quo vadis, Domine?, Christ replies ‘To Rome, to be crucified again’. At this, Peter turns back to the city where he suffers martyrdom.1 On its publication in book-form in 1896, this novel of pagan and Christian life in Neronian Rome was acclaimed in Poland as an astounding work of high literature. In 1905, it constituted one of the grounds for the award to its author, Henryk Sienkiewicz, of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Yet, outside Poland, its subsequent translations and transformations into other interrelated media have usually been categorized as works of popular culture. Through Quo vadis, Polish classicism had a significant and lasting effect on ‘Western’ receptions of the classical world and on modern conceptions of Nero, imperial Rome, and Christian martyrdom. Over the course of the twentieth century, the novel and its reformulations crossed national boundaries, cultural categories, and media and, along the way, provided a powerful discursive structure through which to explore Christian faith and oppression by, resistance to, and triumph over tyranny. It is with this exceptional example of classical reception that this volume is engaged. Our introduction addresses the range and originality of the volume as a study in classical reception, in terms of its broad engagement with issues of nationalism and the genre of the historical novel, and its more specific focus on this particular Polish novel, its late nineteenth-century literary context, and its translations and multimedial reworkings across the twentieth century. The chapters, summaries of which are included here, are written from diverse national perspectives and 1  The legend emerges in a number of apocryphal works, such as the fourth-century Acts of Peter and Paul. Even before Sienkiewicz’s novel appeared, it had been retold in a number of literary works. The best-known figurative representation of the legend is Annibale Caracci’s painting from 1602.

Monika Woz ń iak and Maria Wyke, Introduction In: The Novel of Neronian Rome and its Multimedial Transformations: Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis. Edited by: Monika Wozń iak and Maria Wyke, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198867531.003.0001

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2  Monika Woźniak and Maria Wyke disciplinary approaches. Equally, as editors we have brought to the volume our respective expertise in Polish, Italian, and anglophone national cultures and our grounding in classics, classical reception, comparative literature, and cultural studies. We conclude with some reflections on the respects in which our analysis of Quo vadis might be paradigmatic for understanding how and why classics and popular culture converge.

Classical Reception, Nationalisms, and the Historical Novel Ancient Rome has formed a privileged and unsettling site for cultural expression as a consequence of its seeming familiarity, durability, order, violence, demise, and fragmented survival. Its contradictions have made it fertile ground on which to play with time, desire, and identity (national, political, or religious).2 Yet Nero’s Rome has occupied the cultural imaginary more than any other place or period of Roman history. The emperor has received the attention of later dramatists, composers, painters, sculptors, novelists, poets, and choreographers, as well as film-makers, television directors, cartoonists, comedians, and circus ringmasters, and resurfaced in a wide range of ­countries, languages, and media. The background of these Neros goes back to the uniformly late and hostile primary sources: the pseudo-Senecan drama Octavia; the histories of Tacitus, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio; and early Christian literature and its predictions of a coming apocalypse.3 So formed, the originary portrait of Nero is paradoxical, excessive, and scarcely be­liev­ able, yet compellingly scandalous—a deluded egomaniac, a monster of lust, a self-stylizing artist, a cruel tyrant, an arsonist, persecutor, and murderer and, in ad 69, destroyer of the imperial dynasty—the complete antithesis of the ideal Roman statesman.4 Thus analysis of Nero’s ample Nachleben can be exemplary for understanding how and why ancient sources are transformed into post-antique cultural products.5 In its concern with a narrative about Nero that originated in late nineteenthcentury Poland and then circulated extensively across nations, this volume 2  See, for example, the essays in Edwards 1999. 3  A number of pretenders or ‘false Neros’ emerged after the emperor’s death, however, and were welcomed especially among the people in the East (as Tacitus, Hist. 2.8-9). See Hedrick 2015. 4  Critiques of this ‘impossibly crude’ portrait of Nero produced in the ancient theatre of politics begin approximately with the essays collected in Elsner and Masters 1994. For more recent re-evaluations, see e.g. Bartsch, Freudenburg, and Littlewood 2017. See Malik 2020 for ancient and modern characterizations of Nero as the Antichrist. 5  See Manuwald 2013: esp. 1–35 on the benefit for reception studies of investigating Nero in opera. Cf. Wyke 2012 on Julius Caesar in the United States of America.

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Introduction  3 brings into close comparison the nationalisms of classical reception. In their collection of essays, Classics and National Cultures (2010), Susan A. Stephens and Phiroze Vasunia argued for the importance of investigating how classical cultures have contributed to the concept of the nation and to the expression of different nationalisms. We should ask what ideo­logic­al drives are propelled by the linkage of classics and the nation. Since then, and as part of a strategy to decentre the West as the locus of classical reception and of reception studies, a number of works have brought to the attention of anglophone scholars the richness and the specificity of responses to Graeco-Roman antiquity in the nations of Central and Eastern Europe, whether at local, regional, or national level.6 Several have identified the peculiarity of Poland in that regard (as, for example, Dorota Dutsch in A Handbook to Classical Reception in Eastern and Central Europe, 2017), for Poland problematizes the conjunction of the classical with the national. Although from the start Latinitas (Latinity) had been integral to the construction of Polish cultural identity, the complex political and social history of Poland embraced shifts of borders, multiple languages, and diverse faiths. Moreover, from the late eighteenth century, just when concepts of nation and nationhood were coming to prominence, the territory of Poland was subject to occupation and progressive partition by the empires of Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Poland became a nation without statehood and was wiped from the map of Europe. Classical antiquity was therefore often put to work to express indirectly and with intensity that loss of liberty.7 Poland’s long struggle under  the increasingly oppressive and brutal rule of foreign powers in the nineteenth century, as well as the repeated failure of military uprisings that in­ev­it­ably ended with executions, exile in Siberia, or forced emigration, gave rise to allegorical interpretations of Poland’s fate in the tragic key of Christian martyrdom. To draw a parallel between the moral fortitude of the Christians in the face of persecution and the suffering of the Poles under occupation became a frequent strategy by which to suggest that there might be profound meaning in the political disaster that had befallen them. The authors Józef Ignacy Kraszewski and Henryk Sienkiewicz, however, were unusual in their use of historical fictions centred on Nero as satanic monster or Antichrist

6  See, for example, a special issue of the Classical Receptions Journal edited by Torlone and published in 2013 on poetic responses to Graeco-Roman antiquity in Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, and Russia. And, more recently, A Handbook to Classical Receptions in Eastern and Central Europe (2017) edited by Torlone, Munteanu, and Dutsch. 7  Torlone 2013: 259 and 262–4; Torlone et al. 2017: 6–9; Dutsch 2017. See also the next section of our introduction, and Axer and Ostrowska in this volume.

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4  Monika Woźniak and Maria Wyke through which to articulate a yearning for Polish nationhood. Their novels contained the subliminal message that, just as the Christians had outlasted Nero’s persecutions because of their virtue, so the Poles might outlast their imperial oppressors and become free.8 The importance to classical reception of this type of historical novel, the nineteenth-century fiction of early Christianity under the Roman empire, is now recognized. Over 200 such works were published in English alone between the 1820s and the First World War. The most popular among them were Edward Bulwer Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880), and—in, for example, Jeremiah Curtin’s translation—Henry Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis: A Tale of the Time of Nero (1896).9 A powerful case for the investigation of such works from the perspective of reception has been made by Simon Goldhill in his study Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity (2011), where he focuses on novels structured by a largely British and Anglican framework.10 He argues that these vivid reconstructions of the imperial Roman past deserve attention because they are determinative forms of historiography, in which the classical past is presented as having causal force on the present, in which Roman antiquity makes the man. They are also significant for the ways they criss-cross Victorian culture’s boundaries between fiction (intimate storytelling), classical education (the historical distance of Latin terminology, material detail, and footnotes), social commentary (a manifest anxiety about urban living and crowd behaviour), political propaganda (excavation of the supposed roots of Englishness), and, especially, religious polemic. In the face of contemporary critiques of the history of early Christianity, the loss of dominance of the Church of England, sectarian conflict, and the challenge to faith posed by Darwinism, the British novels present only very particular forms of Christianity triumphing over a pagan world.11 The next section of our introduction, then, and the first few chapters of the volume extend this mode of inquiry by resituating Quo vadis in its original Polish context and exploring its equal importance with, but consequent difference from, these other nineteenthcentury religious fictions.

8  See Axer 2002: 5–9; Rostropowicz 2013; and, in this volume, the next section as well as Chapters 2–4. For the re-emergence of Nero as Antichrist in literature of the late nineteenth century, including in Quo vadis, see Malik 2020. 9  As Turner 1999 and Malik 2020. 10  See Goldhill 2011: 153–264, esp. 153–91. 11  Cf. Malik 2020 on the relationship between nineteenth-century religious crises and the emergence of Nero in literature as the Antichrist.

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Introduction  5

Quo vadis: the Novel of Neronian Rome in Late Nineteenth-century Poland Few books in the history of literature have experienced a more dramatic ­trajectory of fortune than Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis. First serialized across 1895 to 1896 in three Polish newspapers, Gazeta Polska (Warsaw), Czas (Cracow) and Dziennik Poznański (Posen), it was published in book form in 1896 and was immediately translated into Russian and English. In the course of just a few years the novel became an international phenomenon, was translated into dozens of languages, and sold in the millions.12 At the beginning of the ­twentieth century, Sienkiewicz’s book was among the most successful literary bestsellers in the world. It became the object of a ‘quovadisomania’ that soon exceeded any purely literary dimension and triggered its wide and persistent dispersal into the varied media of popular culture in multiple trans­form­ations. A bibliographic overview published in 2016 lists more than two thousand editions of Quo vadis in fifty-seven languages up to that point.13 Although the first wave of enthusiasm naturally subsided with time, for s­ everal decades the novel remained exceptionally popular. By the late twentieth century, however, interest had experienced a drastic decline. Outside Poland, Sienkiewicz’s work is now almost completely erased from the literary landscape and the name of its author all but forgotten. It is an intriguing story of a Cinderella à rebours; while in the famous fairy tale the heroine was stripped of her rightful position and left in rags, only to rise once more to prominence, Quo vadis (despite being the product of a supposedly minor ‘exotic’ literature) conquered the world, only to sink into oblivion. We might well wonder why the novel has almost vanished when its ripple effects on culture are still discernible, however faintly, today—from the name and hedonistic purpose of a restaurant and private members’ dining club in central London to the name and spiritual purpose of a Catholic summer camp in Portland, Oregon, for young men contemplating the priesthood.14 One possible reason may lie precisely in the fact that Sienkiewicz’s novel could reach readers abroad only in the form of translations—ones that were 12 By 1916, the year of Sienkiewicz’s death, the number of copies sold in the USA alone had exceeded 1.5 million (Mikoś 2016). 13  Curiously, the three countries with the highest number of editions are Germany (294), Italy (289), and Spain (234), while Poland, with 192 reprints, only comes fourth (Quo vadis 2016: 13). 14  For the dining club, see its website https://www.quovadissoho.co.uk/about/ (last accessed 24 August 2019). For the Catholic summer camp, see the news story in The Catholic Sentinel (26 July 2019), https://catholicsentinel.org/Content/Faith-Spirituality/Living-Faith/Article/Young-men-discernGod-s-call-at-Quo-Vadis-Days/4/29/38203 (last accessed 24 August 2019).

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6  Monika Woźniak and Maria Wyke invariably mediocre, if not quite awful, and were often made from earlier translations into other languages (initially mainly Russian). Such translations did not influence the novel’s appeal for mass audiences, but they did help to cast Sienkiewicz as a lowbrow writer. Despite the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1905, Sienkiewicz was nonetheless perceived as a writer for the masses, and Quo vadis was placed in line with such bestsellers as The Three Musketeers (1844), Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), or Gone with the Wind (1936) (Marinelli 2002: 209). Foreign critics were obviously challenged when assessing the literary value of the novel, having generally only a vague idea about the author and his oeuvre, and virtually none about the literary and cultural context from which he came. It was, therefore, difficult for them to go beyond a superficial analysis of the novel, which they most often boiled down to a discussion about the ideologically pro-Christian message of the text. Their strategies of tracking the resemblance of Quo vadis to earlier novels on the subject of the Roman world or even accusing Sienkiewicz of plagiarism (most often encountered in early critical reactions) can also be read as measures of their struggle to understand the mechanisms of the novel’s success. In fact, to understand the cultural influence of Quo vadis it might be more useful to look at the issue from its reverse side and consider not what brings the novel closer to other popular narratives about ancient Rome but rather what differentiates it from them. And, for this purpose, we need to look at the historical novel in the social and political context of the writer’s life and work. The literature of ancient Greece and Rome, especially Latin literature, played a key role in the development of Polish culture. The Poles, belonging to so-called ‘younger Europe’,15 felt keenly the need to define their ‘place in world history and to translate this awareness into Renaissance an­thropo­ logic­al language, which used signs of the classical tradition’ (Axer 2007: 139). Thus the myth of the Sarmatian origins of Poland and the name of Sarmatia for the state became more and more popular from the sixteenth century. It originated from a genealogy constructed in the fourteenth century that sought to legitimize the Polish kingdom by proclaiming its military victories over the ancient rulers Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar (Axer 2017: 162). Polish humanists identified the emerging Polish Commonwealth with Sarmatia Europea as a discursive mechanism by which to establish the in­tern­al integration and international position of the state. During the early 15 The designation ‘younger Europe’ was given to the indistinctly defined Central-Eastern European historical region: ‘The corpus of this Europe is historical territories connected with Poland,  Bohemia and Hungary, three monarchies formed in the tenth to the twelfth century’ (Kłoczowski 1998: 11).

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Introduction  7 humanist period in Poland (that is until around 1540), neo-Latin poetry flourished based on close engagement with works of classical Latin literature. Understandably, when bilingual writers such as Jan Kochanowski or Szymon Szymonowic moved from Latin to the vernacular later in that century, they looked primarily to ancient Roman models for inspiration, especially Horace and Virgil, whom they found mentally and culturally closer to Sarmatian Poland than contemporary writers from Western Europe.16 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jesuit colleges, where most young nobles were educated, unified the cultural signs and models that invoked Graeco-Roman antiquity, turning them into a systematic and widely used component of public communication comprehensible to all of the Polish gentry. Knowledge of the Latin language and of ancient Roman authors became almost a determinant trait of the civic and collective identity of the ‘real’ Polish Sarmatian. The nobility turned Latin into a form of supra-ethnic means of political communication about and for nationhood.17 In the second half of the eighteenth century, the Latin tradition in Poland was enriched by inspiration from French classicism and an interest in the ancient world that was reviving in Europe more broadly. Bilingualism was still common among the nobles, and Latin continued to be used extensively in public life, entering into a special relationship with the vernacular language. In the nineteenth century, Latinitas was a thoroughly integrated component of the mythologized national identity of the Poles, and fluent knowledge of Latin and Greek was still an indispensable element of the education of the Polish elite: students were expected to be able to use the classical languages both in speech and in writing. Sienkiewicz, born in 1846 to a family of impoverished landed gentry, was naturally expected to follow this path of education in Classics. Paradoxically, however, Sienkiewicz fared worse in this respect than many of his fellow con­ tem­por­ary writers: his grades in Latin in high school were always mediocre at best and, as a result of failing an examination in ancient Greek, he did not obtain a university degree. However, he had mastered Latin well enough to write his own Nobel acceptance speech in the language (although it was checked and corrected by his friend, the classical philologist Kazimierz

16  For more discussion in English of the history of classicism in Poland, see Axer in this volume and Axer 2007. Poland is discussed in the recent surveys and case studies of Central and Eastern European classical reception: Torlone 2013 and Torlone, Munteanu, and Dutsch 2017. 17  See Axer 2017 and in this volume. It is important to bear in mind that, right up to the late eighteenth century and Poland’s loss of independence, Latin was the only language used in the educational system.

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8  Monika Woźniak and Maria Wyke Morawski) and to read Latin authors in the original (though he read Greek authors, above all his beloved Homer, in translation). Even if this is now rarely remembered, Sienkiewicz also translated some of the poetry of Horace, and did so quite well. What is more important, however, is that the author grew up in an environment that avidly cultivated love for Graeco-Roman literature and history. He had himself already developed a fascination with classical authors at school, and that fascination would stay with him for his whole life. In addition to his special love for the Iliad and the Odyssey, he was particularly attracted to the works of the Roman historians Tacitus and Livy. They became his favourite bedtime books, which he read again and again throughout his life. These texts he knew almost by heart. Bronisław Biliński, author of the most comprehensive study to this day of Sienkiewicz’s engagement with Graeco-Roman antiquity, pointed out that ‘we are faced with a writer who was completely permeated by classical culture’ (Biliński 1973: 6), more than any other Polish author of the nineteenth century. It is no surprise that such a strong commitment to classical culture would be reflected in the writing of Sienkiewicz, especially after 1879, when he first visited Rome and was able to enter into direct contact with the material remains of that past. He was then returning to Europe after a two-year trip to the United States of America, where he had been able to witness first-hand the political and social dynamics of a young, fast-growing nation—as he recounted in his Listy z Ameryki (Letters from America, 1876–8), a fine ex­ample of literary reportage first published in Gazeta Polska.18 Yet, when he was once again in Europe, his imagination was immediately drawn to that continent’s shared cultural roots. In his correspondence from France (Nowiny 1878, 12), he described the libertine atmosphere of the Parisian nights he witnessed in terms very similar to those which would resurface many years later in Quo vadis, comparing them explicitly to the dissolute world of im­per­ ial Rome and evoking, for the first time, the figure of Nero as an incarnation of Roman corruption and dissolution. The writer’s response to his visit to Rome in 1879, appearing in the newspaper Gazeta Polska (18 October 1878), was entirely focused on the impressions stirred in him by his tour of various monuments of the ancient city, with no mention of Rome as the home of the Catholic Church and no apparent interest in the contemporary situation of Italy. Sienkiewicz was to return to Rome many times after this first visit, for ­different reasons, but his visits were always oriented towards exploring the 18  The first edition in book form was published in 1880.

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Introduction  9 ancient history of the Eternal City. During these stays he had the opportunity to make friends with members of the Polish community living in Rome— writers, intellectuals, and archaeologists. The most important of these acquaintances was undoubtedly the painter Henryk Siemiradzki (1843–1902), who had been based in Rome since 1872 and was best known for his enormous antiquarian canvases depicting aspects of the Graeco-Roman ­ world. In 1889 the writer also visited southern Italy, including Naples, Pompeii, and the ruins of Nero’s villa at Baiae. It was on that occasion that he saw, and was deeply impressed by, the Toro Farnese statue in the museum of Naples. His memory of that artwork would be elaborated later in the ­celebrated account he gave in Quo vadis of the efforts of the strongman Ursus to overcome a German aurochs in the arena. This direct and tangible exposure to the material remains of ancient Rome could only deepen Sienkiewicz’s already keen interest in its history. It was only a matter of time before this fascination became an inspiration for his literary production. Before it came to full fruition, however, the author’s im­agin­ ation turned to his national, Polish past. In the years from 1883 to 1886 he created a series of novels, commonly called Trylogy, set in the seventeenthcentury Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: With Fire and Sword, The Deluge, and Fire in the Steppe. They were greeted with unprecedented enthusiasm as a revelation in the genre of the historical novel and thoroughly enchanted their Polish readers.19 Their immense success transformed Sienkiewicz from the well-respected author of short stories and reportage into the most popular and loved writer in Poland. They also opened the way to an international career. After having completed the Trylogy, in the early 1890s Sienkiewicz tried his skills as author of two contemporary novels: Without dogma (1891) and Children of the Soil (1894). Both works contain Italian and ancient Roman motifs. Without dogma is written as the diary of Leon Płoszowski, a man from a wealthy aristocratic family who struggles to find a meaning to life in a world seemingly without morality. The protagonist lives in Rome and his opinions and reflections on classical antiquity stem clearly from Sienkiewicz’s autobiographical experience. Similarly, the visit to Rome by Stanisław Połaniecki and his wife Maria (the fictional protagonists of the Children of the Soil) gave the

19  At that time the historical novel was already a well-established and popular literary genre in Poland, developing in the first half of the nineteenth century under the influence of Walter Scott’s novels, which had been translated into Polish promptly on their English-language publication. Sienkiewicz drew on the models of both Scott and Dumas, combining gripping plots with vivid reconstructions of the past based on extensive historical research. Most importantly, his literary gift elevated the style and language of his novels far above other Polish authors of historical fiction.

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10  Monika Woźniak and Maria Wyke author the opportunity to describe yet again the ruins of ancient Rome and to introduce reflections on the historical and cultural importance of classical antiquity that were put into the mouths of secondary characters. When Sienkiewicz began planning his next historical novel, he was, therefore, a mature man, approaching 50, standing at the height of his power to create vivid historical fictions. He had already had the experience of composing the Trylogy: his creation of a great historical fresco of seventeenth-century Poland prepared him to pick up again, equally successfully, the genre of the historical novel and to refine his writing talents, above all his skill in stylizing his language to evoke a credible past world. Sienkiewicz was also now well equipped to reconstruct ancient Rome: not only because he knew Latin and was well read in the primary sources but also because he always meticulously researched the epoch he proposed to describe in his historical novels and, in the case of Quo vadis, took pains to become familiar with a number of Polish and other contemporary scholarly studies on Nero. He was friends with experts on the subject (such as Kazimierz Morawski, founder of the Polish discipline of classical philology), who often supported him with their ex­pert­ ise. Finally, he had the opportunity to see with his own eyes once again the monuments of ancient Rome. In 1893 and 1894, when he was writing Children of the Soil but was already planning his next novel on Neronian Rome, he stayed in the city several times and prepared for Quo vadis by getting acquainted with the latest archaeological discoveries and by going to the Roman Forum every day. After writing two novels set in the present, Sienkiewicz confessed in a letter to a friend that he wanted to return to historical themes: ‘I decided not to abandon epic any more [meaning ‘historical narration’] because it is less tiring and rejuvenates the spirit’ (Biliński 1973: 56). However, it is hard to say what exactly made the writer choose Nero’s Rome as the place and time for his next novel. Sienkiewicz himself later claimed that the idea of the novel came to him thanks to repeated readings of Tacitus’s works, and that it took concrete shape when the painter Henryk Siemiradzki, during one of their joint strolls in Rome, took Sienkiewicz to the chapel ‘Quo vadis, domine?’ on the Via Appia and told him the early Church legend about St Peter encountering a visitation from Christ in that very place. As in every legend, there is probably some truth to this anecdote (for many years a painting by Siemiradzki ­entitled Domine, quo vadis?, now lost, hung in the study of Sienkiewicz’s house in Oblęgorek), although it can be assumed that Ben-Hur, the American novel by Lew Wallace set in Roman-occupied Judea in the time of Christ, also played a role in inspiring the Polish writer.

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Introduction  11 Sienkiewicz read Wallace’s novel in 1888 and it made a great impression on him. Enthralled by the ‘archaeological, historical and artistic’ value of ­Ben-Hur (Biliński  1973: 31), the Polish author recommended it for translation and publication in the newspaper with which he was collaborating, the Varsovian Słowo. Curiously, it was not the religious message that he liked most: as he confessed in a letter to his friend Mieczysław Godlewski: ‘In spite [our em­phasis] of its mystic-religious atmosphere and even its quotations from the Bible, it is one of the most interesting stories I've read recently’ (Biliński 1973: 31). However, the idea of reproducing the American novel’s clash between Christianity and paganism obviously appealed to Sienkiewicz’s imagination. In 1892 he published a short story, Let us follow him, often seen as a kind of prelude to the themes later developed at length in Quo vadis. It is a tale of a Roman patrician, Caius Septimius Cinna, whose beloved wife, Antea, falls ill with a mysterious sickness. After several failed attempts to cure her, they travel to Jerusalem, arriving just in time to witness the crucifixion of Christ. This experience miraculously transforms Antea. But although the affinities with Wallace’s work seem obvious, Sienkiewicz elaborated the motif of the miracle in a quite different way: Antea is still going to die; instead, her healing happens on a spiritual plane, freeing her from fear and making her willing to ‘follow’ Christ even into death. For some time Sienkiewicz also planned to set his new ‘Christian epic’ in the Roman provinces but, as he explained in an interview of 1894, ‘it would take too much time and effort to make a detailed visit to these places, which are unknown to me’ (a prerequisite for com­pos­ ition that did not trouble Wallace). He decided, therefore, to focus on Rome, which suited his ambition to compose ‘a great Christian epic’ just as well, if not better. Once the novel was published and became an international bestseller, critics were quick to point out the similarities between the plot of Quo vadis and earlier fictions about ancient Rome, accusing Sienkiewicz of pilfering from or even plagiarizing other authors. The works listed as the presumed sources for his novel ranged from Chateaubriand’s The Martyrs (1809) and Dumas’s Acté (1839) to Renan’s Antichrist (1873) or even Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834).20 This wild chase for literary sources of Quo vadis missed the point, not only for the simple reason that every nineteenth-century historical novel about ancient Rome in general, and about Nero’s reign and the beginning of Christianity in particular, was based on the same stock of primary materials, mainly the works of Tacitus and Suetonius. More importantly, 20  For a detailed account, see Swiętosławska 2016: 99–136.

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12  Monika Woźniak and Maria Wyke c­ ritics outside Poland ignored—simply because they had no knowledge of it—the most obvious and immediate context for Sienkiewicz’s literary ­inspiration, that is his Polish cultural tradition. Even though Polish literature in the nineteenth century was oriented towards Hellenic rather than Roman history and themes, there are at least two authors whose works, by Sienkiewicz’s own admission, clearly influenced his vision of ancient Rome. The first of them was Zygmunt Krasiński, whose romantic drama Irydion (1836), set in the time of the emperor Elagabalus, was a sweeping study of the decline of the pagan world set against the rising power of Christianity. The second, even more important, model was Józef Ignacy Kraszewski (1812–87), a prolific author of historical novels who, before the advent of Sienkiewicz, was considered the most important representative of this genre in Poland.21 The older writer’s undeniable influence on Sienkiewicz’s work has been the object of many studies (Bursztyńska 1977, Wietecha  2011, De Carlo  2016) but, in the case of Quo vadis, the affinities are particularly striking. Kraszewski published two novels set in ancient Rome: Caprea i Roma. Obrazy z pierwszego wieku (Caprea [sic] and Rome. Pictures from the First Century, 1859) and Rzym za Nerona. Obrazy historyczne (Rome under Nero. Historical Pictures, 1864). The first work is a barely fictionalized account of the reign of Tiberius (the section associated with Capri) and his successors, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero (the section associated with Rome). Kraszewski describes the Great Fire of Rome, the persecutions of the Christians, and even the story of St Peter’s encounter with Christ on the Via Appia, but his text reads almost like a dry summary of Tacitus and Suetonius. In the second work, the writer gave his narrative a more engaging form. Turning to the strategy frequently deployed in historical fiction, that of having discovered ‘authentic’ documents, he produced an epistolary romance centred on the figures of a virtuous young widow, Sabina Marcia, converted to Christianity, and the patrician Julius Flavius who falls in love with her. Another of Sabina’s admirers is a dissolute courtier of Nero, Lelius. Predictably, both young men are transformed by their love for Sabina and both convert to Christianity as well. Sabina and Lelius perish in the arena, while Julius Flavius dies soon after on Nero’s orders. Although the broad structure of the plot bears only a passing resemblance to that of Quo vadis, it contains several ideas, scenes, and motifs that find almost identical equivalents in Sienkiewicz’s text. Some similarities, above all 21  For discussion in English of Kraszewski’s novels set in ancient Rome, see Rostropowicz 2013 and Malik 2020.

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Introduction  13 descriptions of Nero’s habits and crimes, are obviously due to the authors’ use of the same historical sources; others, however, suggest the direct influence of Rome under Nero on Quo vadis. Motifs such as Julius spying on Sabina when she goes to a clandestine meeting of the Christians at prayer, trying to forget her by attaching himself to the fascinating hetaira Epicharis, frantically looking for her during the Fire of Rome, trying to convince her to move to his house from the modest lodgings she chose to live in, visiting her in prison where she awaits execution: all these bear a close resemblance to the actions undertaken at various points by the equivalent character in Quo vadis, Marcus Vinicius. Some descriptive passages, such as the account of the first occasion on which the Christians die (in  the arena), the villa in which Sabina is to be found (in Quo vadis it is owned by Aulus Plautius), or the panic of the crowds during the Fire, are also alike. Even the famous speech of Petronius, in which he tries to dissuade Nero from persecuting the Christians, has its close counterpart in Kraszewski’s novel, where a minor character, Kornutus, courageously opposes Nero’s plans to send the Christians to their death. However, a comparison of the affinities between these two visions of Rome in the time of Nero does not work necessarily to the detriment of Sienkiewicz, rather quite the reverse, as it reveals his ingenious writing strategies and superior literary talent. While both authors had the habit of conducting extensive research into the epoch they intended to portray, Kraszewski’s goal was mainly educational (to inform his readers about Neronian Rome) and ideological (to glorify Christianity and to draw a parallel between Christian martyrdom and the suffering of Poles under the rule of its occupying powers). Sienkiewicz shared these ambitions, but united them with a desire and a capacity to create a gripping narrative that would captivate the imagination of his readers. To do so, he did not try to invent an original or unusual plot. On the contrary, he used by now quite clichéd motifs and narrative threads and felt free to recycle and elaborate on elements he knew from earlier texts. This method of composition was not exclusive to Quo vadis, but applied to all his historical novels. All the volumes of his Trylogy are based on the same pattern of star-crossed love, where a couple meet and fall in love but are then sep­ar­ ated by a cruel twist of fate. Following this pattern, Marcus Vinicius bears an uncanny resemblance to The Deluge’s protagonist Andrzej Kmicic, a bold and handsome soldier who falls in love with the pious girl Oleńka Billewiczówna, is initially rejected by her for his moral shortcomings, and is then eventually taken into her embrace. He needs to undergo a profound transformation from an impetuous ruffian (who unconsciously betrays his country) to a

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14  Monika Woźniak and Maria Wyke heroic defender of his native land, before he can be reunited with his be­loved.22 The literary achievement of Sienkiewicz did not consist, therefore, in the novelty of his plots but in his ability to create memorable characters, a moving narrative, and accurate yet purposeful descriptions of period detail in an appropriately archaic language. The Polish writer possessed a flair for developing suspenseful action that was full of dramatic twists. He also incorporated into his Neronian narrative elements of genres that would only develop fully in the twentieth century. So, while Quo vadis begins with the conventional set-up of a Roman soldier, Marcus Vinicius, infatuated with a beautiful young virgin, Lygia, who also happens to be Christian, it soon steers towards a more complicated intrigue. The first obstacle that arises between the two young people does not stem from the girl’s faith but from the brutal and overbearing attitude of Vinicius. Vinicius’s uncle, Petronius, uses his influence with Nero to have Lygia seized from her guardians and given to his nephew. However, the plan misfires when a drunken Vinicius reveals it to the girl during a feast at Nero’s palace. Horrified, Lygia refuses his advances and with the help of her fellow Christians manages to escape, carefully covering her tracks. Desperate to find her, Vinicius engages the services of the Greek Chilo Chilonides, a kind of ancient Sherlock Holmes. The next segment of the novel reads almost like a detective novel: Chilo, while not exactly as distinguished a gentleman as Holmes, proves to be nevertheless as skilled and efficient an investigator. He learns that the girl is a Christian and finds the means to discover where she lives. When Vinicius’s second attempt to take Lygia by force fails and, nonetheless, he is magnanimously forgiven by her and nursed back to health after being wounded during his assault, it is finally time for him to reconsider his behaviour. His conversion to Christianity is neither quick nor easy, making it all the more plausible. Sienkiewicz skilfully shows how the ‘Roman nature’ of this solder previously loyal to Nero cannot tolerate the principles of the new religion, even if he is willing to accept it for Lygia’s sake. Even once he has finally converted, Vinicius’s goal is to live happily with his beloved, rather than to become an exalted Christian martyr. However, when all the obstacles are removed and the young lovers are about to marry, an external disaster strikes. Nero orders the Great Fire of Rome and then, looking for a scapegoat for his crime, decides to persecute the Christians. The last part of the novel becomes a fast-paced thriller that 22  It is, however, only a superficial resemblance, since Sienkiewicz equipped Kmicic with the mentality, attitudes, and morality typical of the ideal masculinity required by Sarmatian Poland, while the traits of Marcus Vinicius make him unmistakeably a member of the elite in Neronian Rome.

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Introduction  15 sees Petronius and Vinicius trying frantically to save the imprisoned Lygia from torture and death in the arena. The plot proceeds through twists and cliffhangers towards the inevitable climax, the subsequently famed scene in which Lygia, tied to the horns of a German aurochs, is saved in extremis by her faithful servant Ursus. It is small wonder that both Polish and Italian readers of the novel in its initial form would wait early in the morning outside the publishing houses of the newspapers serializing it, eager to get their hands on the next episode. Sienkiewicz’s characters may lack the psychological depth of Dostoyevsky’s or Flaubert’s heroes, but they are psychologically plausible, rounded, and dynamic figures. The Polish writer was also recognized as gifted with the capacity to create characters that seemed to fit perfectly into the historical context of their time. Their ways of thinking and social prejudices, as well as their moral attitudes, habits, and the way they speak, give the protagonists of Quo vadis an intense aura of authenticity complemented by a convincing material reconstruction of Neronian Rome in terms of topography, architecture, interior design, costumes, and props. This characteristic care for ­his­tor­ic­al reconstruction is not limited to the main characters: a whole cast of colourful inhabitants of Rome moves before the reader’s eyes, and even secondary or quite minor figures, like the cynical philosopher-detective Chilo or the fanatical and snappy Christian Crispus, left a long-lasting impression on readers. The most fascinating figure in Quo vadis, however, is undoubtedly Petronius, a character modelled on Gaius Petronius Arbiter, a Roman writer, philosopher, and politician credited with the authorship of the Satyricon. As was his habit, Sienkiewicz took the primary sources about Petronius as his starting point and then enriched the character, developing him into a complicated, multilayered personality.23 Cynical, decadent, and lazy, yet at the same time extremely intelligent, sophisticated, and self-deprecating, capable of noble impulses and gestures of unparalleled courage, Petronius embodies not so much the vices as the values associated with Graeco-Roman antiquity. More than that, many scholars came even to consider Petronius as an alter ego of the author, who himself confessed in a private letter, ‘There is too much of Petronius in me’ (Bujnicki 2002: 81).24 Outlining this character with clear 23  It is probable that, in his concept of this character, Sienkiewicz was also influenced by the scholarly study Petroniusz Arbiter i jego romans (Petronius Arbiter and his Romance), published in 1894 by the writer’s friend and historical advisor Kazimierz Morawski. 24 A distinct similarity can also be found between Petronius and the modern decadent Leon Płoszowski, the protagonist of Sienkiewicz’s contemporary novel Without Dogma, who was also clearly endowed by the writer with some autobiographical traits. For more about Sienkiewicz’s conception of Petronius, see Bujnicki 2002.

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16  Monika Woźniak and Maria Wyke sympathy and admiration, Sienkiewicz entrusted him with the function of observer and commentator on changes in the world around him. The author was thus able to filter philosophical and moral reflection on the clash between pagan and Christian cultures through an intra-diegetic point of view, avoiding by this narrative device the risk of turning the novel into an apocryphal and naive apology for the new religion. Petronius’s assessments and reflections on Christianity sound convincing precisely because they come from a representative of the pagan world, who looks at the new phenomenon with  distance and a certain dose of cynicism.25 Equally credible in this respect are his ironic remarks on the decadence and moral emptiness of the Roman elite, of which the emperor-comedian Nero remains, of course, the leading representative. Turning Petronius into the most attractive and charismatic character of the book was emblematic of the writer’s subtle approach towards the depiction of Nero’s persecution of the Christians, an approach that makes Quo vadis stand out among nineteenth-century novels about ancient Rome. It is true that Sienkiewicz, like so many other authors, was set on creating a narrative about the triumph of Christianity over a corrupt pagan world, in which he also drew a parallel between imperial Rome and the contemporary tyrannical rule of both the Russian and German powers over oppressed Poland. However, unlike many similar narratives, he avoided a mechanical black-and-white dichotomy between ‘evil’ pagans and ‘good’ Christians.26 His long-lasting love for Graeco-Roman culture made him evoke not only the corruption but also the grandeur and beauty of ancient Rome. Although Quo vadis invariably ‘lost in translation(s)’ one of the most precious assets of the original work, that is its stylistic mastery, the novel was still able to enthral readers with its vivid and energetic vision of the splendours of Neronian Rome. And that is probably why Quo vadis triggered such a huge response in other arts, especially the visual and the performative, from paintings and postcards to ballet and opera, from tableaux vivants to theatrical and cinematographic adaptations, transforming the novel into one of the first truly worldwide and enduring transmedial phenomena after the Bible. For this reason alone, as well as for the immense and wide-ranging influence Quo vadis had on popular 25  Cf. Goldhill 2011: 221–3. 26  For some time after the publication of Quo vadis, Sienkiewicz entertained the idea of writing another novel set in ancient Rome. His reasons for giving up are revealing: ‘I have already decided not to write about Julian the Apostate. I intended to show, as in Quo vadis, the contrast between the pagan and Christian world but, now, after I have gained a deeper knowledge of that period, I can see clearly that the morality of the Christians was no better than the morality of the pagans. In addition, tell me yourself: can I forgive the ancient Christians for burning and destroying those magnificent Greek temples?’ (in a letter to Ignacy Chrzanowski, quoted in Bujnicki 2018: 21).

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Introduction  17 conceptions of ancient Rome in the twentieth century, it deserves to be brought back up from oblivion and to have close critical attention paid to it and its multi-medial transformations.27 The first five chapters that follow this introduction thus explore the literary significance of the novel and responses to it in and outside Poland before its multimedial transformations begin to accrue as much attention. Jerzy Axer heads that discussion as a leading authority both on Sienkiewicz and Polish classicism and as author of a series of groundbreaking introductions for anglophone scholars to broad patterns of classical reception in Central and Eastern Europe.28 He first situates Sienkiewicz’s novel in relation to the rich but contested Latinity of Polish culture under Russian occupation and then provides a spirited account of how the author built a believable vision of Neronian Rome (drawing into the Polish language, for example, the top­ onyms of the city and the rhythms of Roman oratory), and why it so moved his contemporaries in Poland but also, through the work’s translations, its readers elsewhere. Italians in particular were invited to participate in their own past alongside Sienkiewicz’s characters. Readers of many nations were moved by the expressiveness with which the author depicted scenes of how life could be lived with dignity under an oppressive regime. The Polish classicists Adam Ziółkowski and Ewa Skwara next bring their respective expertise to bear on the mechanisms by which Sienkiewicz reconstructed the materiality of Neronian Rome. Ziółkowski addresses the author’s keen interest in grounding his visualization of the ancient city in con­tem­por­ ary archaeological knowledge at the same time as he centred his narrative on apocryphal legend. He takes as a case study for close scrutiny Sienkiewicz’s eruditely drawn topography of the extra-urban cemetery at Ostrianum—a site of especial significance as that is where the reader first encounters the Apostle Peter preaching to the city’s Christian faithful. Skwara explores the material culture of Neronian Rome with which the author equips his characters, and demonstrates how even the briefest reference to costume (a notoriously difficult undertaking for any novelist of the classical past) can be used both as authenticating decoration and as a literary device subtly to advance 27  The Latin expression chosen by Sienkiewicz as the title for his novel has generated a great deal of confused and confusing variation in the titles given to subsequent adaptations of the novel. The ori­ gin­al work’s title was Quo vadis without a second capitalisation or question mark and that, therefore, is how the original Polish novel is referred to throughout this volume. When discussing a later edition, translation or adaptation, we utilise the form chosen by the publisher or author of it, so for example Quo Vadis for Curtin’s translation, Quo vadis? for most Italian translations and the three Italian film and television adaptations, and Quo Vadis for LeRoy’s film adaptation of 1951 but Quo vadis for Kawalerowicz’s of 2001. 28  See e.g. Axer 2007.

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18  Monika Woźniak and Maria Wyke the plot or to differentiate class, gender, age, morality, or emotion. Sienkiewicz, in this as in so many other respects, integrates contemporary with classical sources. Through his intermedial engagement with the Roman history paintings of Gérôme, Alma-Tadema, and Siemiradzki, especially the vivid colours of the latter’s costumes and his play with light, the novelist casts on his descriptions an aesthetic luminosity. Chapters 5 and 6 provide a bridge between our analysis of Quo vadis as a work of high literary culture in its Polish context and our explorations of its multimedial reworkings in popular culture more broadly. They both explore responses to the novel in the United States of America. The classicist Ruth Scodel turns from her co-authored study of the novel’s multiple adaptations in film and on television to look back at the somewhat surprising consequences of the work’s extraordinary popularity in the first few years after its publication in various English translations. In his promotion of a humane Petronius, the Polish author appears to have laid the ground for a more positive reception in American classrooms of a Latin text that until then had more commonly been considered extremely indecent. Yet, in the press, professional historians and literary critics debated whether the novel was an accurate, edify­ing historical picture of Rome under Nero (and its prospects) or a melodramatic, sensationalist work of fiction aimed at attracting the lower classes. Jon Solomon, author of the pioneering study The Ancient World in the Cinema (published in 1978) and of the more recent comprehensive investigation of the commodification of the novel Ben-Hur (published in 2013), explores how Quo vadis was compared in the American press with the earlier novel as another bestseller set in the ancient world and with a Christian focus. Yet Ben-Hur was appreciated far more in the United States, where it outperformed and outlived Quo vadis, despite some acknowledgement of the higher literary skills of the Polish author. Causes include Wallace’s celebrity as an American war hero and the alignment of the Christian elements in his novel with those of the American evangelical movement, a movement for which the life of Christ carried much greater religious weight than the martyrdom of Christians in Rome. Yet in Europe, as we shall see, it was a different story.

Quo vadis: Multimedial Transformations in the Twentieth Century The engagement with imperial Rome of historical novels like The Last Days of Pompeii, Ben-Hur, and Quo vadis was concentrated, complex, polemical, and far-reaching. These books had an immediate impact on how classical an­tiquity

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Introduction  19 was conceptualized by their very many readers, but they also went on to give shape to the reception of Rome across the popular media of the twentieth century.29 For these reasons, Simon Goldhill says, we should investigate not only the structures of thinking to be found in the novels themselves but also the subsequent circulation of popular images of the classical past that have been gleaned from them: the pyrotechnics of Last Days; the chariot race of Ben-Hur; the conflagrations, the banquets, the arena torments of Quo vadis.30 But to do so—as is the project of this volume—is to confront a perceived hermeneutic problem in Classical Reception Studies (as Goldhill also observes). Across his now canonical works on classical reception, Charles Martindale has often described that activity as a moment of profound aesthetic engagement by a post-antique author or artist with an ancient artwork. Classical texts, he argues, are remade by later writers, and those rewritings shed valu­ able light on the works they reformulate. Through such acts of reception, modernity is continuously set in refreshed dialogue with antiquity. By those measures, Martindale worries whether the products of popular culture (such as film) may be too banal and too superficially invested to have anything of value to say about the classical. To pay such works attention risks devaluing reception studies.31 Other approaches to reception extend beyond unilinear, authorial, aesthetic histories and thus can be more accommodating of popu­ lar culture. In relation to the nineteenth-century religious novels of ancient Rome, for example, Goldhill sees them as a mediating force between intellectual argument and mass entertainment. Their multifaceted responses to antiquity took place in society, were widely circulated and consumed over time. They had substantial public impact and, therefore, their representations of the past are events that need situating in a cultural history.32 A cultural studies approach has similarly been taken towards more evidently ‘popular’ twentieth-century manifestations of classical antiquity—in film, but also, for example, on the radio and television, in children’s literature, science fiction, pornography, comic books, the press, advertising, computer games, and social media.33

29  As Goldhill 2011: 160–1. Cf. Nick Lowe’s acknowledgement of the influence of historical novels on the popular reception of ancient Rome in his online entry for ‘popular culture’ in The Oxford Classical Dictionary (4th edition, ed. S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth, 2012). 30  See esp. Goldhill 2011: 14–16. 31  I have in mind particularly Martindale 2006 and 2013. Contra Martindale, cf. e.g. Maurice 2017: 5–10 on the importance of popular cultural receptions and on cultural studies as the methodology appropriate for their interpretation, and Carbone 2017: passim. 32  Goldhill 2011: 14–16. 33  For some examples from within the last twenty years, see Joshel, Malamud and McGuire 2001; Lowe and Shahabudin 2009; Kovacs and Marshall 2011; Maurice 2017; Pomeroy 2017.

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20  Monika Woźniak and Maria Wyke Such work, and our volume alongside it, form part of what has been described in the essays introduced and edited by Lorna Hardwick and Stephen Harrison, Classics in the Modern World: A ‘Democratic Turn’? (2017), as a new phase for classics and for classical scholarship. That ‘democratic’ turn is understood by the editors in terms both of the constituent objects and users of classics and of understanding of the systems whereby the meaning of the classical is ascribed, transmitted, and consumed. The contributors note that the label ‘democratic’ is not always appropriate where types of political agency are at stake, but the turn is certainly, in part, ‘popular’. With the rise of mass media from the nineteenth century, access to classical materials has spread out to people without a formal classical education, and ancient Greece and Rome have been reworked and circulated across more parts of the world than ever before. Classical antiquity has been ‘decentred’ from elite education and Western culture at the same time as some knowledge of it has been made available to a wider array of social classes across many countries,34 and the media of popular culture have become the dominant vehicles for its transmission and reimagining. That displacement has been accompanied in classical scholarship by a parallel interest in how those who are not of the Western elite have put it to political or social use. Popular culture, then, deserves scrutiny because it is saturated with the classical world and is the principal point of access to it for most people. Yet the classical enters, circulates, and is consumed in popular culture differently from high culture. In his entry for ‘Popular Culture’ in The Oxford Classical Dictionary (4th edition, 2012), Nick Lowe observes that its distinctive creativity lies in ‘irony and play, dense intertextuality and allusiveness, and rapid and prolific creation in often ephemeral expressions’. The classical world of popular culture is a pastiche, most often based on the recycling and reworking of other modern receptions.35 And much work still needs to be done, according to Hardwick and Harrison (2013: xxxiv), to pull together a systematic analysis of such infrastructural processes for the creation of classical meaning. Repetition, variation, and remediation are thus defining features of popular culture that, in this volume, are productively explored through close focus not on a diversity of separable receptions of Nero but on the multimedial trans­ form­ations of the historical novel Quo vadis. Scrutiny of its mutations across the twentieth century brings into the spotlight the iterative variability of

34  As discussed by Hardwick 2019. 35  As discussed also in the introductions to Joshel, Malamud, and McGuire  2001; Kovacs and Marshall 2011.

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Introduction  21 Neronian Rome in popular culture—its nuancing according to different national, cultural, linguistic, aesthetic, historical, and social contexts of production. Although The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) is foundational for the whole genre of the ‘toga novel’36 and for the subsequent circulation of Pompeii in the popular imagination, no single work has explored it in this way. However, individual articles and book chapters such as those contained in Pompeii in the Public Imagination: From its Rediscovery to Today (2011, edited by Shelley Hales and Joanna Paul) have situated it in a dense network of responses to the disinterment of the ancient city, while others have individually acknowledged its stimulus for the production of plays and pyrodramas, paintings and silent films.37 By contrast, Ben-Hur (1880) as a recognized classic of anglophone popular culture, has now received meticulous and sustained coverage in Jon Solomon’s monograph Ben-Hur: The Original Blockbuster (2016), where he focuses on the vast array of evidence for how this fic­tion­al­iza­tion of the life of Jesus was successfully commercialized in the form of amateur and professional performances, film adaptations, fraternal organizations, and brand names in manufacturing and retail industries—from coffee to roller coasters. Additionally, the collection edited by Barbara Ryan and Milette Shamir, Bigger than Ben-Hur. The Book, its Adaptations and their Audiences (2016), brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines (such as classics, New Testament studies, film, theatre and American history, and adaptation studies) to investigate Ben-Hur not just as a story in varied formats but as a cultural tradition displaying intriguing continuities and ruptures. To date, only one work in English has been given over to scrutiny of the Polish novel, or rather to its film and TV adaptations—the monograph by Ruth Scodel and Anja Bettenworth, Whither Quo Vadis? Sienkiewicz’s Novel in Film and Television (2009). Our volume constitutes a sister study in relation to their work which, with reference to four feature films and a television ­miniseries for which the novel was a source, concentrates productively on issues of historicity (that of the novel whose own sources are both modern and ancient), fidelity (of the novel to the historical past, but also of the films and television episodes to the novel or to the past it represents), and creative adaptation. They argue that the novel directs but does not determine its largeand small-screen representations, as they reflect the technical progression of cinema and television, the events of the twentieth century, and changes in

36  As Goldhill 2011: 194. 37  For the novel’s commercial success and cultural significance, see most recently Goldhill 2011: 194–202; St Clair and Bautz 2012; Wyke 2019.

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22  Monika Woźniak and Maria Wyke taste. Our volume on Quo vadis is to be distinguished from theirs in, perhaps, three key respects. Firstly, we begin and end in Poland and thus, through a reappraisal of classical reception’s directions of travel, contribute explicitly to breaking through the Eurocentric borders of classics. Our concern, through the case of Quo vadis, is to bring to the attention of anglophone readers not just the richness and uniqueness of Polish classicism but its move westwards. A Polish ‘national’ narrative of high literary estimate was sustainedly appropriated outside Poland—in Italy, France, the United States, and elsewhere— for the popular expression of other nationalisms, political systems, and religious beliefs. Secondly, many of our chapters draw on the taxonomy developed by the theorist Gérard Genette to articulate the transformations of the novel into other texts (verbal, visual, aural, or multimedial). In effect, we start by considering how and why Sienkiewicz’s novel emerges as a form of highbrow hypotext and then go on to explore the processes of transformation by which its copious lowbrow hypertexts are derived, as well as the strategies of transtextual or inter- and intramedial play by which those hypertexts form connections with each other and with texts unrelated to classical antiquity. Each transformation is better understood through its interaction with others. Thirdly, the format of this work as an edited collection (like that of Ryan and Shamir) permits different disciplinary voices to shape a multidisciplinary conversation about Quo vadis. We begin our exploration of the interrelated transformations of Sienkiewicz’s novel with stage performance and film projection. David Mayer, author of the first extensive study of the melodramatic genre of the ‘toga play’ that emerged swiftly on the heels of the ‘toga novel’, excavates the production histories of adaptations of Quo vadis staged in the US and Britain around 1900. Their features are determined variously by the interventions of pro­du­cers, publishers, translators, scriptwriters, theatre managers, musicians, and actors and by the practicalities of stage mechanics, space, and a life on tour. Their failure relative to the successful performance of Quo vadis in France is attributable to their mismatch with expectations for anglophone toga plays. This is followed by further discussion of how the novel was performed in France and in Italy prior to the global release in 1913 of the feature film adaptation directed by Enrico Guazzoni. Stella Dagna, as curator and scholar of Italian silent film, explores the ways in which this milestone in cinematic representation ­challenged theatre and lyric opera’s illustrative tableaux by appropriating their  spectacle, actors, and music, while simultaneously claiming a greater adherence to the novel (in its multiplication of characters, points of view, story spaces, and time). This sophisticated film’s potential to elevate the

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Introduction  23 medium of cinema to the level of art was thus grounded precisely in audience enjoyment of it as a hypertext responsive to the hypotext it was projecting on screen, as well as to the hypertexts that preceded it and to the culture of ‘quovadism’ more broadly. In fact, the film utilizes the culture of ‘quovadism’ not only to compete as a mode of artistic representation with theatre and opera but also, the classicist Maria Wyke argues, with history painting and the Polish novel itself. Building on her earlier studies of ancient Rome in silent  cinema, she argues that, despite the studio’s rhetoric of transcriptive ­fidelity, its film profitably translates the novel across languages, cultures, and media. It reindigenizes the story as rooted in Italian soil (and repurposes it as an Italian religious and political allegory). It also renders the story plurimedial (literary, performative, musical, pictorial, photographic, spectacular) and socially inclusive (available even to the illiterate in the collective space of the cinema). The dynamics that operated between the wide variety of visual illustrations of the novel circulating in Italy between 1900 and 1925 (images within printed editions, on postcards, and in films and their publicity) are scrutinized by Raffaele De Berti and Elisabetta Gagetti. Applying their combined expertise in film history and classical antiquity, they demonstrate how these Italian ­artworks, emerging from varied sociocultural and commercial contexts, conforming to distinct media requirements and with different classes of viewer in mind, gloss the Polish novel with varied emphases. Quo vadis becomes in turn an uplifting romance signalling a religious dawn, an inspiring allegory for modern class struggle, or a titillating spectacle of violence and erotic appetite. Our investigation of how a literate historical novel entered the circuits of popular visual culture then moves further out across the countries of Europe to focus on illustrative postcards that operated with looser ties to the text. As a specialist in the intersections of Polish literary culture with the visual, Ewa Górecka demonstrates how such postcards manifest some allegiance to the novel while catering for a mass audience, the majority of whom ­possessed little detailed knowledge of it or of Neronian Rome. Designed to stir up strong emotions in their users, the postcards depicting scenes of ­martyrdom often lose the tragic flavour of their Polish source and take on the characteristics of a different aesthetic system—kitsch (flamboyant colouring and strong sentimentality). The Hollywood blockbuster Quo Vadis, released in 1951, constitutes a turning point in transformations of the novel and ever since has probably been the most influential on the elements that still make up Neronian Rome in the popular imagination. Jonathan Stubbs, a historian of anglophone his­tor­ic­al

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24  Monika Woźniak and Maria Wyke films, argues that with Quo Vadis the MGM studio initiated an  industrial strategy of outsourcing abroad Hollywood’s big-budget ­film-making—a strategy of substantial economic benefit that also contributed to a larger American programme of economic and cultural intervention in post-war Europe. The studio took commercial advantage of the story’s literary pedigree (but scarcely its Polish origins), its Christian message (but not its Catholic flavour), and its setting in Rome. MGM shaped the narrative as a celebration of the emergence of a non-sectarian Christian republic and thus could market it as highly ­relevant to its time when the United States was emerging as a Cold War superpower. Martin Winkler brings to this volume his substantial ex­pert­ise on the intersections of classics and cinema and his knowledge of the reconstructive strategies of this historical film in particular. Here he explores some of the specific interventions the epic film made in the ‘Quo vadis’ story and their lasting attraction. Nero, for example, becomes an appealingly petulant emperor thanks to the music and lyrics sourced for him by the film’s composer and its historical adviser, and by the casting and ostentatious yet charming performance of the British actor Peter Ustinov. Thus, even though modern scholarship has now absolved Nero of the crime of arson, he remains in popular (especially intra-cinematic) memory the mad and bad poet who fiddled while Rome burned. Yet MGM’s film renders the emperor’s pseudo-poetic singing and self-aggrandizement equally memorable, according to Monika Woźniak, by virtue of borrowing for them some of the literariness of Sienkiewicz’s novel (such as survives in its original English translation). Bringing into play her disciplinary background in translation and intercultural studies, she further analyses how the film’s Petronius also retains from the novel his mastery of both obsequious flattery and pungent irony. Otherwise, she argues, this Quo Vadis confronts the challenge of recreating ancient Roman dialogue (the paradoxical expression of Latin in English) largely through a strategy of domestication. To be a hero in Hollywood cinema, Marcus Vinicius speaks in a contemporary American accent. Sienkiewicz’s novel has been a driving force behind the circulation in popu­ lar culture of the artist-emperor Nero, arena martyrdoms, the phrase quo vadis and the fictional strongman Ursus. Monica Dall’Asta and Alessandro Faccioli, from their perspective in film history and media studies, probe in particular the contribution of the novel’s fictional Lygian millworker to the creation and reformulation of the strongman across the Italian low-budget ‘sword and sandal’ films of the 1950s and 1960s. Constituted variously— through a process of transtextual play—from the mythic labours of Hercules, poses plastiques, the practices of bodybuilding, film adaptations of the novel,

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Introduction  25 other types of screen physicality, and other genres of film, the strongman ­confronts savage beasts, bends iron bars, rescues damsels in distress, and restores justice. Changeable in its spatial and temporal locations, this muscular male body is also mutable in its political, social, and sexual significations. The productive mutability of the Quo vadis story as a whole is brought out in the last chapter of this volume, which brings us into the twenty-first century and returns us, fittingly, to where we began—Poland. Elżbieta Ostrowska utilizes her expertise in Polish cinema to ask what ideological agendas have mo­tiv­ ated the return to the past in Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Quo vadis (2001), both the past of Neronian Rome and the past of its fictionalization in late nineteenthcentury partitioned Poland. For spectators in post-communist, Catholic Poland, the ambivalent film’s changing points of spectatorial identification, its casting, camerawork, mise en scène, and expressive music, offer an enchanting prospect of imperial plenty, an empowering narrative of religious hegemony over Western Christendom and, in between, affective moments of tragic ­victimhood. The film’s present-day narrative frame brings to the surface the work done by the circulation of Sienkiewicz’s Neronian Rome in popular ­culture, namely to interpret, as well as to entertain, the present.

Classical Reception and Popular Culture Our volume’s exploration of the novel Quo vadis and its multimedial trans­ form­ations, we would argue, lays bare the place of the classical in popular culture. Through its chapters, we ask how the classical world might be transmitted into the modern, how ‘high’ becomes ‘popular’ culture, and with what force and effect. In this case, a hypotext emerges whose patterns of representation spread out through a system of repetition and variation across time and between texts that then travel far from their origins in the classical past. That spread of representation is no longer anchored to a seabed of knowledge (here about Neronian Rome) but floats in discursive swirls, not all of which are classical in propulsion or direction. Why then does Nero’s Rome, as formulated in the Quo vadis story, matter and to whom? What do its popular cultural manifestations and reformulations tell us about modern investment in the classical as a means to reinforce or challenge contemporary concerns (of nation, religion, politics, gender, or sexuality)? Popular culture may not illuminate the classical past, perhaps, but its investigation does provide us with understanding of what the classical means to us in the present and what we do with it to explore ourselves.

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26  Monika Woźniak and Maria Wyke Postmodern intellectual trends such as identity politics, gender studies, and postcolonial studies, according to Susan A. Stephens and Phiroze Vasunia in their introduction to the collection Classics and National Cultures, ‘have taken a toll on the hegemony that Classics once enjoyed’, and it has in consequence become ‘a discipline conscious of its place within national and cultural systems and reflective about the larger networks of which it has been a part’ (2010: 8–9). We could add to those trends postmodern cultural studies, and its understanding of the classical within modern networks of popular culture, to those trends. Exploring popular culture is an invitation to classicists to enter the waters of a post-classical world where Graeco-Roman traditions are not exceptional. It is also an invitation to join with other scholars in acts of multidisciplinary discovery. Rethinking classics and classical reception has required the elaboration of new metaphors. The sea has already been utilized by Shane Butler in his introduction to the essays Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception (2016). There he begins with the apparent stability of nineteenth-century science and metaphors of geology to describe our relationship to the distant classical past and the important time in between that connects then and now. But he moves on to explore our more humanistic appreciation that we can never dig right down to the bottom of things (‘antiquity as it really was’) fully to resurrect them. The time in between is not comparable to the solidity of geological strata but to the shifting depths of the sea. In the same volume, Alex Purves prefers not the depth but the surface of the sea to express the transience and contingency of our access to the classical past (especially 2016: 79).38 However, we are indebted here for our marine metaphors to the work of Marco Carbone on the convergence of classics and popular culture in particular, in Transformations of Scylla and Charybdis: Encounters with Otherness and Ancient Greek Myth in Post-Classical Perspective (2017). As befits his study of ancient marine myth in modernity, he describes popular culture as a turbulent ocean beyond the shores of traditional classics. Graeco-Roman antiquity is ferried out to that present on the opaque waves of its reception. Thus we need to plot the convergence of classics and popular culture in terms of ocean­ic maps of currents and whirlpools. This is surface, but not superficial, classics. 38  Cf. Richardson 2019, who introduces a collection on Classics in Extremis: The Edges of Classical Reception in terms of the radical fluidity of classics once it has been decentred from elite Western culture.

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PART I

L IT E R A RY C ONT E XT

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2 The Paradoxes of Quo vadis the Polish Classical Tradition in Action Jerzy Axer

The reception of classical culture in Central and Eastern Europe has been ­different from that in the West in many respects. The region was always ­situated ‘between’ East and West, which meant its development was typical of borderland areas. People in this part of Europe suffered bondage unusually often, although they equally often had the chance—but also faced the ­necessity—of making sovereign decisions and choosing from different ­cultural offerings. From the point of view of reception of the Graeco-Roman tradition, Polish cultural heritage has several distinctive characteristics, one of which is worth highlighting. During humanism, a unique subculture of reception of the ancient Mediterranean tradition developed within the Polish-Lithuanian Jagiellonian state, one that I call the ‘gentry nation subculture’.1 Among the components of the gentry nation’s identity was a set of cultural practices that one could collectively describe as latinitas.2 In social communication, it encompassed more than 200 years (the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries) of experience using a supra-ethnic language of the political nation, a language of which Latin interspersions and crypto-quotations were an inalienable part. This Latinate language was a distinguishing feature of individual civic identity as well as the gentry’s collective identity; it was conducive to the development of a set of notions defining the sphere of universal values shared by the ­pol­it­ical nation. Regardless of our judgement of the true impact that Roman in­spir­ations and models had on the gentry democracy, there is no doubt that concepts such as res publica, civis, and—especially—libertas formed the core of the system’s self-interpretation. Adapting Cicero, people believed that nos

1  Cf. my study Axer 2017. 2  For more on the complexity of the notion of latinitas, see Axer 2009–10. Jerzy Axer, The Paradoxes of Quo vadis: the Polish Classical Tradition in Action In: The Novel of Neronian Rome and its Multimedial Transformations: Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis. Edited by: Monika Woz ń iak and Maria Wyke, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198867531.003.0002

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30  Jerzy Axer Poloni ad libertatem sumus nati, aliae nationes servitutem pati possunt (‘we Polish people are born to be free, other nations endure slavery well’).3 When the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth fell at the end of the ­eighteenth century, its entire legacy was subjected to reinterpretation and re­def­in­ition by Polish elites aiming to propose a new identity for what was now a nation without a state (this took place within the practices of family upbringing as well as academic reflection and artistic activity). After the country was partitioned, how the partitioning powers utilized antiquity was fundamentally different from the classical tradition present in the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth’s cultural heritage. In nineteenth-century Russia (as in Austria and Prussia), reflection on Graeco-Roman antiquity was a part of ‘civic upbringing’, a means of justifying the mission of the empires. The ­latinitas of the Polish gentry nation, however, transformed over time into an elem­ent of the Romantic version of patriotism on the one hand and a component of the ‘Pole-Catholic’ cluster on the other. It also became attractive for Poles during the partitions to view Latinity as a quality inseparable from Polishness. At the same time, this Latinity was meant to serve as evidence of the Polish people’s Europeanness. ‘Europe ends where Latin ends,’ cried Rector Józef Mianowski at the opening of the Main School of Warsaw in 1862; ‘Poland is a Latin splinter piercing the healthy body of Slavdom,’ countered Russian ideologues of the empire.4 This is the complex and contested culture of classical reception in which Henryk Sienkiewicz was brought up. A student of the Main School of Warsaw, he went on to become the greatest prose writer in the history of partitioned Poland. He had an overwhelming influence on the historical imagination of at least five generations of his compatriots. He was the first Polish recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and also the first writer in Polish to be an international success. Building his myth of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (in his Trilogy novels) and rooting the ancient Poles in the early Christianity of Nero’s Rome (Quo vadis), Sienkiewicz synthesized the dreams of gen­er­ ations living in ‘enslaved Poland’ and passed them on into the future. That same Sienkiewicz devised his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Latin. Sienkiewicz’s books have been translated into a few dozen languages. The artistry of his prose, however, is hard to translate. This is especially true of the books set in the Old Polish tradition, but it also applies to his most ‘cosmopolitan’ novel: Quo vadis. The thing that makes Sienkiewicz’s novel about Nero’s Rome an original contribution to world literature is not easily 3  See further Axer 2012: 241.

4  Mikołajczak 1998: 348.

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The Paradoxes of Quo Vadis  31 r­ ecognizable today, even to educated Polish readers, and could go completely unnoticed by anyone brought up far away from the former peripheries of the Russian empire—an area that today we like to call once more Central and Eastern Europe. To understand the powerful influence this work had on the writer’s contemporaries, you need to realize that the way Sienkiewicz built his vision of ancient Rome, and the effect he triggered in readers, is paradoxical in nature. Let’s take a closer look at those paradoxes.

Latin in Polish The main paradox can only be fully appreciated by Polish-speaking readers. Sienkiewicz wrote his ancient epic in elegant and lucid Polish, seamlessly inserting fragments from Tacitus, Suetonius, and Seneca, but also in such a way that readers who had had anything to do with Latin at school un­avoid­ably associated the whole text with reading the Latin classics.5 At the same time, this prose is nothing like the language which translators from Latin into Polish used in his times (and still use today), in the way that it imitates the structures of the Latin language that are so different from the natural flow of our speech. How did he do it? I think what could point us in the right direction is the realization that Sienkiewicz wrote his novel of ancient Rome not for those who remembered Latin but for those who had forgotten it. Let’s take a closer look. The speech of two communities coexists in the novel: one is the Christian community; the other—much more elaborately developed—is the community of pagan Rome. For the former, Sienkiewicz decided to use some very cautious archaizing. This is a barely visible, thin layer of varnish composed of quasi-quotations from the Scriptures. Thus, the Apostles Peter and Paul in particular utter formulas clearly taken from the New Testament. Since Polish translations of the Bible are full of linguistic ­relics, we can conclude that readers recognizing their archaism sim­ul­tan­eous­ly felt them to be a part of their own everyday language experience.6 The fact is, the same expressions were components of the living Polish language, but that part of it which was reserved for communication in sacralized space and time.

5  Walczak 1991 contains a detailed list of different categories of expression that the author believes create an illusion of antiquity in the novel; he points to ancient onomastics, Latinisms, and archaizing. He does not consider the relationship between the Latin sources and the text of the novel. 6  The main translation of the New Testament used in Poland until the twentieth century was Jakub Wujek’s version from 1599; therefore the archaic expressions uttered by Peter and Paul would have been perceived as an inherent element of sacral language.

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32  Jerzy Axer Most certainly, however, such archaization was not intended to correspond in any way to the Latin that might have been used by the book’s characters. Let’s add that the writer knew perfectly well that, in reality, most of the Christian community living in Rome communicated in Greek and were an isolated society, including at the linguistic level.7 Meanwhile, no archaization could be useful to any significant extent when attempting to reproduce the atmosphere of pagan antiquity. The fundamental issue was to find some kind of equivalent for the Latin speech of people from high society—educated and used to verbal duels. Thus, the writer decided to use the Polish of the late nineteenth-century intelligentsia, at the same time as he sought ways of lending it the syntactic and stylistic appearance of following the rules of ancient rhetoric. The choice of source models was crucial here. Among classical texts, Sienkiewicz had three types of ancient sources he could utilize when building his Roman novel: for descriptions, he could use Tacitus and Suetonius; for monologues, he could seek out material in Cicero’s orations and Seneca’s writings; for ‘conversations by post’, he could refer to his collections of the correspondence of Cicero, Seneca, and Pliny the Younger. He transferred only this third type of material directly into the novel. The entire structure of an ancient letter was reproduced in Polish. Epistolographic compositions brilliantly put together from Latin originals are a mechanism for plot development in this novel and appear at culminating moments. A kind of triptych composed of three letters forms the true message of this work: chapter LXXIII begins with a letter from Vinicius to Petronius and ­concludes with the latter’s reply; chapter LXXIV brings Petronius’s testament in a letter sent to Nero.8 Besides fake Latin letters in Polish disguise, fragments of original ancient sources have been quoted in the novel, namely excerpts from accounts by the Roman historians. This happens especially in descriptions. In the descriptive sections of the novel, the great majority of images, expressions, and formulas do not have any Latin equivalents in any original ancient source; however, they have been provided with a kind of ‘certificate of authenticity’. At moments important for plot development, the narrative is interspersed with paraphrases or quasi-translations from an original source. For example, the Fire of Rome 7  See e.g. McGonigle and Quigley 1988: 84. 8  In the first letter Vinicius, already living safely with Lygia in Sicily, explains to Petronius how his conversion to Christianity brought him happiness and gave meaning to his life. Petronius, in answer to his nephew, explains the reasons why he cannot reconcile his nature and philosophy with the new religion, even if he respects it and sees its moral strength. Finally, in his deathbed letter to Nero (based partly on Tacitus’s account), Petronius denounces everything that is corrupt and rotten in the Roman Empire, thus drawing attention to the momentum for its inevitable fall in the future.

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The Paradoxes of Quo Vadis  33 is heavily laced with Tacitus (Annals 15.38-44), Nero’s portrait is collated from Suetonius, Vinicius’s story of Lygia’s origins is a little-changed from Tacitus’s account of the northern tribes in his Germania, and, finally, the epilogue is a paraphrase of the death of Nero as described in Suetonius’s Lives (Nero 47-9). The material from the classical source is sometimes condensed (as in the above examples) and sometimes diluted (where the quotation of several lines of a Latin source is spread over many pages)—again that comparison to varnish comes to mind. This is the case with Nero’s feasts, with the games, with building the person who is essentially the novel’s protagonist, that is Petronius, where the ancient fabric boils down to a few dozen lines from Tacitus and snippets from the Satyricon. It is the same challenge with the character of Tigellinus—besides a few mentions in Tacitus, all we have are allusions scattered across the pages of Petronius’s Satyricon. The great crowd scenes and magnificent verbal images of Rome’s streets, the Forum Romanum, and the amphitheatre—in other words, descriptions of life in the metropolis—have no ancient literary model. In this case, quotation has been replaced mainly with onomastics—a solid foundation of Rome’s topography using a great many original names of sites: streets, roads, and bridges. Quo vadis includes more than 180 proper names that are mentioned almost 400 times. The climate of communing with original, period testimony is consolidated by the frequent presence of names of historical figures actually corroborated by the sources (over 250 people). The narrative also includes names familiar from mythology (almost fifty; some appear multiple times). Consequently, readers find foreign-language interspersions taken from the Roman world almost a thousand times in the text, although actual Latin sentences and formulas hardly appear at all. There is practically no Latin present, besides expressions understandable to even the laziest student of the classical gymnasium, such as heu heu me miserum (IV), Christus regnat (LV), videant consules (VII), peractum est (XIV), Ave, Caesar Imperator! Morituri te salutant (LVI), Pax vobiscum, innoxia corpora, sine armis et sine arte (LIX), and of course the title’s Quo vadis, Domine? Furthermore, there are a couple of schoolboy jokes: veni, vidi, fugi (XXVIII) adapted from Caesar’s famous u ­ tterance, and animal impudens (‘shameless animal’, I)—about women, after Seneca. The same jokes were still being repeated three generations later at the boys’ secondary school I went to. There is just one original quotation: the first three lines of a Horatian ode widely read at school (Carm. 1.3). Nevertheless, readers who have no problem understanding Latin receive clear signals that they are in a world where it reigns supreme. The text of the novel, especially its initial part, is peppered with Latin expressions and terms

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34  Jerzy Axer related to Rome’s material culture and social system, such as insula, mensa, laconium, tepidarium, frigidarium, nomenclator, hypocaustum, codicillum, scandala, vestiplica, alumna, and many, many others. The effect is enhanced by props (statues, vases, mosaics, jewellery—more than thirty items, about forty mentions) that strengthen the reader’s sense of engagement with a credible reconstruction of the past. In this case the writer sees no need for any crutches and appears to expect the reader to have some knowledge of ancient Rome’s realities. This is a clear indication that the readers whom the author is primarily addressing are those who have had some knowledge of Latin, even if they have ultimately completely forgotten it. So-called antiquitates, or ‘antiquities’, were an important part of school requirements; the realities of everyday life in the classical world, its history and mythology remained in student memories even after they were very rusty in Latin grammar.9 Thus, Sienkiewicz’s strategy is very obvious. As soon as readers got far enough into the book to believe the writer and let themselves be drawn into the space of that bygone world, the writer’s main concern became focused on protecting them from everything with which generations of Classics teachers had tortured young people at school. Meanwhile, readers young and old had the overwhelming impression that they were experiencing a work whose language invoked models of classical rhetoric. This impression is created, in my view, not by loan translations and choice of Latinate vocabulary but by the fact that the prose is intensely rhythmical. What I mean above all is its harmony, its rhythm, a way of writing that is meant first for the ears, then for the eyes. The stream of language resounding in the reader’s ears and stimulating the visual imagination is developed like the part of an actor-reciter. Readers are invited to experience the text in a way that was natural for Graeco-Roman antiquity, when only reading out loud was acceptable. Numerical proportions and syntactic parallelisms organize the recitation, making the ancient world of Quo vadis ‘speak to us’ ceaselessly. Thus, not imitating Latin sentence structure but applying the principles of rhetoric (familiar to anyone who has ‘endured’ reading texts by classical authors) is what creates the magic. This is a new artistic prose that uses poetic methods. The secret pull of this magic is that in creating images, metaphors, and similes, Sienkiewicz makes use of poetic means that grew from the ex­peri­ence of Polish Romantic poetry. This makes Quo vadis an anti-textbook, as it replaces erudition with a ­sensual experience of the past. The descriptions have the capacity to produce 9  For more detail, see Axer 2002 and 2009–10.

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The Paradoxes of Quo Vadis  35 extremely vibrant images, the language used to compose them is Polish ­without Latinization; this language connects the ancient world to the present day by building not distance but closeness. In my view, the condition for achieving complete satisfaction from reading the novel in the times when it was written, that is six or seven generations ago, was to have had the experience of those who had once learned Latin and felt relieved when they forgot it.10

Nero’s Rome in the Late Nineteenth Century The next four paradoxes that I would like to draw to the attention of r­ eaders of the novel in translation can be observed even if you are unfamiliar with the language of the original. Here is the first one. The topographic vision of Rome in Quo vadis is presented from the perspective of a pilgrim tourist visiting the city in the late nineteenth century. The ancient world has been reconstructed in the novel in full agreement with then-current archaeological knowledge, and that is precisely the image that became a revelation of their own magnificent past to Italians living among the ruins of ancient Rome. People who had lived next to the remnants of the ancient city for generations passed by them with indifference, not pausing to think what the palaces and temples whose ruins surrounded them had looked like originally. I am convinced that the fundamental source of the remarkable and immediate success of Quo vadis among Italians was that it gave wide circles of residents of the country’s ­cap­ital a chance to see themselves amidst the magnificent monuments and dec­ora­tive furnishings of ancient Rome. Surprise, which is a precondition for any artistic ­experience, enabled them to see their city through a stranger’s eyes and, for the first time, thanks to the literary creation of a foreigner, to feel citizens of the Eternal City in the full sense of the word. That is the first paradox. The mock-up of Rome designed by Sienkiewicz is inhabited by a few dozen characters with historical names who are positioned against the background of nameless crowds and remain inactive in the plot. They are set in motion only for moments, in episodic scenes. They are all easily found in encyclopaedias. They are static, sparing in gesture and in speech. Only a few people have a right to behave differently, that is not like human quotations of the classical 10  In this, Sienkiewicz proceeds very differently from his friend and rival, Teodor Jeske-Choiński, who Polonized all Latin terms. Instead of via he used ‘droga’ (road, in Polish), instead of porta he used ‘brama’ (gate, in Polish). He referred to a proconsul’s wife as ‘prokonsulowa’ (using the Polish feminine suffix denoting wife) and to the triclinium as ‘jadalnia’ (dining room).

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36  Jerzy Axer past. These are characters playing developed roles built on ancient themes. However, all of them—and this is the second paradox—belong more to Europe from Sienkiewicz’s times than to the world of Neronian Rome. We can identify characters from Sienkiewicz’s other novels here, only set in different times and different places, dressed in first-century costumes. Two examples: Petronius, arbiter elegantiarum, is part nineteenth-century dandy and part alter ego of the writer. Chilo Chilonides has wandered into the book straight from the Jewish quarter of Warsaw or Łódź. Note that only these characters enjoy freedom of movement in the novel. They enter interiors and go outside; they even take long walks. We accompany Petronius in the novel’s longest stroll, from the Palatine to the Forum. We follow Vinicius from the trans-Tiberim quarter to Ostrianum, and also from his own home to the home of Linus. Chilo Chilonides is an even more widely travelled character. And there we have the second paradox: from the viewpoint of the relationship between readers and Nero’s Rome, these main characters are emissaries mediating between the moment of reading and the portrayed world rather than characters belonging to that world. Quo vadis restored to Rome’s modern citizens the vivid memory of being descendants of the ancient Romans (as mentioned earlier).11 I see a third paradox in the fact that the restoration of that memory was brought about by a foreigner from a country lying beyond the limes in its broadest definition. In a perverse way, the author’s origins—to my mind—increased the power of the novel’s vision. In Polish Romantic and post-Romantic poetry and journalism, the suffering of enslaved Poland frequently finds symbolic expression in the figure of a Slavic martyr in the arena, bearing testimony to fearless faith in front of bloodthirsty crowds and imperial torturers.12 Sienkiewicz, however, lent this symbol extraordinary freshness by changing the main actor. It is not a gladi­ ator but a Slavic virgin who brings about the spectators’ desire for liberty. No mention of Poland is made anywhere, but even European readers completely unreceptive to the slogan promulgated by the Romantic poet and activist Adam Mickiewicz of ‘Poland as the Christ of nations’, and incapable of reading the Polish patriotic ‘Aesopian speech’13 of those times, could not fail 11  Including those who, in order to be able to read the novel, needed it to be translated into the Romanesco dialect. 12  See further the chapter ‘The Religion of Patriotism’ in Davies 2001: esp. 235–40. 13  The writers publishing in partitioned Poland faced an oppressive system of censorship, which forced them to come up with new means of expression. The situation grew particularly grim in the territories under Russian rule after the failure of the January Uprising (1863). With increasing Russification, including the banning of the Polish language from schools and universities, Polish

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The Paradoxes of Quo Vadis  37 to sense that the writer had personally experienced a system of political oppression. And this is the fourth paradox I want to discuss. Whereas Western societies had not known real tyranny for generations, the Polish experience in the area of the Russian partition14 provided valuable material for the writer’s imagination. At the core of nineteenth-century understanding of the Polish cause lay the contrast of those who were weak and helpless, yet indomitable and eventually victorious, with cruel tyrants who are ultimately defeated. The tradition of Polish latinitas (discussed earl­ ier) was only a seeming obstacle to making oppressors out of the Romans. The truth is, the Roman identity of the Poles was based on admiration for republican and never imperial Rome, on drawing a direct link between Rome from the time of the Catos, Brutuses, Ciceros, and Cassiuses, and the glory of papal Rome. For the gentry nation and its late grandchildren, the Rome of the Caesars was a repellent model, a grim reminder—proof that power uncontrolled by the citizens always degenerates into tyranny.15 It is amazing that even non-Polish readers sensed that Quo vadis in­corp­or­ated direct knowledge about times of oppression similar to those of Nero’s reign. I think what gave Quo vadis such power at the time it was written and long afterwards, power felt even by those who were unable to experience directly the novel’s force of style, was the writer’s familiarity with something we today might anachronistically call a ‘totalitarian system’. Sienkiewicz knew it from personal experience: widespread informing on others, an omnipotent secret police, sentencing without trial, fear, and humiliation. He knew what it was like to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds on a daily basis.16 As he reconstructed it for his readers, the author saturated Nero’s Rome with

literature had to develop new ways to circumvent the obstacles amassed against it by the censors. So-called Aesopian speech became an elaborate system of allusions, symbols, and allegories. In fact, in describing Aesopian language, scholars resort to a whole array of rhetorical tropes and devices like periphrasis, metonymies, synecdoches, and ellipses. Invisible to outsiders, these elements operated in a way that was perfectly clear to Polish patriotic readers who knew well how to see between the lines and even behind them. 14 Three partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth took place toward the end of the eighteenth century (1772, 1793, and 1795) and ended the existence of the state, resulting in the elim­ in­ation of sovereign Poland and Lithuania for 123 years. Russia gained the largest share of Poland (including Warsaw). 15  See further Sinko 1933. 16  Sienkiewicz’s first cousin Zdzisław Dmochowski perished in the January Uprising that erupted in 1863, while his older brother Kazimierz, who also took part in it, was forced to flee the country to avoid arrest and execution. For a succinct but perspicacious description and analysis of life in Poland in the nineteenth century under Russian rule, see Davies 2005 (particularly his chapter ‘The Russian Partition (1772–1918)’) or Wandycz 1974 (and his chapter on Russian Poland and the Industrial Revolution).

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38  Jerzy Axer k­nowledge of Russia, with the multigenerational experience of his own ­community. This is why those who read Quo vadis but lacked similar experience themselves felt a sense of connection with such direct and genuine knowledge of the fate of those in bondage as was not provided by other reading matter.17 As one of many powerful examples, the French essayist Henry de Montherlant declared in 1962 that Quo vadis made him understand the workings of a ­system ruled by pure oppression.18 Readers of Quo vadis became co-participants in the unfolding events to an extent that previous literature set in ancient Rome had not enabled them to experience. What more can a writer from another nation offer the distant descendants of his book’s characters—the Romans—and their city in exchange for a subject for his novel? What more can a writer do for his own nation than to turn its experience into a universal one?19

17  On the appeal of referring to Quo vadis in various epochs ‘after trauma’ (such as the experience of a totalitarian regime or the calamities of war), see Sztachelska and Szymborska 2018. The scholars analyse the film adaptations of Quo vadis. 18  ‘I don’t hesitate to say that Quo vadis has been the most important book of my life,’ declared Montherlant in his essay of 1962 about the novel. Montherlant perceived the modern world as an incarnation of all the vices depicted in Sienkiewicz’s vision of Neronian Rome. In his opinion, it was ‘terrifying and grotesque, like Nero’s face when Vinicius saw it for the first time’. See Marek 1978. 19  The above text also includes paraphrased excerpts from other works in Polish on Quo vadis that I have published or are in press.

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3 Sienkiewicz and the Topography of Ancient Rome the Riddle of Ostrianum in Quo vadis Adam Ziółkowski

Henryk Sienkiewicz was the opposite of a novelist of today: modest and little inclined to autoanalysis.1 It is perhaps for this reason that the number of his declarations on the origin of his greatest literary success is extremely small— three to be exact—and brief.2 The shortest, an answer to the questionnaire ‘On my literary work’, mentions laconically his reading of Tacitus and his impressions from a long stay in Rome in 1893–4.3 The best known, in a letter to Jean-Auguste Boyer d’Agen,4 adds a couple of details: The idea to write Quo vadis suggested itself to me by perusing the Annals of Tacitus, who is one of my favourite authors, and by a quite long stay in Rome. The famous Pole Siemiradzki, who at that time lived in Rome, served as my guide to the Eternal City and during one of our excursions made me see the chapel of Quo vadis. It was then that I conceived an idea of writing a novel placed in that epoch. . . . There is no doubt that the persecutions which the Poles suffer under the Prussian, and especially Russian, yoke con­sid­er­ ably influenced my projects.

The most detailed declaration, in a letter to Ange Galdemar,5 develops the same motives. First, his practice of reading Latin historians, especially Tacitus, 1  This text is a much modified version of the paper I read at the conference ‘Henryk Siemiradzki: un polacco a Roma’ (25–26 May 2012), organized by the Polish Institute in Rome. All the translations into English are my own. 2  The quotations in this paragraph come from the anthology of Sienkiewicz’s statements about Quo vadis in Bokszczanin 2002. 3 The questionnaire was an initiative of the Varsovian weekly Świat (1912) and Sienkiewicz’s answer was first published there in the same year. The full text can be found in Sienkiewicz 1949–55. 4  Bokszczanin 2002, 320–1 (24 January 1912). 5  Bokszczanin 2002, 304–5 (5 March 1901).

Adam Ziółkowski, Sienkiewicz and the Topography of Ancient Rome: the Riddle of Ostrianum in Quo vadis In: The Novel of Neronian Rome and its Multimedial Transformations: Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis. Edited by: Monika Wozń iak and Maria Wyke, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198867531.003.0003

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40  Adam Ziółkowski both not to forget Latin and because of his interest in history. It was while reading the Annals, continues Sienkiewicz, that an idea came to his mind to parallel in a historical novel these two worlds—the Roman Empire and early Christianity—one of which was the greatest political power in history and the other an exclusively spiritual force: ‘As a Pole I was attracted by the idea of the victory of spirit over physical force, and as an artist by those admirable forms in which the ancient world abounded.’ Second, the City of Rome: ‘Seven years ago, during my last stay in Rome I visited the City and her surroundings with Tacitus in my hand. I can say that I already had a complete idea, what remained was to find a starting point. I found it in the chapel of Quo vadis, in the view of St Peter’s, in the Tre Fontane, in the Alban Hills . . . Such is the ­origin of Quo vadis.’ This, however, is not all; at the end of the letter he adds, ‘all that I have written to you is too short, too dry, for to all those motives I should add my own feelings, my visits to the catacombs and also that ­luminous landscape which always surrounds the Eternal City – and the aqueducts seen at the sunset or at dawn.’ We see that in the author’s own words the two major impulses for writing Quo vadis were Tacitus and the landscape of Rome. Now, whereas critics and commentators have written hundreds of pages on the presence in Quo vadis of Tacitus and other classical and modern authors writing on ancient Rome, in analyses of the visual aspect of his inspiration (at least as important for a novelist writing in the time of pittoricismo and whose real strength, and the principal source of his literary success, was the incomparable plasticity of images and scenes), the City is almost non-existent. Ever since the publication of his novel, both Sienkiewicz’s admirers and vilifiers have emphasized the influence of nineteenth-century academic painting on his historical imag­ inaire in general and on Quo vadis in particular (especially the work of his host in Rome, Siemiradzki), but without relating it to his vision of the City. Of course, one would not expect his initial source of inspiration to remain as strong when he was writing the book, a year later and away from Italy. It seems, though, that Rome (both that which the topographers and archaeologists of the day were reconstructing and that which he was seeing with his own eyes from his first visit in 1879 to that decisive visit between 1893 and 1894) had an impact as great as, or greater even than, Tacitus or Siemiradzki, not only on particular episodes but also on the structure of the novel as a whole.6 6  The present text resumes a topic I treated in Ziółkowski 2002, 36–48, as I have come to realize, not diligently enough.

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Sienkiewicz and the Topography of Ancient Rome  41 When Quo vadis came to life, the truly scientific topography of ancient Rome was already seventy years old.7 For centuries a domain, in the best case, of enthusiasts with unrestrained imagination and, in the worst, of unscrupulous falsifiers, it became a discipline apart with precise aims and methods, thanks mostly to German scholars gathered round the Istituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica, which had been founded in 1829. Soon after, in 1842, a new young visitor appeared in subterranean Rome, Giovanni Battista De Rossi, founder of the archaeology and epigraphy of early Christian Rome as a ­scientific discipline. A real explosion of archaeological exploration occurred during the two decades after the Risorgimento, the time of the first frantic building expansion of Roma Capitale, when entire ancient districts appeared and almost immediately disappeared forever, usually leaving behind no other traces than short notices in two journals founded as organs for the protection and documentation of the architectonic remains of the ancient City and ­material found in them: Bullettino della Commissione Archeologica del Comune di Roma and Notizie degli Scavi di Antichità del Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione e della Reale Accademia dei Lincei. The beginning of a grave economic crisis in 1886 led to the suspension of both activities—constructional and archaeological—across the whole city, not only in new residential districts but also in the historical centre. It suffices to recall the suspension, after 1886, of Rodolfo Lanciani’s excavations in the Forum Romanum and on the Sacra Via, that were restarted only in 1898 by Giacomo Boni. Only in the ­catacombs did De Rossi’s investigation go on without interruption. This ­prolonged archaeological ‘holiday’ was not, however, a time of rest, but of digestion and synthesis of the enormous amount of material obtained from previous excavations and studies. It was then that Lanciani worked on his Forma Urbis Romae8 and Christian Hülsen published articles in Römische Mitteilungen (the exclusively German successor to Bullettino dell’Istituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica) that were to be the bricks from which the second magnum opus of the period, the third volume of Topographie der Stadt Rom im Altertum, would soon be constructed.9 Sienkiewicz’s long stay in Rome, when he conceived Quo vadis, took place at the close of that long period of reflection and synthesis. Of course, it takes time for new ideas to sink into the collective consciousness; besides, even today specialists are rarely unanimous and, at the end of the nineteenth 7  For a comprehensive survey of the study of the archaeology and topography of ancient Rome in Sienkiewicz’s day, see now Palombi 2006. 8 Lanciani 1893–1901. 9 Hülsen 1907.

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42  Adam Ziółkowski century, when genuinely scientific study of Rome’s topography had barely reached maturity, when the number of reconstructions and identifications shared by all (or nearly all) was much smaller and the liberty of interpretation much greater, learned opinions differed on almost every particular point. Last but not least, there remains the problem of how news on recent discoveries and ideas were propagated among non-specialists. As regards the topography and archaeology of ancient Rome, its unequalled popularizer was Lanciani himself: his pocket-size volumes10 quickly became the bible of Englishspeaking visitors to the Eternal City, including Sienkiewicz (which we know from his letters). But the list of authors whom laymen considered authorities was not restricted to professionals in our sense of the word, especially in the  field of Christian archaeology. The rediscovery of Rome’s primitive Christianity by De Rossi electrified Christian intellectuals of every confession (Catholic, Protestant, and Anglican), and presented them with the tremendous challenge of how to absorb the new discoveries and integrate them with their own visions of the pre-Constantinian Church in general, and (especially in the case of Catholics) with the tradition of the earliest Church of Rome in particular. For non-professionals like Sienkiewicz, the writings on Christian antiquities in Rome by Dom Prospère Guéranger (restorer of the Benedictine order in post-revolutionary France) or Frederic Farrar (chaplain to Queen Victoria and dean of Canterbury) had the same status and the same scholarly authority as those by Lanciani. Finally, another very influential source of information ought to be mentioned. Even quite recently, despite infinitely higher scholarly standards, we have seen the most sensational archaeological discovery of our time in Rome being announced first in The New York Times, two years before its first brief notice in an academic work and twelve years before its definitive publication.11 One hundred years ago, not only news­ papers but also salons and coffee houses patronized by the educated public were, so to speak, legitimate channels of diffusion for archaeological and topo­graph­ic­al novelties. In 1893–4, the topographical ‘offering’ for an author of a novel on ancient Rome was thus both very rich and very diverse. On the one hand, there were pious legends of late antique and medieval vintage (like the emblematic one of quo vadis, Domine?), and stories with which Roman ciceroni had been feeding pilgrims and other visitors for centuries. Both categories were deeply 10  Lanciani 1888, Lanciani 1892, Lanciani 1907. 11  I am thinking, of course, of the so-called Wall of Romulus, found in 1988 (The New York Times, 11 July 1988) and first signalled in Cristofani  1990, 97; the definitive publication is Carandini and Carafa 1995 (in reality 2000).

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Sienkiewicz and the Topography of Ancient Rome  43 rooted in the soil of the Eternal City and in the collective memory of all Christianity. On the other hand, there were the opinions of specialists, directly accessible or filtered by more or less competent popularizers. There is no doubt that Sienkiewicz, having constructed his novel around an apocryphal legend, also strove to render as well as possible the realities of the epoch. In my non-impartial opinion, in this endeavour he succeeded better than any other modern author writing on ancient Rome that I have read—especially in his presentation of the city’s topography. Inevitably, in a novel full of topographical references one can find here and there some small errors, usually oversights due to distraction or, perhaps, to the author’s excessive reliance on his own memory. In the rest of this chapter I want to have a closer look at a serious ‘error’ (between inverted commas because, as we shall presently see, it is not really an error): the location of the cemetery called Ostrianum, where in the novel the Christians gather to greet St Peter. The chapters set in this cemetery (XX–XXI) are the turning point of the novel’s plot, since it is there that Vinicius at last tracks Lygia down and the reader first meets St Peter (who in subsequent chapters keeps to the opposite, west bank of the Tiber, on the Vatican Hill and sporadically in Trastevere, until the final episode on the Via Appia). They are also very significant, however, for the question of Sienkiewicz’s strategies as a topographer of ancient Rome. There are two respects in which his location of the cemetery is exceptionally important. Firstly, the charge of having committed an error on this point incited the author to his only retort (as far as I know) in defence of the novel’s erudition. Secondly, the singularity of the location reveals an unexpected aspect of his work as a writer and his relations with the historical and archaeological authorities of the day. One of the characteristic traits of ancient Rome’s topography is that all the vestiges of pre-Constantinian Christianity are exclusively sepulchral, starting with the earliest, the so-called Memoria di San Pietro under the main altar of the Vatican Basilica, and are located outside the urban area. This total lack of traces of a Christian presence in the City itself, in the face of their relative abundance in burial grounds, already in late antiquity led to the supposition that for the first generations of the faithful the cemeteries were places not only of final rest but also of gatherings. Teaching, baptism, even the Eucharistic sacrifice would have taken place in the cemeteries or, preferably, in their underground parts, the catacombs. This opinion, entirely mistaken as we know today, at the end of the nineteenth century was shared by all the specialists: Catholics, Protestants, and others. It is therefore not surprising that in Quo vadis the Christians, in order to listen to St Peter, gather in a suburban

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44  Adam Ziółkowski cemetery, more precisely, ‘in Ostrianum, an old hypogeum [underground chamber] between Via Salaria and Via Nomentana’. Why precisely there? Late antique tradition linked St Peter’s stay in Rome with three sites, all extra-urban: two well known, the Vatican and the initial section of the Via Appia, and a third ephemeral, in today’s Quartiere Trieste, between Via Salaria and Via Nomentana (see Figure  3.1). This last tradition, forgotten probably by the beginning of the seventh century, appears for the first time in the middle of the fifth, the golden age of the Passions (apocryphal descriptions of the death of the martyrs). The Passio sanctorum Papiae et Mauri specifies that the two martyrs were buried ad nymphas sancti Petri, ubi bap­ tizabat (‘by the fountain of St Peter, where he used to baptize’). The Acta

Fig. 3.1  St Peter’s locations in Rome, according to the novel Quo vadis.

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Sienkiewicz and the Topography of Ancient Rome  45 Liberii et Damasi (The lives of the popes Liberius and Damasus) from the turn of the fifth century, and equally apocryphal, mentions the name of this ­cemetery: cymiterius Ostrianus, ubi Petrus apostolus baptizavit (‘the Ostrian cemetery, where Peter the Apostle used to baptize’), and its position non longe (‘not far away’) from a cemetery on Via Salaria, today known as the Cemetery of Priscilla. We find the same cemetery in the Index oleorum, in one of the papyri of Monza (in which are listed vessels containing oil taken by presbyter Johannes at the order of Pope Gregory the Great from lamps burning before the shrines of the martyrs in Rome for Queen Theodolinda, the Catholic wife of the king of the Longobards), described as sedes ubi prius sedit sanctus Petrus (‘the seat where first sat St Peter’); here prius (‘first’) contrasts with the Vatican mentioned in the same text. This is all, except that the Mirabilia urbis Romae, a much later work, full of errors and fabrications but often based on excellent sources, while listing Roman cemeteries mentions cimiterium fontis sancti Petri (‘the cemetery of the spring of St Peter’) after the cemetery of Sant’Agnese on Via Nomentana and that of Priscilla on Via Salaria. In late antiquity there was thus a short-lived tradition of St Peter’s first cathedra, that is of a place where the Apostle taught and baptized, in a cemetery north-east of the City, on Via Salaria or Nomentana, which in the Acta Liberii et Damasi is designated as cymiterius Ostrianus (correctly, coemete­ rium Ostrianum). As I have said, after the turn of the sixth century our sources become mute on a cult centre of the Apostle in that region apart from the notice quoted above in the Mirabilia. The tradition of a cult of St Peter in the district was revived by De Rossi who, on the basis of the above-mentioned texts and the topography of early Christian cemeteries in the neighbourhood, identified Ostrianum with the cemetery on Via Nomentana, close to the wellknown cemetery by the basilica of Sant’Agnese, which in the inscriptions found in situ was called coemeterium Maius and is known also from the Martyrologium Hieronymianum.12 It would thus seem that everything is in order: in his narrative Sienkiewicz made use of the results of the most recent archaeological discoveries. And yet, it was this very detail that provoked him to put, in the journal Słowo for 31 July 1896, a retort to the charge of having committed an error, which the journal had repeated from an Italian review of Quo vadis. I quote some fragments starting with what Sienkiewicz says at the very beginning of his letter: Słowo, in a short article ‘The Italians on Sienkiewicz’, referring to the review of Quo vadis in Rassegna Nazionale, inserts the following remark: ‘According 12  De Rossi 1864, 189–91, De Rossi 1867.

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46  Adam Ziółkowski to Italian archaeologists the author committed an anachronism introducing characters from a novel set in the times of Nero to the Ostrianum cemetery, which came into existence in the 3rd century.’ Your correspondent, speaking of this review, on the whole a laudatory hymn, with great zeal emphasizes the only objection it contains, adding on his part the words ‘according to Italian archaeologists’. I have the review in question. Its Italian author A.G.  does not adduce any Roman archaeologists and speaks only of an anachronism with no quotations. Whether the Roman archaeologists say that the Ostrianum cemetery was founded in the 3rd century, I do not know, for having finished the novel I do not carry their works along. I only know that a notice like this casts a shadow on the solidity of my work and would be justified only if there were not any doubt concerning the question of the cemetery and its foundation in the 3rd century. . . . I repeat: I do not know, nor do I remember which archaeologists think that the Ostrianum cemetery was founded in the 3rd century; but I know that there are some, not among the least, who are of an entirely different opinion.13

There follows a very long quotation, about two-thirds of the whole letter, from a book by Dom Guéranger, Sainte Cécilie et la société romaine aux deux prem­ iers siècles (1874), in Sienkiewicz’s words ‘a work all too scientific and loaded with archaeology’, and rightly so. The book was emblematic of the ‘scientific’ Catholic apologetics of the day, that is a total defence, down to the smallest detail, of the entire Catholic tradition on the early Church, rigorously supported by the most recent discoveries, historical, philological, and arch­aeo­ logic­al, particularly the last, dutifully communicated to Guéranger by his friend De Rossi. Now the crucial, concluding part of the quotation from this work is as follows: ‘Ancient itineraries of the pilgrims coming to Rome, early martyrologies and other documents indicate that for that purpose [teaching, baptism, etc.] a hypogeum was chosen between Via Nomentana and Via Salaria, which had the name of Ostrianum cemetery.’14 And finally the conclusion to Sienkiewicz’s letter: This is not only what archaeologists say about Ostrianum and old papyrus documents, but also what the Church of Rome itself believes about this locality. I end on that since I believe that as an author I have the right to do so. I only wanted to convince the readers of Quo vadis to what extent even the 13  Bokszczanin 2002, 282–4. 14  In the original: ‘Les anciens Itinéraires des pélerins de Rome, les premiers Martyrologues et d’autres documents signalent, comme ayant servi à cette destination, un hypogée situé à la campagne, entre la voie Nomentane et la voie Salaria, et il y est designé sous le don de cimetière Ostrianum.’

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Sienkiewicz and the Topography of Ancient Rome  47 smallest details of my work can be supported with proofs, how painstaking the work was.

Thus Sienkiewicz. So, was the objection of the reviewer from Rassegna Nazionale, or perhaps of anonymous ‘Italian archaeologists’, justified or not? The answer is both yes and no. Yes, because the archaeological investigation of the Coemeterium Maius demonstrated without a shadow of a doubt that it dated from the third century.15 No—and here we come to the crucial point— because Sienkiewicz had identified Ostrianum not with the Coemetrium Maius on Via Nomentana but with the cemetery of Priscilla on Via Salaria, more than one kilometre to the west. Let us take a look at the beginning of chapter XX of Quo vadis, in which Vinicius, Chilo, and Croton leave for Ostrianum (see Figure 3.2): They went through the Vicus Patricius, along the Viminal to the former Viminal gate, near the plain on which Diocletian afterward built splendid baths. They passed the remains of the wall of Servius Tullius, and through places more and more deserted they reached the Via Nomentana; there, turning to the left, towards the Via Salaria, they found themselves among hills full of sand-pits, and here and there they found graveyards. . . . They went now into a narrow depression, closed, as it were, by two ditches on the side, over which an aqueduct was thrown in one place. . . . This was Ostrianum.16

As can be seen from the wording of the novel, the author does not locate Ostrianum on Via Nomentana; the reader is certainly placed instead in one of the Christian cemeteries on Via Salaria. The mention of an aqueduct proves that the author had in mind the Cemetery of Priscilla in the Villa Ada, the most remote from the City. The aqueduct in question is Aqua Virgo/Acqua Vergine, constructed by Marcus Agrippa, the only one that has been functioning from antiquity down to our day. Fed by a vast system of water-bearing strata at the eighth milestone from the Porta Collatina, its course first follows that of the road of the same name then, in today’s urban area, it makes a great semicircle along Via di Pietralata and thence, passing through the district between Via Nomentana and Via Salaria, reaches the area of Villa Ada, from which it turns southwards, towards Parioli, Villa Borghese, the Pincio, and finally the Campo Marzio. The aqueduct ran underground for most of its course except for the last section in the low zone of Campo Marzio: ‘most of 15  Fasola 1954–5, 75–9, Fasola 1969, 107–28. 16  Sienkiewitz 2016 (1896), trans. Curtin, no pag.

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48  Adam Ziółkowski

Fig. 3.2  Vinicius’s route to Ostrianum.

its course’ because in the upper section, in some particularly low places, it had to be supported by arcades as well. The last of these places is precisely the valley between Via Nomentana and Via Salaria. Just behind the basilica of Sant’Agnese the ground falls away, reaching its lowest point by Via dei Giordani. In that area the arcades of the aqueduct could still be seen in the

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Sienkiewicz and the Topography of Ancient Rome  49 1920s. In the light of all these indications, Sienkiewicz’s Ostrianum can only be some part of the vast cemetery of Priscilla. Now, even in the novelist’s day this identification could claim some arch­ aeo­logic­al support. In 1889, four years before the author’s long visit to Rome, De Rossi found the probable nucleus of that cemetery: a crypt used for ­bur­ials, called the hypogeum of the Acilii, on the basis of fragments of sumptuous early imperial marble sarcophagi of the Acilii Glabriones, who were perhaps the most aristocratic Roman family of the late first–second century ad and, according to Christian tradition, were linked with the new faith already in the second half of the first century.17 In 1901, a member of De Rossi’s team, Orazio Marucchi, would investigate another hypogeum linked with that of the Acilii, which had been discovered at the same time but temporarily left unexplored, and identify the whole cemetery with Ostrianum on the basis of well-laid basins he found there and which he interpreted as a ­baptistery.18 Yet, even before Marucchi’s discovery, a crypt within the regina delle catacombe might have appeared a better candidate for identification with the ‘cemetery where Apostle Peter used to baptize’ mentioned in the Passio Papiae et Mauri and the ‘cemetery of the fountain of St Peter’ mentioned in the Mirabilia, because the nuclear hypogeum of the Acilii seemed to date from the second or even first century.19 The late, third-century dating of the Coemeterium Maius, if identified with Ostrianum, inexorably led to the conclusion that the tradition on the original cathedra of St Peter in this ­district had been a pious legend born after the triumph of Christianity. The identification of Ostrianum with the cemetery which seemed to date from apostolic times was thus much more than just another hypothesis: it was a defence of the tradition on the pastoral activity of St Peter in the SalarioNomentana district. Returning to Sienkiewicz’s reply to the objection made by the reviewer of Rassegna Nazionale, it is striking that neither realizes that in speaking of Ostrianum they have different cemeteries in mind. The reviewer, rebuking Sienkiewicz for the anachronistic placement of a key scene with St Peter in a cemetery founded in the third century, is not aware that under the name of Ostrianum the author means the cemetery of Priscilla, not the Coemeterium Maius. The author, emphasizing that not all the Roman archaeologists date Ostrianum to the third century, does not realize that different datings result 17  De Rossi 1888–9a, pp. 15–66; see also De Rossi 1888–9b. 18  Marucchi 1901a, Marucchi 1901b, Marucchi 1902. 19  ‘Might have appeared’ since both texts clearly distinguish between this cemetery and that of Priscilla.

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50  Adam Ziółkowski from different identifications, and defends his position with a quotation from Guéranger who died fourteen years before the finding of the hypogeum of the Acilii. We shall see shortly that the reviewer’s misunderstanding is really that of his informants (undoubtedly ‘Italian archaeologists’), and those among them who may have been responsible for it. As for Sienkiewicz, he himself explains the reason for his lack of awareness in the letter to Słowo I have quoted. He is a novelist, not a scholar; having finished Quo vadis, he also finished with the archaeology of ancient Rome. He is writing his letter two years after the publication of the book, from Zakopane in the Polish mountains, where, immersed in the study of medieval Poland, he is working on his future masterpiece The Teutonic Knights (1900). He has therefore every right not to remember all the details of one particular question about Rome’s topography, a very important question of course, but precisely one among many he had to  grapple with— obliged by his literary conscientiousness—while writing Quo vadis. It is a pity that Sienkiewicz did not write anything like this during his work on the novel because that might inform us in what manner and from whom he learned about the proposition to identify the hypogeum of the Acilii with Ostrianum. Here we are facing a true mystery. The hypogeum was discovered in 1889 but, as I mentioned above, Marucchi proposed its identification with Ostrianum only after having explored its extent early in 1901, that is seven years after Sienkiewicz’s departure from Rome. We have seen that in 1896 the archaeological authorities on whom the reviewer from Rassegna Nazionale relied knew only De Rossi’s identification of Ostrianum with the Coemeterium Maius; and Marucchi supported this identification even later, in the original French edition of his magnum opus, Le catacombe romane, and in the original version of his famous historical and archaeological introduction to the second Italian translation of Quo vadis by Enrico Salvadori, both published in 1900. Even more eloquent is a report in a Varsovian weekly Tygodnik Ilustrowany from the end of 1901 entitled ‘Cmentarz Ostryański’ (‘The Ostrianum cemetery’), which relates a visit to the Coemeterium Maius, most probably made on 18 January of the same year, with Marucchi as the guide. Marucchi is said to emphasize that this cemetery, until a short while ago almost unknown and avoided by visitors, has recently become famous thanks to Quo vadis, and adds that, even though the Apostle surely taught and baptized there, he did it in the open because the underground cemetery certainly dates from later times; Sienkiewicz, speaking of a crypt, would thus have committed a small anachronism, quite forgivable in a novel. The same mistaken identification of Sienkiewicz’s Ostrianum (with the Coemeterium Maius instead of the cemetery of Priscilla) and the same

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Sienkiewicz and the Topography of Ancient Rome  51 reproach of anachronism suggest that one of the informants of the reviewer from Rassegna Nazionale was precisely Marucchi, which is not surprising considering his then position as the leading authority on Christian antiquities in the city. Even more significant is the fact that Marucchi publicly defended the identification of Ostrianum with the Coemeterium Maius even in the first days of the year in which he put forward in a learned and amply documented paper (published in the Nuovo Bullettino di Archeologia Cristiana, the organ of the Pontificia Commissione di Archeologia Sacra) an argument for its new location, the same location that Sienkiewicz had adopted six years earlier in Quo vadis. At this point we come to the somewhat humorous side of the story. In the second, updated version of his introduction to Quo vadis (1907) Marucchi writes at length about his identification of Ostrianum, emphasizing how well it matches the literary tradition regarding early Christian Rome and, at the same time, faithfully recording that in the previous editions of the novel he had accepted the then common opinion about its position on Via Nomentana. He adds the following note: Sienkiewicz describes magisterially a gathering of the Christians presided over by Apostle Peter in Ostrianum and places this cemetery on Via Nomentana, since while he was writing everyone acknowledged that it was on that road. Yet I have no doubt that if he knew new studies on the subject he would have moved the episode to the villa of the Acilii Glabriones on Via Salaria and this exquisite chapter would become even more interesting.20

As can be seen, Marucchi does not realize that the novelist had already made his chapter ‘even more interesting’, that he had placed the episode at the location Marucchi is indicating, without the benefit of knowing Marucchi’s new studies on the subject. The quoted note, apart from showing yet again how superficially the archaeologist had read Quo vadis (his introduction amply shows the extent to which he underestimated Sienkiewicz’s erudition and diligence), rules out the possibility that the novelist had obtained from Marucchi the hypothesis that Ostrianum should be identified with the hypogeum of the

20  ‘Il Sienkiewicz descrive magistralmente un’adunanza di cristiani presieduta dall’apostolo Pietro nell’Ostriano e pone questo cimitero sulla via Nomentana, perché quando egli scrisse tutti lo riconoscevano su questa via. Ma io non dubito che se egli conoscesse i nuovi studi fatti in proposito trasporterebbe quell’episodio sulla via Salaria nella villa degli Acilii Glabriones e quel bellissimo capitolo sarebbe anche più interessante.’ Quoted from Enrico Sienkiewicz, Quo vadis?, Torino, 1933, pp. XXIV–XXV, and p. XXV n.1.

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52  Adam Ziółkowski Acilii. So we return to the question: from whom did Sienkiewicz learn about this hypothesis and let himself be persuaded to adopt it in the novel if, during his stay in Rome, the only identification in circulation was that put forward by De Rossi, the greatest specialist on early Christian archaeology in Rome, who had resurrected the tradition and the very name of Ostrianum, and who was then still very much alive? The simplest answer, most compliant with the principle of Ockham’s razor and most flattering for Polish national self-esteem, is that Sienkiewicz arrived at this idea by himself. Unfortunately, in our case, the principle of economy is hardly applicable. Apart from the remoteness of the possibility of such an initiative on his part in topographic and archaeological matters in general, it suffices to recall his credo on historical material in the letter to Słowo, where he emphasizes ‘to what extent even the smallest details of my work can be supported with proofs’ and affirms that, in the case of Ostrianum (as in all ­others), he followed the works of Roman archaeologists. Regretfully, we are thus obliged to discard the idea of Sienkiewicz as Polish topographer of ancient Rome, and look elsewhere for the source of his position on the matter at hand. Similarly, we have to rule out the possibility that Sienkiewicz read about the hypothesis in the daily press or heard about it from an acquaintance who was not an archaeologist. The very fact that, even at the beginning of 1901, everybody—professionals as well as laymen—sought the novelist’s Ostrianum on Via Nomentana (despite his precise topographical indications otherwise) shows how strong was the hold that De Rossi’s identification had on the common consciousness of the day. This, and the persistence with which Sienkiewicz, in the letter to Słowo, stresses that the ‘apostolic’ dating of Ostrianum was defended by ‘not the least among Roman archaeologists’, clearly indicate that the source of his identification of the cemetery with the hypogeum of the Acilii was a specialist, or specialists. And since we know beyond any doubt that this hypothesis was first presented in writing in 1901 by the archaeologist who a couple of months before had still defended the rival identification, the only way in which Sienkiewicz could have learned about it in 1893–4 was through personal contact with the scholar who first conceived it, almost certainly an archaeologist, probably a specialist in Christian archaeology, that is a pupil of De Rossi. Already in 1893–4, before the worldwide fame he achieved through the incredible success of Quo vadis, Sienkiewicz would have had easy access to the circle of scholars specializing in ancient, especially Christian, Rome, the more so as his cicerone was Henryk Siemiradzki, to whom every door in the

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Sienkiewicz and the Topography of Ancient Rome  53 city stood open. I imagine that during his stay, collecting material for Quo vadis, he met one of the members of De Rossi’s team, from whom he learned about a discovery with far-reaching historical implications, admirably s­ uit­able for the plot of the novel he had in mind. Information such as this from the mouth of ‘not the least among Roman archaeologists’ would have had for Sienkiewicz, as novelist rather than specialist in Rome’s topography and archaeology, a weight sufficient to counterbalance the common opinion supported by the authority of the grand master of the domain, especially as (let us emphasize it yet again) the placement of Ostrianum in the cemetery of Priscilla ‘saved’ the tradition that St Peter when in Rome first taught there. The identification of this presumed informant of Sienkiewicz is closely connected with the apparent weakest point of my hypothesis: why did the author’s informant not disseminate his proposition under his own name? My answer follows. At the end of his life De Rossi had three potential successors, all worthy of the title of ‘not the least among Roman archaeologists’: our old acquaintance Orazio Marucchi, Mariano Armellini, and Henry (or Enrico) Stevenson. We have seen that Marucchi is out of the question, which leaves us with Armellini and Stevenson. Now, they both died prematurely soon after Sienkiewicz’s departure from Rome, Armellini in 1896 and Stevenson in 1898. As we see, everything fits: we have two leading Christian archaeologists, both able to conceive, be it as a fleeting hypothesis, the identification of Ostrianum with the hypogeum of the Acilii and inform the writer about it (and also persuade him to adopt it in his novel), and both died just after the publication of Quo vadis. This would explain why the first archaeologist to present this hypothesis in a scholarly manner was their fellow disciple Marucchi who, still at the beginning of 1901, was following the opinion of his master, De Rossi. I  think that we should seek Sienkiewicz’s informant, or his informant’s informant, in one of those two. Be that as it may, the first published work in which we find the identification of the oldest memorial of the Apostle with the hypogeum of the Acilii is Quo vadis. Today we know that this identification was mistaken;21 but, after  its publication by Marucchi, for a quarter of a century (and among non-specialists in archaeology much longer, until the final disappearance of the apolo­ get­ ic attitude among Catholic students of ancient Rome), this hy­poth­esis was at the very least as legitimate and ‘scientific’ as that of De Rossi. It is therefore difficult to speak, in this case too, about an error by Sienkiewicz. I think, however, that the most interesting and significant aspect 21  See Fasola 1969.

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54  Adam Ziółkowski of the ‘case of Ostrianum’ lies elsewhere. Thinking of Quo vadis and other historical novels, we tend to perceive the relationship between novelists and scholars as unidirectional, with the novelist making use of ideas already implanted in the scholarly world to enrich his work. But, in our case, are we not in the presence of a novelist who actively diffuses the ideas of an archaeologist that the scholar does not dare, or has had no time, to present publicly? I wonder.

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4 Costumes in Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis and their Literary and Painterly Sources Ewa Skwara

The authors of historical novels utilize many strategies to recreate the realities of the times in which they set their plots. They draw on primary sources, both historical and literary, for characters, events, and dialogue. They also create the impression of authenticity through an attempt to reconstruct the customs and practices of a bygone era. Material culture, therefore, also plays an extremely important role in their construction of a past world. After all, the protagonists have to live in appropriate houses, dress in historically accurate clothes, use everyday objects, and therefore—as in theatre—they need fitting ornaments, props (dishes, books, everyday objects), and costumes (clothing). Sienkiewicz is no exception. His Quo vadis is strongly saturated with clas­ sic­al antiquity. The writer has achieved this effect above all by invoking, para­ phrasing, quoting, and reproducing ancient literature. In addition to the frequently mentioned names of ancient poets and writers, as well as explicit or paraphrased quotes from their works, one can also find passages borrowed from classical works that allow one to look at the novel as a creative blend of ideas derived from ancient literature. The plot, depicting major historic events of Nero’s reign, undoubtedly follows the key historians (such as Tacitus or Suetonius); the atmosphere and charm, however, are not achieved through historical accuracy but rather through the invocation of ancient literature and philosophy. Furthermore, we are not talking about a simple list of quotes, as this would only give the effect of a textbook compilation. Ancient literary works appear in the novel in their original form or in translation a handful of times (Homer Odyssey 6.149–55, 188; Suetonius Claudius 21; Horace Odes 1.3.1–3). Much more frequently mentioned are the names of ancient poets, philosophers, and artists (Aeschylus, Anacreon, Apicius, Aristotle, Cicero, Ewa Skwara, Costumes in Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis and their Literary and Painterly Sources In: The Novel of Neronian Rome and its Multimedial Transformations: Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis. Edited by: Monika Wozń iak and Maria Wyke, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198867531.003.0004

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56  Ewa Skwara Democritus, Homer, Lucretius, Lysippos, Myron, Persius, Phidias, Pliny, Praxiteles, Scopas, Seneca, Sophocles, Theocritus, Virgil). It is remarkable that missing from this list are the names of Horace and Ovid. It seems, however, that this omission is intentional—Sienkiewicz does not mention these authors because it is their verses that he most often borrowed and paraphrased to then use as material for his novel. An insightful reader, therefore, will find in Quo vadis such Horatian elements as uides ut alta stet . . . (Odes 1.9) and exegi monumentum (Odes 3.30), and the Homeric poet’s juxtaposition of sleep and death (Iliad 14.231; 16.672; 16.683) or the prayer of Chryses the priest (Iliad 1.37–42).1 Latin and Greek literature served the writer as an inspiration for the way in which he created his vision of love. Sienkiewicz used models created by Roman comedy, called palliata, and by Latin love poetry. Lygia’s inaccessibil­ ity and all the obstacles put in front of the young lovers are a typical scheme known from palliata, Vinicius’s devotion and his readiness to sacrifice all remind one of love poetry’s servitium amoris trope. Sienkiewicz imitates plot ideas of Roman comedy and love poetry, but also borrows the language used to describe love and lovers. The protagonists speak with the tongue of Ovid, and Petronius even plays the role of a teacher of love. Plautus and Terence gave Sienkiewicz the models to construct love-filled plots, and Roman love poets taught him the language of affection (Skwara 2017: 29–40). Ancient literature served Sienkiewicz as inspiration for the plots and lan­ guage of his works; in Quo vadis he additionally set his characters against the background of a materially conceived ancient world. The plot is set mainly in the city of Rome, which has been meticulously reproduced in the novel on the basis of both ancient authors and archaeological excavations contemporary to Sienkiewicz’s writing. The accuracy of the descriptions is so great that even now you can easily find the streets of the Eternal City where the protagonists wandered. They were also equipped with historically accurate props and cos­ tumes. The author, however, avoided giving full descriptions of the Roman surroundings, limiting himself only to information about ‘some columns’, ‘statues’, ‘oil lamps’, ‘pitchers’, ‘a cubiculum or atrium’, and so on. Sienkiewicz remained as sparing in his depiction of costume. Yet when he does include this information, it is always significant. The outfit not only serves as an element authenticating the historical background of the plot but also informs the reader about gender, age, social status, and/or personality traits, as well as the attitude to fashion or even the morality of the protagonists. 1  Skwara 2016: 24–31.

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Costumes in Quo vadis and their Sources  57 This significance is one of the main reasons for the following analysis, together with two additional elements which make the topic even more interesting: Sienkiewicz’s imaginative borrowing of costumes from historical paintings and his proficiency in dealing with ancient garments in the first place as, for mod­ ern readers, they are not only almost undistinguishable but seemingly irrele­ vant to the plot. This chapter will try to analyse the significance of the costumes, the way the author uses them not only to provide period detail but also subtly to characterize individuals, and in doing so to show how much he was influenced by contemporary historical paintings.

Collective Costuming It seems that one of the most difficult tasks for historical novelists is the selec­ tion of costumes for characters embedded in ancient times. First of all, the small variety of outfits, which are often discussed, disputed, and criticized by researchers, poses a big challenge. It is harder, therefore, for authors to mark properly differences in dress and then expect their readers to spot and cor­ rectly interpret those differences. In Quo vadis Sienkiewicz handled this problem in an interesting way. It is obvious that all protagonists must wear clothes of some sort, and those clothes are often mentioned as a consequence of grammatical sentence structure, as a grammatical object. In such cases the author always clothes his protagonist in a tunic. Marcus Vinicius provides the best example in this respect: • Marcus takes off his tunic to ‘get into the tub of hot water’ (I);2 • under his tunic ‘his heart was beating at an unusual rate’ (VII); • he ‘covered his nose and mouth with the tunic’, all the way through the flames, and then his own tunic caught fire (XLIII); • he ‘tears the tunic on his chest’ when he begs for mercy in the arena (LXVI). In this capacity however, the tunic, is not only reserved for Marcus: • Lygia’s ‘breast heaves under her tunic’ (VII), ‘her heart beats as if it wanted to tear her tunic’ (XXVI); • Domitius Afer ‘spills wine on his tunic’ (VII); 2 All quotes follow the edition, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Quo vadis: powieść z czasów Nerona, ed. Tadeusz Żabski, Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, Biblioteka Narodowa II 298, Wrocław 2002. All quotes translated by the author of the chapter.

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58  Ewa Skwara • Chilo ‘spits out wine on his tunic’ (LIX); • Petronius ‘slides Eunice’s tunic off her shoulders’ (XXIX); • Nazarius ‘hides the purse under his tunic’ (LVII); • Ursus ‘pulls Vinicius by his tunic’ (LX). Sometimes the phrase ‘clothed only in a tunic’ appears as information about a character when they have taken off their outer robes, showing a sense of unfettered freedom when meeting with friends: • clothed only in a tunic Lygia comes to Vinicius, because she was already preparing for bed (XXVI); • Marcus plays ball in his tunic after taking off his toga (II); taking off his toga, Marcus runs from Nero’s palace to save Rome from burning (XLI and XLII). The tunic, therefore, becomes synonymous with clothing in general, as it is worn by every character in the novel, regardless of age, sex, or social status. This general usage is also clearly seen in the description of outer garments worn at feasts. Right at the beginning of the first of them, the participants are compared, poetically, with the statues decorating the interior of Nero’s palace, and are dressed in outer garments identified by their classical names as togas, pepla (a Greek outer garment for women), and stolae (a kind of toga for Roman women): Among the columns, next to the white statues of the Danaids and others depicting gods or heroes, flowed the crowds of people, men and women, also like statues, for they were draped in togas, peplums and stolae, charm­ ingly flowing to the ground in soft folds, on which there shimmered the gleams of the setting sun.  (VII)

Sienkiewicz limits any detail to a single description, namely that Acte pointed out to Lygia on her arrival at the imperial dining hall the ‘senators in widebrimmed togas and in colourful tunics’. Although this passing remark does not imply that absolutely all the male guests present at the banquet wore the ­so-called toga praetexta, later film adaptations often depict all the male ­revellers clad in just such a toga, with a purple border. It seems a bit ridiculous, as this kind of outfit was worn only by acting officials, priests during sacrifices, and children who had not yet reached manhood and could not wear a white toga virilis (Cleland, Davies, Llewellyn-Jones, 2007: 190–7). It is highly unlikely

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Costumes in Quo vadis and their Sources  59 that only these three groups would have attended such a party, but film-makers often do not pay much attention to how crowds of extras are dressed. For Sienkiewicz too, background characters might not matter much, as he clothed them in generic Roman tunics, togas, pepla, and stolae, but at least in this unspectacular description of some Roman senators he managed to remain his­ torically accurate. Equally casually he describes the women accompanying the guests of the feast: ‘. . . some women cloaked in the Roman way, some in the Greek, some in fantastic Oriental costumes’ (VII). Descriptions of senators gathered in great numbers or of groups of Christians never go into detail when it comes to costume. Equally little is said about the garments of the Christians bound for Ostrianum—men ‘were car­ rying flashlights, covering them . . . with coats, and the women were wrapped up carefully in long stolae’ (XX).3 Sienkiewicz observes the audience at the circus through the eyes of Ursus, who sees the ‘white togas of countless view­ ers’ (LXVI). It is hard to be more circumspect in such phrasing. Thus, everyone is wearing a tunic,4 and groups of characters are treated as a collective dressed in undifferentiated togas, pepla, and stolae. Yet sometimes, and therefore tellingly, Sienkiewicz provides detailed information about the costumes. He does so for the most important protagonists and when the gar­ ments themselves play an important role in the plot.

Protagonists’ Attire Sienkiewicz admittedly does not provide details that distinguish the clothing of individual characters, but the remarks he makes about their outfits at least provide information that helps to indicate their social status among other personal features. Petronius is always dressed in a toga, which Sienkiewicz repeatedly emphasizes, especially in situations where the social status of this arbiter elegantiarum plays an important role in the plot. So when Eunice expresses her thanks to him for letting her stay in his house, she kisses the edges of his toga (XII), the folds of which she is responsible for as his vestilpica or dresser (XIII). And when, after the burning of Rome, Petronius is supposed to promise the people that games will be organized in Nero’s name, 3  As stated by Scodel and Bettenworth 2009: 139, in Sienkiewicz’s novel ‘the Christian community is without class or ethnic distinctions’. 4  If a protagonist, for whatever reason, is someone who does not wear a tunic, the author always describes their attire in the broadest way possible, e.g. the rabbis were wearing long festive gar­ ments (L).

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60  Ewa Skwara and wheat, wine, and olive oil distributed, he must first silence the fevered mob. For this to happen he removes ‘his white toga with the purple border’ and swings it over his head. It is difficult for a clearer signal to be given that the owner of such an outfit is a high-ranking Roman citizen (XLVII). A similar, but this time more troublesome, sign of status is the rich ‘Augustian’s tunic’5 worn by Vinicius while looking for Lygia in the flames of burning Rome (XLIII). The people recognize his status and immediately shout threats against Nero and his cronies for having set the city on fire. Marcus is unfortunately included among them by the angry mob. This scene is one of the few moments in the novel in which Sienkiewicz talks about Vinicius’s costume, implying his especially high status in contrast to the threatening crowd by which he becomes surrounded.6 Most other comments on costume do not identify rank but describe disguises that are supposed to hide it. When the distraught lover plans to look for Lygia, who has been abducted by the Christians, he says: ‘I'll take the dark lacerna and go wandering around the city. Maybe I will find her in disguise. . . . Tell them to give me a Gallic lacerna with a hood.’ (XII). The lacerna is a cape with a clasp on the right shoulder or chest. Its Gallic version with an opening in the centre for the head and often an extra piece of fabric to serve as a hood (sometimes identified with a paenula), Vinicius, or rather Sienkiewicz, uses as a disguise to conceal his identity or, at least, his high status. This device is repeated several times. Marcus puts on: • a Gallic cloak with a hood, when he goes out with Chilo and Croton to spy on the Christians at Ostrianum (XIX), and after that, when he and Petronius plan to capture Lygia, while she is being carried in a coffin, pretending to be dead (LVII); • a slave’s coat, when he and Nazarius go to the prison (LVII); • a slave’s dress (which is a plain-carded tunic), when he visits Lygia in prison (LX, LXI). Sienkiewicz does not give any details for these costumes, but the terms lacerna and ‘Gallic hooded cloak’ often appear in his descriptions of the lower classes,

5  It is hard to say what Sienkiewicz meant by ‘Augustian’s tunic’—the dress of someone from the imperial court. He probably means that Vinicius was wearing a tunica laticlavia (a tunic with a wide vertical stripe). 6  Vinicius’s high rank is attested by the scarlet tunic he wears to Nero’s feast (VII), and later the colourful garments of a Syrian priest he puts on to receive Lygia in his house (X).

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Costumes in Quo vadis and their Sources  61 so such garments can be seen as an indicator of low status. Both Peter (XX) and Chilo (XXIV) wear hooded cloaks. Sienkiewicz describes the garments of each of them as unequivocally poor, by deploying evaluative adjectives. Peter wears ‘slave’s clothes’ (XXI), or sometimes ‘a striped coat’ (XXIII), or ‘a simple poor man’s lacerna’ (XXXVI) and Chilo ‘is dressed sloppily, in a dark tunic woven from goat wool and a coat full of holes made from the same material. His dress was a testament to his true or pretended poverty’ (XIII). But when Chilo becomes Nero’s confidant and betrays the Christians, Sienkiewicz dresses him in white robes (LIV), thus emphasizing his radical improvement in status. Everything suggests that Sienkiewicz uses a very simple dress code: highranking Romans (including Vinicius and Petronius) wear rich tunics and white robes framed with a purple border, and the poor (such as Chilo and Peter) cover their plain tunics with lacernae and Gallic cloaks with a hood. Such a binary system for costumes may be surprising, especially if we con­ sider that, according to our sources, the lacerna was extremely popular in the mid-first century ad and was worn by representatives of all social strata. It served not only as a raincoat but also as a coat to be put over the toga. Elite Romans, however, dressed in it only in unofficial situations, like going to the theatre or the circus (Cleland, Davies, Llewellyn-Jones,  2007: 108). Perhaps the juxtaposition of these two types of costume was the result of reading the second Philippic of Cicero and, especially, the part in which the author high­ lights the contrast between the orator, dressed the traditional Roman way in a toga, and Antony, showing up in Gallic shoes and lacerna (nullis nec Gallicis nec lacerna, Cicero, Philippics 2.76). Although Cicero wanted to highlight the nonchalance of his adversary, not his poverty, the contrast he poses between the toga and the lacerna must have remained embedded in Sienkiewicz’s mind. There is almost no mention of women’s costumes, with the exception of the partners of our protagonists (Lygia, Eunice, and Poppaea), and these are also rare. When Lygia appears for the first time in Aulus’s garden her clothes are not even mentioned; only the description of the preparations for Lygia to join Nero’s feast force the author to comment on her necessary change of clothing. Sienkiewicz does not mention what the girl wore when she came to the pal­ ace, but Acte found this dress insufficiently elegant and chose for her entry into the imperial presence a ‘soft golden tunic and snow-white peplum, which were laid in folds’ (VII).7 7  The look was completed with white shoes embroidered with purple thread, which also had a golden ribbon encircling the ankle in a criss-cross. A string of pearls hung around her neck (VII).

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62  Ewa Skwara The peplum or, rather, peplos (because it is a Greek garment) is the most common dress in artistic representations of women from the fifth century bc onwards.8 It is almost uniquely associated with the image of virginal Athena at the Panathenaia; hence it has become a ritual robe symbolizing the fem­in­ ine virtue of chastity, although one must admit that the idea took shape pri­ marily in modern literary studies rather than in ancient sources. It was no coincidence that Sienkiewicz dressed Lygia in a peplum, and a white one to boot. He wanted to emphasize her innocence in general and clash her purity with the lavishness of Nero’s feast. The second description of Lygia’s dress supports this view. It appears in a scene where the girl meets with Vinicius, when he briefly arrives in Rome from Antium. Lygia expected her beloved, according to Sienkiewicz, because instead of wearing her usually dark robes (which were previously never men­ tioned) she was wearing a white stola (XXXIX). A stola was a garment reserved for Roman matrons, that is for a freeborn wife of a Roman citizen. A characteristic feature of this dress was its length, which modestly covered the whole leg from the waist to the foot. It was belted at the waist with cord.9 It signalled high status and required respect, thus protecting the wearer against improper and unwanted behaviour (Cleland, Davies, Llewellyn-Jones, 2007: 182). The stola was also given an ethical dimension—it was a symbol of mari­ tal fidelity.10 It is not surprising, therefore, that Sienkiewicz chose to dress Lygia in a stola, although the girl was neither a Roman nor married. The trad­ ition­al symbolism of the robe underlined the characteristic features of our heroine—her purity and fidelity. Eunice, on the other hand, was neither Roman nor a wife, and spent half the novel as a slave, later to be liberated by Petronius. Nevertheless, this pro­ tagonist was granted the privilege of wearing a white stola as if in recognition of her loyalty to Petronius (XXIX). She also appears in white (although we do not know whether in a stola) at the last feast, during which she commits Embroidery, purple thread, and especially pearls had to be seen as part of a very refined outfit, fitting for attendance at court. 8 The peplos was a Greek seamless dress fastened on the shoulders and folded around the body. In the days of Homer, women treated it as casual clothing, but after the archaic era it was no longer used in daily life and became a ritual robe. See Cleland, Davies, Llewellyn-Jones 2007: 143; Houston 1947: 45. 9  The Roman male elite considered loose garments to be a sign of moral or political instability and irregularity, e.g. Sulla warned against the loosely belted young man, thinking of Caesar (Suetonius Iulius 45.3). See too Horace (Satires 1.2.25), Cicero (In Lucium Catilinam orationes 2.22; In Verrem actiones 5.31), Cassius Dio (43.43.4). Also women’s clothing, when not belted but flowing down unre­ strained, was reserved only for intimate situations; see Ovid Amores 1.5.9. 10  The noble Pomponia Gracina wears a stola—her robe is dark because of her mourning, but even Chilo calls her stolata, which means that she is worthy of wearing a stola.

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Costumes in Quo vadis and their Sources  63 suicide (LXXIV). The author only once more pays attention to her dress before her death. At home, in an intimate setting with her beloved, the girl is ‘dressed in a transparent violet robe called Coa vestis’ (LI). Here the robe is supposed to emphasize the sensuality of Petronius’s lover, given that this gar­ ment is mentioned in Ovid’s ‘Art of love’ (Ars amatoria 2.298) as the dress of preference for a seductive mistress.

Imperial Costumes As one can see, Sienkiewicz appears to be quite casual in the way he informs readers about the costumes in which he clothes his characters. He even treats the imperial couple in a similar manner, which is to say that he does not appear to pay much attention to their attire. He says little about it but, when he does, he does it suggestively where the detail relates primarily to colour. Sienkiewicz mentions Nero’s clothing only when the emperor is in public. Then, regardless of whether it is a gown or a robe, it is always purple. Nero is dressed in purple when he sings: • a hymn to the sea at a party organized by Poppaea in Laurentum (purple toga, XXXVII); • at the Aqua Appia aqueduct during the Fire of Rome (purple cloak and a crown of golden laurels, XLVII); • at the amphitheatre, preceding the throwing of the Christians ad bestias (purple robe and a crown of gold, LVI). The purple cloak Nero wears during the Fire of Rome was probably the syrma, a purple cloak worn by actors in tragedies that was designed to give them more volume and height. Sienkiewicz chose to dress Nero in the syrma in order to add to the theatricality of the scene and identify the fire as the back­ drop for the emperor’s tragic performance. In addition, purple is the symbol of his high status, reinforced by the weight of the golden wreath resting on the emperor’s temples. Later when it turns out that the Romans, in the face of impending doom, would appreciate neither the emperor nor his poetry (XLVII), the emperor changes it along with his clothing and hides ignomini­ ously in dark robes and a hood. Nero sometimes appears in a different colour, although it is very similar to purple. He is described as wearing robes of amethyst (a tunic at VII, a toga at XXXVI), which Sienkiewicz mentions twice as ‘they cast a bluish glow on the

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64  Ewa Skwara face of the Emperor’. Poppaea dresses herself in this colour (XXXVI, LV), and probably because of this, Nero, every time he is accompanied by his wife, whether at feasts or during the official trip to Ostia, wears robes of amethyst himself (XXXVI). The amethyst shade of purple is common for the imperial couple, whenever they appear together in the pages of the novel, as if Nero had to abandon his purple robes in favour of his wife’s amethyst–violet ones to avoid inducing a sense of aesthetic disharmony. Scenes of this kind give the impression that they reflect a painter’s vision.

Drawing Inspiration from Paintings This impression makes us ask what influence the neoclassical paintings of the end of the nineteenth century had on shaping the costumes in the novel, espe­ cially the paintings of Alma-Tadema11 and Henryk Siemiradzki, Sienkiewicz’s close acquaintance.12 Existing analyses prove this to be the case for many of the scenes found in the book and it is evident that such paintings influenced the author’s description of costumes as well.13 Many scenes in the novel undoubtedly bring to mind specific works, most often the well-known ones, such as paintings by Alma-Tadema and Jean-Leon Gérôme. The motif of Eunice kissing the statue of Petronius (I) recalls Pygmalion et Galatée (1890) by Jean-Léon Gérôme, and the feast at Nero’s pal­ ace, during which rose petals fall from the ceiling (VII), is certainly modelled on The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888) by Alma-Tadema. However, it was a painter who is somewhat forgotten today, Henryk Siemiradzki (1843–1902), who mostly influenced Sienkiewicz. The writer repeatedly talks about his paintings in letters, news columns, and art reviews. His particular favourites were The Sword Dance (1879), displaying a mesh of light and shadow,14 and Capri in the Times of Tiberius (1880), which was created as an illustration of 11  Sienkiewicz, in a text published in 1905, reviewed the book Sur la pierre blanche by Anatol France and mentions there the paintings of Alma-Tadema, thus proving he knew them. See Okoń 2002: 169 and Tarnowski 1897: 331. Blom 2001: 284–5 demonstrates that, even if he did not come into contact with the original canvases, he must have seen many reproductions. 12  Sienkiewicz was interested in painting and sculpture, which both influenced his aesthetics and literary imagination. He remained under the strong influence of the paintings by Henryk Siemiradzki, who was his guide in Rome. See Kosman 2000: 11–12. 13  Among the works of Siemiradzki that inspired Sienkiewicz’s novel, the most mentioned are Bacchanalia (1890) and Nero’s Torches (1876). Bujnicki 1991: 152–3 and 159–60 even states that ‘the primary tendency in Quo vadis was to paint a picture and visualize’, and the story and plot are intro­ duced in the style of ‘living paintings’ (tableaux vivants). Similarly Okoń  2002: 168 states that Sienkiewicz paid almost obsessive attention to scenes that he considered ‘painting-ready’ material. 14  Gazeta Polska 1880, n. 113; Sienkiewicz, 1950, t. LI: 192–4.

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Costumes in Quo vadis and their Sources  65 the excesses of Tiberius’s reign.15 In this painting Siemiradzki directly refers to passages from Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars (Tiberius 62), which describe how Tiberius pushed the condemned into the sea from a cliff. The meeting of painter and author probably took place during Sienkiewicz’s first visit to Rome in 1879.16 It is known that during subsequent visits to the Eternal City (in 1886 and 1890) Siemiradzki served the writer as a guide and showed him the Church of Quo Vadis (Antologia, 2002, 320). Between 1890 and 1891 they remained in contact via correspondence. From Sienkiewicz’s surviving letters it appears that, although the writer admired his compatriot’s paintings, he did not consider him a close friend (Sienkiewicz, 1996: part 2, 196, 334, 394, 396). Siemiradzki was a representative of the monumental aca­ demic art movement, a prolific painter of scenes depicting antiquity or the lives of early Christians. His paintings hang in many European galleries. Perhaps the reason for this coldness was Siemiradzki’s numerous contacts with St Petersburg (where he had previously studied) and Moscow (where he exhibited his paintings). Sienkiewicz, as a great patriot, did not look kindly on interaction with the ‘invader’.17 Mutual relations were further complicated by an open letter published in the press in 1898, in which Siemiradzki, in response to a debate about who came first, quite awkwardly explained that he would never have taken on a subject as serious as the Christian Dirce (1897) if he were only inspired by the fictional narrative of Quo vadis. However close or cold the personal relationship between Siemiradzki and Sienkiewicz,18 there is no doubt that the author knew and admired the paint­ er’s works, and those which portrayed early Christian topics certainly had an impact on Quo vadis (Dłużyk (1986: 125–39), although the novel in turn cer­ tainly left its mark on the painter’s canvases.19 Among many paintings by

15  Sienkiewicz, 1950, t. LII: 238–42. 16  Miziołek 2017: 30–1 argues that their first meeting took place earlier, in Paris in 1878 during the World’s Fair, where the painter exhibited his famous Nero’s Torches. 17  Russia, together with Prussia and Habsburg Austria, divided up and annexed the Commonwealth lands of Poland, which regained its independence only after World War I. For Sienkiewicz, who was officially a Russian subject, Russia was an occupying force. 18  A photograph of the two gentlemen taken during a meeting in Łódź a year before the death of the painter (1901) proves, however, that both tried to repair their relations, Miziołek 2017: 31. 19  One of the most apparent examples of this influence on Siemiradzki’s art is his work Future Victims of the Colosseum (1899). The painting depicts an old man surrounded by an audience and holding a parchment with the Greek text of John’s Gospel (‘In the beginning was the Word . . . In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness.’ 1:1–5). In this way the painting alluded also to the themes of Nero’s Torches and the inscription on its frame: Lux in tenebris lucet (‘A light shines in the darkness’). The Colosseum is visible in the background, as is Nero’s palace, the Domus aurea, and his statue with its characteristic rays around his head. Siemiradzki, similarly to Sienkiewicz (LVI), knew that the Colosseum was built during the reign of the Flavian dynasty (after Nero), but decided to make the building a symbol of Christian martyrdom. See Miziołek 2017a: 137–9.

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66  Ewa Skwara Siemiradzki, literary depictions of which can be found in the pages of the novel, the first is a work known today under two titles: Persecutors of Christians at the Entrance to the Catacombs and Christians Hiding in the Catacombs (1874). The canvas depicts an elderly man coming out of the cata­ combs dressed in a dark olive robe, accompanied by a woman in white, fol­ lowed by other Christians. On the right side there is a group of figures hidden in the bushes, four of whom are Roman soldiers wearing helmets and a woman with a man. Everyone seems very moved, as if in anticipation that something dramatic is about to happen. This scene is depicted in literary form within Sienkiewicz’s description of the meeting in Ostrianum (XX).20 Extremely strong parallels between a painting and the novel can be found in one of Siemiradzki’s most famous works, Nero’s Torches, which the painter himself called Christian Fires or Christian Torches. This painting, even before its official exhibition in 1876, became so famous that other artists, including Alma-Tadema, came to admire it (Dłużyk, 1986: 264). Nero’s Torches depicts the cruel spectacle of burning Christians during the nightly orgies held in the gardens of Nero’s Domus aurea. The left side of the painting, called the pagan side, is occupied by the imperial court together with its crowd of courtiers; this part of the canvas is dominated by the whiteness of the senatorial robes, the ivory of the marble terraces, and the gold of Nero’s litter. The emperor is crowned with a golden laurel wreath. Much more interesting, however, is the right side—the Christian side, which is also described in the pages of the novel. It presents—as Sienkiewicz later wrote—’a whole array of poles dec­or­ated with flowers, myrtle leaves and ivy, to which Christians have been tied up’ (LXII). The convicts are dressed in ‘painful tunics soaked in resin’ (LIX), and at the side of each one of them ‘a slave stood with a burning torch in his hand’ in order to ‘apply the flame to the base of the pillars’ (LXII) at their master’s command. Both Siemiradzki and Sienkiewicz followed the description from Tacitus (Annals 15.44),21 and one could speculate that their visions were cre­ ated independently if not for two details (see Figure 4.1). The first of these is the mappa, a kerchief that was used by the prefect or consul as a sign that the spectacle was about to start. This piece of fabric was traditionally white. Siemiradzki, however, decided to change the colour to red. Sienkiewicz, probably inspired by the painting, also introduces a red 20  As Miziołek, 2017: 35. 21  Both the writer and painter knew the work of Joseph Ernest Renan, L’Antéchrist (1873) with the subheading Nero, which incorporates not only passages from Tacitus (Ann. 15.44) but also Suetonius (Nero 11–12) and Cassius Dio (LXII). This publication probably influenced Siemiradzki as well as Sienkiewicz. See Miziołek 2017: 38, Scodel and Bettenworth 2009: 4.

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Costumes in Quo vadis and their Sources  67

Fig. 4.1  Nero’s Torches (1876), Henryk Siemiradzki. National Museum, Kraków.

mappa to commence the spectacular battle of Ursus with the bull (LXVI). In this way he uses his favourite technique of borrowing an element, but reusing it in a slightly different context or setting if it can add to the overall symbol­ ism or originality of a scene. The second detail, which suggests that Sienkiewicz drew inspiration from Nero’s Torches, are the yellow tunics of four Ethiopian slaves—a distinctive colour accent placed in the centre of the painting. These figures stand in front of Nero’s litter, so one can assume that they are porters. Sienkiewicz reuses this colourful vision and describes the scene, in which two slaves dressed in yellow tunics run in front of the litter carried by four Ethiopian slaves. They part the crowd and make a passage for the group to walk through. This group does not accompany Nero but Chilo, newly elevated to the senatorial rank (LIV). This is the only place in the whole novel where garments are of a dif­ ferent colour than white, black, or purple, which makes it all the more sur­ prising. In addition, the yellow colour, referred to as saffron, was ‘regarded as a particularly sexy and feminine colour appropriate for weddings and seduc­ tions’ (Cleland, Davies, Llewellyn-Jones 2007: 163) and probably this is why it is also the favourite colour of courtesans in comedies.22 Sienkiewicz did not mean to make the slaves more effeminate, but probably, just like the painter before him, used the colour to accentuate Chilo’s radically improved status. Yellow is the symbol of opulence. On canvases it substitutes for or resembles 22  Donatus (De Com. 8.6) writes: meretrici luteum datur (‘the courtesan is given yellow garments’).

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68  Ewa Skwara

Fig. 4.2  Christian Dirce (1897), Henryk Siemiradzki. National Museum, Warsaw.

gold; as a dye for cloth (made from highly expensive saffron), it displays opu­ lence and wealth. The most controversial pairing in any discussion about mutual interpene­ trations of motifs between Siemiradzki’s paintings and Quo vadis is Christian Dirce (1897) and the depiction of one of the most dramatic scenes of the novel—the tying of Lygia to the raging bull. In a letter published in 1898 in Gazeta Lwowska, the painter explains that the oil sketch for his work was made long before the publication of the book, and the similarity between his canvas and the scene in the novel resulted from painter and author using the same source material. He speaks first of all about Renan’s L’Antéchrist, but also mentions Hyginus (Fabulae 7–8) and Clement of Rome (Letter to the Corinthians).23 Undoubtedly, both men knew these ancient texts and Renan’s publication, but it cannot be ruled out that Sienkiewicz saw early sketches for Siemiradzki’s Dirce or that the novel influenced the last stages of the painting’s composition. It is also worth mentioning, in this context, that in Dirce (Figure 4.2) the figure of Nero stands in the arena wrapped in an amethyst and gold-coloured robe with a golden wreath on his head—the same vision of the emperor and his garment as is found in the pages of Sienkiewicz’s novel. In Quo vadis there are many other scenes or props that can also be found in Siemiradzki’s paintings. For example, the evening meeting of Lygia and Marcus in the garden, where they lean on each other’s shoulders sitting on a stone bench among wild vines (XXXIX), resembles A Dangerous Game 23  Dłużyk 1986: 473. Pope Clement describes a ‘tableau vivant’ created by Nero, who took Hyginus’s story about Dirce as the theme. This passage was widely discussed by Renan, who in this way inspired both Siemiradzki and Sienkiewicz. See Miziołek 2017: 47.

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Costumes in Quo vadis and their Sources  69 (1880), and the ostrich feathers described in the novel as set on golden bars over Poppaea’s head (IX) can be seen in Saint Timothy and Maura (1885). In turn, Bacchanalia (1890) looks like an illustration of the novel’s description of the executions held in the gardens of Nero, during which the musicians accompanying the emperor were dressed up as fauns and satyrs (LXII). A special convergence between the novel and the paintings can be seen in the way both of these artists focused on light effects.24 Siemiradzki was known for his superior capacity to capture the effects of air and colour variation (Harlot, 1872; The Sword Dance, 1879). In Sienkiewicz’s novel, especially in outdoor scenes, the author describes the colour and appearance of air: ‘shimmering lights created by the rays of the sun poking through the leaves’ (IX) or ‘the golden and lilac twilight’ (XXXIX). The entire series of Siemiradzki’s paintings entitled ‘The Roman Idyll’ (Fishing, 1879; Before a Bath, 1885–9; Next to the Street of Graves, 1894) shows female figures dressed in white or pastel pepla or stolae, men usually wearing tunics and togas, and the emperor clothed in purple robes complemented by a gold wreath on his head. It is difficult to determine in detail the type of cloth­ ing; it rather comes down to colour, not to cut and style. The poor and desti­ tute are usually dressed in coarse robes of dark colour. Sienkiewicz probably introduced this same set of distinctions into the novel inspired by his col­ league’s paintings, though they were certainly not the only source of his in­spir­ation. One cannot state with certainty that the writer’s vision of cos­ tumes was modelled exclusively on painting. At any rate, Sienkiewicz then used this code for his own narrative purposes.

Latin Terminology The author of Quo vadis did not appear to attach great importance to the attire of his characters and seldom provided any detailed information about it, yet he still chose to use Latin or Greek names for categories of clothing (synthesis, tunica exomis, cilicium, syrma, Coa vestis, capitium). Each specific type of garment (except the capitium) is mentioned only once and always in the same way—with an extended description that explains its use and meaning.

24  Okoń 2002: 171 states that ‘the luminism of the author, seen in all his works is a subject worthy of a separate study’.

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70  Ewa Skwara In addition to the lacerna discussed above, Sienkiewicz dressed his protag­ onists in other specific types of lesser-known garments. Acte covers Lygia during the combing of her hair ‘in a kind of voluminous robe called a synthe­ sis’ (VII).25 Ursus, as befits the strongman who will rescue the maiden, ‘wears a tunic called exomis, tailored in such a way that the right shoulder and right chest remained bare. A similar garment, that would leave complete freedom of movement, was worn especially by workers’ (XVII).26 Paul of Tarsus ‘has a coat of thick cloth called cilicium’ (XXVIII), a sign of his lowliness and piety. Nero, when starting to sing, appropriately enough ‘takes down his dramatic syrma’—the tragic actor’s costume—with one move of his arm and at the end of the show wraps it around himself (XLVII). Eunice appears in ‘a transparent violet robe called Coa vestis, through which you could see her rosy body’ (LI), thus emphasizing her attractiveness and distinguishing her from chaste Lygia. When Vinicius is sick, Lygia checks up on him before going to sleep ‘dressed only in a tight-fitting tunic, called the capitium by the ancients, which tightly covers the breast’ (XXVI). Later, Vinicius, looking for Lygia during the fire, will find her capitium, which ‘is a tight-fitting garment that women wore directly on the body’ (XXVI; XLIII). This tight yet modest garment thus sig­ nals the intimacy of their relationship and takes on a dramatic function as Vinicius searches for the missing girl. Each of these termini is inserted into the novel in such a way that it requires neither footnotes nor further explanations. The author does not refer to any prior knowledge the reader may have but delivers sufficient explanation. This does not, however, give the impression that Sienkiewicz wanted to educate his audience, but rather to saturate the texture of the novel with Latin and to enhance aspects of his characters. Sienkiewicz would have known most of these terms from ancient texts that were part of the Classics curriculum.27 Cicero mentions the lacerna in the 25  Sienkiewicz clearly suggests that Lygia was covered with the synthesis only for the time it took to comb her hair: ‘Meanwhile [Acte] wrapped her in a kind of voluminous robe called a synthesis, and after sitting her on a chair, gave her over to the slaves for a moment to supervise the combing from afar. When it was finally finished, she was dressed in a peplum draped with lovely, light folds’ (VII). The Romans put on the synthesis in less formal situations and treated it as leisurewear. This type of robe was also called cenatoria, because it was usually worn during feasts. Suetonius (Nero 51) describes with disapproval how Nero wore the synthesis in public and caused widespread disgust. 26  This type of tunica passed under the right arm and was fastened only on the left shoulder. A good example appears on a bronze statue of Hephaestus in the British Museum. See Houston 1947: 46. 27  Sienkiewicz not only knew Latin but also read classical authors in the original, which he wrote about in, for example, his letter to a French critic Ange Galdemar, published in 1901 in Le Gaulois. He wrote: ‘For years I used to read ancient Latin histories before going to sleep. I did it not only for the love of history, that I always considered interesting, but also for the Latin, which I did not want to forget. This custom allowed me to read Latin poets and writers without any problems, and it fuelled my love for the ancient world.’ See Kosman 1998: 47; Sienkiewicz 2002 ‘Antologia’: 305. Nonetheless, it

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Costumes in Quo vadis and their Sources  71 second Philippic (In Marcum Antonium orationes Philippicae 2.30.76), as does Propertius (3.12.7), Pliny (Naturalis Historia 18.60.225), Juvenal (9.28–30), and Martial (2.46; 13.87; 14.131–3; 8.10). Synthesis can be found in Suetonius, nota bene in his biography of Nero (Nero 51), as can the cilicium (Augustus 75). Plutarch writes about the exomis tunic (Cato Maior 3.2), as does Aulus Gellius (6.12.3), and the Coa vestis can be found not only in Ovid but also Pliny (Naturalis Historia 11.26.76), Horace (Satires 1.2.101–4), and Propertius (1.2.2).28 Sienkiewicz missed his mark only with regard to the capitium, although he always tries to explain what it is. On one occasion, he writes that it is ‘a tight-fitting tunic, . . . which tightly covers the breast’ (XXVI); on another that it is ‘a tight-fitting garment that women wore directly on the body’ (XLIII). He is right both times, as the capitium was a bra of sorts. However, since the term was used at a later period in antiquity as the terminus technicus for the robes worn by Christian priests, Sienkiewicz assumed that the capitium must resemble some kind of outer tunic or robe. That is why he describes Lygia, who is ready to go to sleep, as wearing only the capitium when she encounters the sick Marcus (XXVI), and, in the second scene, dur­ ing the Fire of Rome, Marcus finds Lygia’s capitium, presses it to his lips, hangs it on his shoulder, and takes it with him to cover his mouth from the smoke outside (XLIII). It is clear that Sienkiewicz did not consider it to be a piece of lady’s underwear. Apart from this one example, Sienkiewicz does not make any mistakes, but he also does not pay too much attention to the garments of his characters, because he finds so many other ways to shape the ancient atmosphere of his novel. Yet every remark regarding dress and costume in the novel, despite it being only occasional, is used in an extremely subtle way to indicate the social status of the characters and their mutual relations, and to drive his narrative forward and create a painterly vision of Neronian Rome.

is apparent that while reading poetry and prose he liked to consult the original with a French transla­ tion at hand. His many notes scribbled in the books still surviving in Oblęgork attest to that. He also mentions his reading of Latin texts in his correspondence; see Axer 2002: 59. 28  None of the garments mentioned can be found in the Satyricon. And this is the primary source for at least one of the main protagonists of the novel, Petronius. It is worth mentioning that not long before the creation of Quo vadis Kazimierz Morawski published his new translation of Cena Trymalchionis and a thorough study of its author. Sienkiewicz must have heard of these publications; see Bokszczanin 2002: 244.

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5 Quo vadis and Ancient Rome in the United States, 1896–1905 Ruth Scodel

The popularity of Sienkiewicz’s novel Quo vadis in the United States of America had some unpredictable consequences. Its sympathetic portrayal of Petronius seems to have contributed to making the Cena Trimalchionis episode from the Satyricon acceptable for the Latin classroom (in an expurgated edition), and led to the publication of translations of the Latin text.1 Prompted by the novel’s popularity, but also in part by criticisms of it as unnecessarily graphic in its depiction of the decadence of Nero’s court and the cruelty of the persecution of Christians, discussions of ancient history written by professionals appeared in the non-specialist press. These reflect in part a recurring tension in American culture between anxiety about sex and violence in popular entertainment and respect for historical fact.2 The substance of these essays also reveals that the assumptions about historical method of an American academic of this period and those of a conscientious novelist were more similar than we might expect. Jeremiah Curtin’s translation of Quo vadis was published in the United States by Little, Brown & Company in the autumn of 1896.3 It became an immediate bestseller and continued to sell extremely well for eighteen months—special deluxe editions were produced for Christmas 1897. Reviews were also very positive (Zielinski  1958). Many praised the novel’s historical

1  The two translations of 1905 mark the end of the period treated in this chapter. 2  Some of the same issues were raised as late as in the 1980 obscenity trial concerning the film Caligula (directed by Tinto Brass and produced by Bob Guccione); see Vaughn 2006: 73–4. The distinguished historian Glen Bowersock testified in support of the film: NEWS IN BRIEF; 2 TESTIFY IN CALIGULA TRIAL (Boston Globe, 24 July 1980 [Pre-1997 Full text]) Retrieved from http://proxy.lib. umich.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/docview/293975250?accoun tid=14667. 3  Quotations from the novel will follow the 1896 edition, available through the Hathi Trust. The translation is in the public domain and is freely available at guternberg.org.

Ruth Scodel, Quo vadis and Ancient Rome in the United States, 1896–1905 In: The Novel of Neronian Rome and its Multimedial Transformations: Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis. Edited by: Monika Wozń iak and Maria Wyke, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198867531.003.0005

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74  Ruth Scodel authenticity and credited to Sienkiewicz’s research his success in avoiding the flaws of other novels about persecuted Christians.4 Since only the translation and not the original work was protected by copyright (the United States had no copyright agreement with Russia, to which Poland was subject), other publishers produced rival translations for the American market.5 Indeed, Sienkiewicz himself protested the pirating, declaring it to be against ‘my will and interests’, in a letter to Little, Brown & Company printed in The New York Times on 11 April 1900 (p. 9). Curtin’s translation sold 60,000 copies in fifteen months; by 1915, more than a million and a half copies had been sold in various editions, suggesting that nearly one in every hundred people in the United States bought a copy (Barron  2005: 5–8). Two different stage productions (only one authorized by the author and publisher) played simultaneously in New York and around the United States. New York critics were not enthusiastic, but both productions toured and so made the novel even more widely known.6 This chapter will explore some of the respects in which Sienkiewicz’s novel prompted interest in Petronius’s Satyricon, the condition of Rome under Nero, and the balance expected between accuracy and propriety when discussing them in turn-of-the century America. It also considers various interesting points of intersection the novel seemed to cross between fiction and history, high- and lowbrow literature, and edification and sensationalism.

Petronius The central historical character in the novel is Petronius Arbiter. Apart from fleeting mentions in Plutarch (‘How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend’, Moralia 60 d–e) and Pliny the Elder (Natural History 37.20), the historical Petronius is known only from a sketch in Tacitus’s Annales (16.18–19). He is never mentioned in Sienkiewicz’s main source, the biography of Nero in Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars. Most scholars, however, identify the courtier of Nero with the author of a satiric novel, the Satyricon. Although most of what must have been a long book is lost, substantial fragments are extant, of which the most famous narrates an extravagant dinner hosted by a rich and tasteless freedman named Trimalchio.

4  These reviews are summarized and discussed in Barron 2005: 212–24. 5  Giergielewicz 1967 is a bibliography of editions. 6  See, for example, The Literary Digest 20.17 (28 April 1900), p. 511, and Mayer in this volume.

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Quo vadis and Ancient Rome in the US  75 The Detroit Free Press for 14 October 1900 (p. 4) presented an article without byline about the historical Petronius for readers curious about the reality behind the novel. In 1900, Detroit, Michigan, was the thirteenth largest city in the United States, with a population of 264,704 according to the US census that included many immigrants—an industrial city although not yet the Motor City. To present such an article, even as filler, suggests that the editors expected that readers who lacked an elite education would be curious about the topic. Much of the article is plagiarized, word for word, from the introduction to selections from Petronius by Harriet Waters Preston published in the Library of the Best of the World’s Literature, Ancient and Modern in 1897, an anthology in thirty-one volumes (vol. 19, pp. 11384–8). Preston, although she quotes the Tacitean narrative of the death of Petronius (Annales 16.19), does not, however, discuss it. The newspaper article, relying on her quotation of the passage, claims that Sienkiewicz’s account of Petronius’s death is accurate, apart from the role of Eunice as a fictional slave with whom he falls in love and who chooses to commit suicide by his side. This is false. While Sienkiewicz’s Petronius dies in roughly the same defiant and cheerful spirit as the character in Tacitus, Tacitus’s Petronius first flogs some slaves while rewarding others. In the novel, ‘he had issued a command to give unusual rewards to those with whom he was satisfied, and some slight blows to all whose work should not please him, or who had deserved blame or punishment earlier’ (p. 530). The Petronius of Tacitus seems to act arbitrarily, while the novel supplements and slightly modifies the historian’s account to motivate the command and avoid any imputation of cruelty. More significantly, the final letter in Tacitus does not refer to Nero’s murders or criticize his poetry, as does the letter in the novel, but lists his sexual outrages, naming both male and female sexual partners. The writer may deliberately have ignored the differences between Tacitus and Sienkiewicz, especially since the explicit reference to sex between males would hardly have been printed in an American newspaper in 1900, but it is also possible that, in reading Tacitus through Sienkiewicz, they simply did not recognize the changes as significant. The newspaper article introduces a summary of Tacitus’s character sketch of Petronius at Annales 16.18 by stealing from Preston the comment that ‘the reader is enchanted by the smiling, dauntless, almost insolent grace of one gallant figure, which alone serves to brighten the blackness around him’. Preston, however, also remarks, ‘The whole man is there—as truly as in the highly elaborated recent portrait by Henryk Sienkiewicz, in “Quo Vadis”.’ While Preston argues that the character of Petronius could be inferred entirely

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76  Ruth Scodel from the surviving fragments of his novel, it is impossible to avoid the suspicion that she read the Latin under the influence of Sienkiewicz’s Petronius, interpreting the ancient novel in terms of the author who had been created in the modern work. She also praises the Satyricon (in a passage also pilfered by the Free Press): Even where the matter of the story is coarsest, the narrator’s accent is so refined, his touch so light – above all his humor is at once so droll and so delightfully indulgent and humane – that we feel as though he had the magic art of keeping his fine toga unsmirched by the filth in which he treads. (Preston 1897: 11385)

To be sure, her approach does not depend entirely on Sienkiewicz. Mackail’s Latin Literature of 1895, which cannot have been influenced by Quo vadis, praises the Satyricon as ‘so masterly and so human’, and says that it must have been ‘comparable, in dramatic power, and (notwithstanding the gross in­decency of many passages) in a certain large sanity’, to Fielding (Mackail 1895: 183–4). Both Mackail and Preston also compare Petronius’s breadth of ­humanity to that of Shakespeare. This defence of Petronius’s humanity may be in part a response to Huysmans’ novel of 1884 À Rebours, whose protagonist is an admirer of a very different Petronius as author of a very different novel: ‘This realistic novel, this slice of Roman life, without any preoccupation, ­whatever one may say of it, with reform and satire, without the need of any studied end, or of morality.’7 The Satyricon, with its ‘gross indecency’, was a difficult text for the nineteenth century, especially in the puritanical United States.8 Only one translation seems to have been published in the United States before 1899, that of Calvin Blanchard, who gave it the subtitle Trebly Voluptuous (he was an advocate of free love who also published a pirated translation of Boccaccio’s Decameron).9 In Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748) a nobleman gives a copy of the Satyricon to the young hero as a preface to praising homosexual behaviour. The relevant passage of the modern novel seems to assume that the reader knows the classical text, and probably from the Latin—a 1708 English translation of Petronius had converted a same-sex seduction into a 7  Translation by John Howard 1922: 59. The original says: ‘Ce roman réaliste, cette tranche découpée dans le vif de la vie romaine, sans préoccupation, quoi qu’on en puisse dire, de réforme et de satire, sans besoin de fin apprêtée et de morale’ (Huysmans 1920: 96). 8  It was still difficult in the twentieth century; see Roberts (2006). 9  See Armstrong 2013: 256–7.

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Quo vadis and Ancient Rome in the US  77 heterosexual version (Morales  2008: 39). Roderick Random was reprinted more than once in the United States during the nineteenth century (the Library of Congress lists editions from Philadelphia in 1833, New York in 1860, and Philadelphia in 1895). Petronius’s novel is rarely mentioned in American writing outside scholarly circles before Quo vadis. (The episode of the ‘Widow of Ephesus’ was an exception, but even if it is cited from Petronius, it clearly circulated independently like the erotic tales of the Decameron.)10 In England, however, the Spectator (issue 71, 1893: 742–3), reviewing A. Collignon’s academic Étude sur Pétrone of 1892, calls the Satyricon ‘worse than pornographic’, and quotes Collignon: ‘Notwithstanding the varnish of elegance which clothes the whole work, it conceals within itself the deepest corruption. The moral sense seems wholly wanting in the author. He dwells complacently on pictures of which the very subject is revolting.’ The Detroit newspaper article, although it is aimed at the reader of Quo vadis, not the reader of Petronius, further takes from Preston a brief summary of the rediscovery of the Satyricon. Yet the Satyricon is not important to Sienkiewicz’s novel. It is mentioned only twice, first when Petronius buys and gives a copy to Vinicius, recommending especially the Cena (‘Dinner’): But he gave command to halt before the book-shop of Avirnus, and, descending from the litter, purchased an ornamented manuscript, which he gave to Vinicius. ‘Here is a gift for thee,’ said he. ‘Thanks!’ answered Vinicius. Then, looking at the title, he inquired, ‘Satyricon’? Is this something new? Whose is it?’ ‘Mine.’  (p. 19)

It appears a second time when Petronius is working on the Cena (QV XII). This must be a slip, as earlier the novel was already available for purchase. The Cena was not only the most familiar part of the book for Sienkiewicz’s audience (apart from the independently circulating ‘Widow of Ephesus’), but was also the least objectionable. Certainly nothing in Sienkiewicz directly encourages his reader to pick up the work of the historical Petronius, and Quo vadis does not explore the low-life milieu of the Satyricon. Some American readers thought that the Polish novel went too far in depicting the immorality of Nero’s court, and it would have made Quo vadis unattractive to a Christian reading public if Sienkiewicz had emphasized that its central character was the author of a book that could be called worse than pornographic. Ironically, 10  So, for example, The Catholic World, A Monthly Magazine of General Literature and Science 40.239 (February 1885, 620), in an article about George Eliot.

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78  Ruth Scodel however, the fictional character had real influence on how Sienkiewicz’s contemporaries read the Satyricon. While Mackail, for example, finds Petronius to be a wise and genial author, Sienkiewicz’s Petronius feels profound contempt for both the common people and other courtiers: ‘Men with the odor of roast beans, which they carried in their bosoms, and who besides were eternally hoarse and sweating from playing mora on the street-corners and peristyles, did not in his eyes deserve the term “human” ’ (p. 19). Yet the Petronius of the novel is ‘too refined to be cruel’ (p. 107), and he consistently opposes the cruelty of Nero, Poppaea, and Tigellinus, explaining to Vinicius: ‘transgression is ugly and virtue is beautiful. Therefore a man of genuine æsthetic feeling is also a virtuous man. Hence I am virtuous’ (p. 46). Sienkiewicz says that Petronius among the people ‘passed for a humane and magnanimous man’ (p. 350), and even though the novel depicts him as a selfish snob, he does not act contemptuously without good reason. The reader is invited to like him, and in liking him to minimize the ways in which he does not view the social world with indulgent generosity. Sienkiewicz did not invent the humanist Petronius, but he surely did more than anyone else to promote that version of the classical author. The Latin faculty at Amherst College produced an expurgated version of the Cena with commentary for classroom use in 1895 (that is, before Quo vadis), but a commercial publisher issued another in 1902 by W. E. Waters. Waters comments, ‘The name of Petronius has been anathema to a large number of Latin scholars, but in the Cena his puritas is no longer impûrissima.’ The Cena has been a frequent text in the American Latin classroom ever since, and translations also appeared in 1898 (Peck, see below)11 and 1905 (Lowe and Ryan, published in England but reviewed and available in the United States). Some of this activity must have resulted from the German commentary published by Friedländer in 1891, which made the Latin more accessible, but it is surely thanks to Sienkiewicz and the sympathy he makes his Petronius feel for the fictional love of Vinicius and the Christian Lygia that selections from Petronius could be widely recommended for American schools and colleges. Without the appealing figure from Quo vadis, parents might well have objected if their children read such a scandalous author, even if the selections were themselves inoffensive.

11  A column called ‘The Lounger’ in The Critic: a Weekly Review of Literature and the Arts (2 April 1898: 29, p. 841) hails Peck’s forthcoming translation as welcome to readers of Quo vadis.

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Quo vadis and Ancient Rome in the US  79

Nero’s Reign The different responses to the novel published by members of university faculty, Harry Thurston Peck of Columbia and Charles Pomeroy Parker of Harvard, show the transitional state of classical learning at the time. Neither had a PhD or had studied in Germany, the unquestionable leader in the field. Peck had done his BA at Columbia itself, while Parker had a first in Literae Humaniores at Oxford. Neither specialized in ancient history. Peck published widely in magazines on general literary themes; he was sufficiently well known outside university circles that his suicide in 1914, after his career had been ruined by a sexual scandal, was reported on the front page of The New York Times (24 March 1914). Parker, according to his Harvard obituary, did not see himself as entirely a ‘real’ scholar because he did not have a doctorate.12 Peck’s ‘Quo Vadis as History’ appeared in The New York Times on 29 January 1898 (in the Saturday section on literature and art), introduced by an editorial article about the novel’s greater success in the United States than in Britain. Peck was an obvious choice to write such an article, since he published a translation of the Cena Trimalchionis that same year. The article opens by distinguishing a type of popular novel that has a ‘noisy’ success—it becomes a topic of sermons and parodies and the basis of newspaper jokes. Quo vadis belongs to the other type, known to ‘all intelligent readers’ but less talked about.13 Indeed, Peck defines Quo vadis as ‘less a novel than a picture of social conditions’. Peck seems to want to reassure readers who want to be ‘intelligent’ (here surely with some connotation of superior social status) that their enjoyment of the novel does not detract from their intelligence. This distinction is not quite accurate. It is true that a random search of digitized American newspapers from 1896 to 1900 reveals no advertisements for Quo vadis merchandise, but it does find jokes. The theatrical versions that toured not long afterwards certainly offered more spectacle than history: a poster for a production in my own home town of Ann Arbor, Michigan, in February 1900 promises ‘carloads of costly scenery’, ‘a small army of supernumeraries’, and ‘a fortune in costumes and effects’. The novel certainly provided opportunities for such display. Peck, however, treats the novel’s historicity with respect, indeed too much respect. He divides the question of historical 12 From the ‘Minute on the Life and Services of Professor Charles Pomeroy Parker’, Harvard University Gazette, 12 (1917), 70. 13  Peck refers to George du Maurier’s widely parodied novel Trilby (1894), for which see Jenkins (1998). But Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur of 1880 was an obvious point of comparison and ‘very noisy’; see Solomon 2016: especially 408–508 on merchandise.

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80  Ruth Scodel accuracy into three subcategories: archaeology (the representation of material culture); the historical characters; and the general depiction of Neronian society. In relation to the first, the Columbia University classicist objects to the presentation of Petronius’s house as an insula (this is a relatively technical point, but he is right); he catches an anachronistic reference to smallpox; and he notes errors in the spelling of Latin names. He praises the depiction of the Forum, of Nero’s orgies, and of the amphitheatre. In relation to the second subcategory, he says that the historical characters conform to the ancient sources, with the possible exception of Nero. While the Nero of Quo vadis is ‘in the main . . . the Nero of Suetonius’, he thinks that the emperor’s monstrosity is slightly exaggerated. Peck makes no distinction between the Nero of Suetonius’s biography and the actual person. In relation to the third, he considers it a fair picture of the city of Rome, where the elite had ‘begun to weary of the cold and shadowy philosophy that had for a time usurped the place of faith’. He offers no evidence for this statement (it is hard to see anything ‘shadowy’ about Roman Stoicism). The modern classicist finds it somewhat befuddling that Peck does not even consider the possibility that the literary sources on which Sienkiewicz based his work might be less than entirely reliable, so that closeness to the ancient sources is for him a sure marker of historical accuracy.14 Peck may have been self-interested, since his translation’s success would depend on the audience the novel had created, and his treatment of the novel as not really popular (as a quietly intelligent rather than a noisy success) fits entirely with his endorsement of its accuracy. On the other side, Charles Pomeroy Parker’s essay ‘The True History of the Reign of Nero’, from The New World: a Quarterly Review of Religion, Ethics, and Theology (June 1898: 313–36) refers to ‘that striking melodrama called Quo Vadis’. The New World was published at Harvard, whose divinity school was a centre of Unitarianism, at the time a liberal Christian denomination that stressed philanthropy over dogma.15 The journal was edited by Charles Carroll Everett, who was Dean of Harvard Divinity School; Crawford Howard Toy, also of Harvard; Orello Cone, a prominent biblical scholar and author of Gospel-Criticism and Historical Christianity (1891); and Nicolas Paine Gilman, a progressive economist and author of Profit Sharing between Employer and Employee (1889) and Socialism and the American Spirit (1893). It was not a 14  An introduction to Tacitus’s use of sources is Potter 2012. For Suetonius, see Wallace-Hadrill 1983: 175–7 on gossip. 15  The American Unitarian Association merged in 1961 with the Universalist Church of America and the Unitarian Universalists; today’s Unitarian Universalists are not necessarily Christians.

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Quo vadis and Ancient Rome in the US  81 scholarly journal, but it addressed an educated audience of liberal Christians interested in biblical scholarship, comparative religion, and social improvement. Parker and the journal’s editors were evidently concerned that even their elite readers would be too ready to treat the novel as history. The Harvard classicist begins with an energetic defence of Seneca against the criticism of other scholars and praise for most of the policies of Nero under the philosopher’s influence.16 Then, however, he moves to the character of Nero, showing scepticism about the tradition that he murdered his stepbrother Britannicus: ‘grave historians are very apt to repeat with solemn faces and full conviction all the court scandal which is furnished them by the picturesque Tacitus’ (p. 322). Parker concedes that the court was thoroughly corrupt after Seneca’s retirement, but argues that this corruption did not extend into wider circles and, outside Rome, Italy and the provinces were full of hard-working and honest people. He does not explain why he doubts Tacitus, or say anything about the sources and methods of Tacitus, but he evidently sees ‘court scandal’ as a universal phenomenon, always to be mistrusted. He also makes no comment on the evidence for the condition of the provinces. While Peck briefly referred to archaeology, neither Peck nor Parker refers to inscriptions or coins, now essential to the historian of Rome. Pointing out that Petronius was not very important historically (he has nothing to say about the Satyricon), Parker notes that Sienkiewicz’s Petronius is surely more high-minded than the real man, and that it is absurd to say, as do the spectators of Petronius’s death in the novel, that with him perished ‘poetry and beauty’. According to the novel, Roman civilization was intellectually and creatively exhausted, and its only significant contribution after Nero was the nurturance of Christianity. Parker was a Christian, and indeed an ordained deacon in the Episcopal Church.17 However, his views here are evidently influenced by Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–89), in which the period ad 96–180 is treated as the happiest in history. Parker admires the ‘thrifty, industrious men of the empire’ and ‘good men of the world like Pliny’ (p. 334), and calls the reign of Marcus Aurelius ‘a time when good was growing in the world’ (p. 334).

16  Seneca has been criticized since antiquity; e.g. St Augustine, who of course criticizes many pagan authors, devotes City of God vi. 10 to polemic against him. In modern times, Mackail 1895: 173 accuses Seneca of indulging Nero ‘not only beyond the limits of honour, but of ordinary prudence’ (though he approves of the philosophical works in substance, while not admiring their style, 174). Parker published papers on Stoicism in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology. 17  See the obituary cited in n. 12 above, p. 69.

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82  Ruth Scodel Sienkiewicz’s treatment of the Apostle Paul bothers Parker, especially how readily Paul apparently acquiesces in the way Peter accepts and baptizes Vinicius without making him acknowledge his sins; this does not, in Parker’s view, reflect the author of the Epistle to the Romans. In general, Parker suspects that the novel’s treatment of the Christians is based on a later period, especially since the novel does not represent tensions between Jews and Gentiles in the movement. Parker also gives considerable space, as the novel does not, to ‘the great war in Judaea, which, when Jerusalem had been destroyed, resulted in that wonderful organization of the Jewish race which has given such great men to the world and seems destined to have important influence in history yet’ (p. 336). For Parker, the most important figures of Nero’s reign, those who deserve closest study, are Seneca, Vespasian, the Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus, and the Apostle Paul. To be sure, the modern historian is not likely to share Parker’s admiration for Seneca. Furthermore, some of Parker’s polemic is unfair to Sienkiewicz, who does not pretend to provide a full history of Nero’s reign. Indeed, it is perhaps unfair for a historian to blame a novelist for relying uncritically on Suetonius and Tacitus—but it is perhaps fair for him to point out that such an uncritical adaptation is not good history. Unfortunately, a shallow commentary like Peck’s must have confirmed, or at any rate would hardly impede, the tendency of the public to take its history from novels. Parker’s point that not every ancient rumour was necessarily true was unlikely to have much effect. Parker’s critique, however, is exceptional in considering large issues more than details. The novel does invite such a critique. For Sienkiewicz locates his story within an implicit grand narrative and, in this wider picture, the death of Petronius marks the end not just of poetry and beauty (which is absurd, if we consider the later history of Roman literature, for example), but also of pagan Rome’s value and significance. Vinicius and Lygia find a peaceful life outside history, while Nero’s death does not lead to a new beginning for Roman culture. The story of Rome, apart from the rise of Christianity, seems to be over. While it seems unlikely that Peck agreed with Sienkiewicz’s interpretation of the larger course of Roman history, he had no interest in debating it. Parker does debate it, because he reads the novel against a different his­tor­ic­al account, essentially Gibbon’s, in which the greatest period for Rome belonged to the second century ad and had therefore yet to come in the time frame of the novel. Parker is clearly frustrated that the popularity of the novel seems likely to ensure that its vision of ancient Rome would prevail outside the academy. Whether we agree with Parker’s interpretation of Roman history,

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Quo vadis and Ancient Rome in the US  83 he argues about the novel’s historical drive, not its accuracy or errors in Latin or nomenclature. Parker’s complaint about Sienkiewicz’s interpretation of Peter and Paul is especially telling. Quo vadis makes the Apostles representatives of a humane Christianity, while a fictional character, Crispus, stands for its sterner and apocalyptic side—he is angry that Lygia loves Vinicius, not because Vinicius is a pagan but because he wanted her to remain a virgin and sees sexual desire as sinful (pp. 227–8). Peter, in the presence of Paul, rebukes him while warning Lygia to avoid Vinicius as long as he does not convert, while both Peter and Paul use their own lives as examples of God’s mercy. A more austere Christianity is thereby acknowledged but marginalized: Crispus is a less significant actor in the plot and his kind of Christianity is not the flavour most familiar to Sienkiewicz’s American readers (although many would surely have remembered Paul’s begrudging view of marriage as appropriate for those not capable of celibacy at 1 Corinthians 7:8–9). The novel’s arrival coincided with the flourishing of the social gospel, an offshoot of liberal theology that stressed ethics above dogma and sought to apply Christianity to projects of social, political, and economic reform.18 A book based on Catholic legend would hardly have been immensely successful in Protestant America if its Christianity had not suited American readers. Nobody was likely to convince them either that Peter and Paul preached a religion hostile to romantic love, or that the wicked Nero may not have killed his mother.

Sensationalism, the Christians, and Gibbon A letter signed with the initials J.W.H. in The New York Times on 26 March 1898 concerning the novel, while it acknowledges its ‘literary excellence, its artistic qualities, its many beautiful descriptions, or its thrilling interest’, severely criticized it as essentially ‘yellow journalism’—that is, vulgar and sensationalist. J.W.H. is identified as ‘a constant reader and valued contributor’ to the newspaper, and published mostly short reviews on literary topics and art­ icles on travel or history. The letter was reprinted (with its long quotation from Gibbon abbreviated) in The Friend’s Intelligencer, a Quaker magazine.19 The letter objects, on grounds of ‘morals and decency’, to both the ‘deliberate

18  See Evans 2017: 1–73.

19  Friends’ Intelligencer, 23 April 1898: 55.17, p. 293.

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84  Ruth Scodel and abhorrent sensuality’ of the episodes in Nero’s palace and the violence of the amphitheatre scenes. These objections echo some themes of the reviews in literary journals. Even some that praised the novel highly argued that it would have been improved by less vivid representations of Nero’s banquet, Tigellinus’s feast, and the arena. The letter’s reference to ‘yellow journalism’ links the novel with popular culture. The phrase was coined and widely used, especially from 1895 onward, for mass-circulation newspapers, especially the great rivals Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. These newspapers featured huge headlines, invented interviews, many illustrations, Sunday colour supplements, abundant crime reporting, and hyperbolic prose. So the letter’s complaint exactly fits James Barron’s analysis of how reviews of Quo vadis policed class boundaries.20 In the view of some critics and readers, sex and sadism belonged to this lowerclass milieu, not to literature. While J.W.H. evidently thinks that Sienkiewicz could have made these episodes much less vivid, he also questions the historical basis for the novelist’s account of the persecution of the Christians. He does not question at all the historical accuracy of anything else. J.W.H. writes: True it is that all the author has given is substantially corroborated by Tacitus, but this old historian devotes but a few pages to these same accounts. Let it not be forgotten, however, that at the time of Nero’s reign Tacitus was an infant, and did not write his history until some forty years later, and therefore was dependent upon reading and conversation for his knowledge of the events alluded to, and so with other contemporary writers equally entitled to credence, who pass them over in silence. Even Gibbon, in his ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’, speaks of these atrocities as being greatly exaggerated.21

Tacitus’s comments in the Annales have been both important and endlessly disputed, not only for Nero’s persecution of the Christians but also for its information about the crucifixion of Jesus: Therefore, to get rid of the report [that he had started the fire], Nero substituted as the guilty parties and inflicted the most far-fetched punishments on

20  Barron 2005: 230–35 discusses these reviews and points to their sensitivity to the popularity of sensationalist journalism among the working class. 21  New York Times, 26 March 1898, 194.

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Quo vadis and Ancient Rome in the US  85 those hated for their disgraceful acts, whom the people called ‘Christians.’ Chrestus, the source of this name, was executed under Tiberius by the procurator Pontius Pilatus, and although the destructive cult was suppressed at the time, it broke out again, not only in Judæa, the source of this evil, but also in Rome, where all that is repulsive and shameful from everywhere flows together and is practiced. So first those who confessed were arrested. Then, through their evidence, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of setting the fire, as of hatred of humanity. (Annales 15.44; translation mine)

In modern scholarship, this passage has been intensely debated: the manuscript of the Annales appears to have been corrected to ‘Christus’ from ‘Chrestus’. Suetonius (Divus Claudius 25) narrates an earlier expulsion of Jews from Rome under Claudius after disturbances caused by the followers of ‘Chrestus’. Some modern scholars think that ‘Chrestus’ was simply the most common form of the name (Renehan 1968). Others, however, think that the sentence about Jesus may have been a Christian interpolation into the Tacitean narrative, aimed at providing non-Christian support for the his­tor­ icity of Jesus.22 The actual issues that scholars now debate arising from this passage are not relevant to the analysis of the American reception of Quo vadis at the turn of the nineteenth century, since J.W.H. evidently did not know about the question of post-antique interference with the Latin text; J.W.H., following Gibbon, instead emphasizes that Tacitus would have been a child at the time of the Fire of Rome. He quotes Gibbon’s argument in chapter 16 of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that Christian accounts of persecution were exaggerated, although Gibbon’s target is accounts of later persecutions. Gibbon’s argument about the Neronian persecution is subtle. He accepts Tacitus’s account, and appears to be sceptical mainly about the historian’s statement that the Christians were, in fact, hostile to humanity, since he believed that Tacitus associated the Christians with rebellious Jewish groups going back to Judas of Galilee. J.W.H.  simplifies Gibbon, but the citation shows what a powerful source of authority The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire continued to be.23 The popularity of Quo vadis, then, was not entirely uncontroversial. Readers who enjoyed its depictions of decadent luxury and horrifying cruelty 22  Carrier 2014 with bibliography; Fuchs 1950. 23  Gibbon 1890, 1.391–5 (this is one of several editions that could have been used by J.W.H.).

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86  Ruth Scodel doubtless wanted to be reassured that it was all essentially true, and that his­ tor­ic­al truth, combined with its Christian message, made it edifying. Those who did not find it edifying also denied its historical accuracy. This is not surprising, but the prominence of Gibbon perhaps is. Reverence for Gibbon links the professional historian with the general educated public, at a time when academic research was less specialized and less technical than it has since become. Academics had read more widely and deeply in ancient authors than Sienkiewicz, but they had not read in a significantly different way. Most surprising, however, is perhaps Sienkiewicz’s contribution to the entry of Petronius onto school and university syllabi. Out of a few sentences in Tacitus, Sienkiewicz created a sympathetic Petronius, and the fictional character helped bring the real author closer to respectability.

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6 Comparing the Reception of Quo vadis and Ben-Hur in the United States, 1896–1913 Jon Solomon

In late October 1896, just days after the Boston publisher Little, Brown & Company issued Jeremiah Curtin’s English translation, Quo Vadis: A Tale of the Time of Nero, Sienkiewicz’s novel was already being compared in American newspapers to Lew Wallace’s earlier novel, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (published in 1880).1 The comparison was warranted. They were easily paired by their Christian focus and ancient settings, both would become bestselling novels in the United States, both were soon to be adapted as major dramatic productions, and both would be exploited as commercial brand names. Many of the entries in this volume document or testify to the success of Quo vadis, particularly in Europe. This chapter, however, will make clear that in all but one important aspect, whatever commercial success Quo vadis achieved in Europe, Ben-Hur preceded, outperformed, and outlived it in the United States, where Ben-Hur had already become the most successful novel of the late nineteenth century. The chapter will also speculate on some of the causes for this differential response to the two novels in the US. In addition to its chronological head start, Ben-Hur had already become, under the stewardship of its lawyer author Lew Wallace, the first copyrighted literary property to achieve commercial success in another artistic genre and also considerable name recognition in several non-artistic commercial ventures, thereby establishing a high watermark that no other property, even Quo vadis, would surpass for many decades.2 Sales of the novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ continued well into the next few decades, when ‘The Player’s Edition’ with photographic illustrations was published in 1900 in conjunction 1  Boston Daily Advertiser (17 October 1896) p. 5; Detroit Free Press (19 October 1896) p. 7; Chicago Tribune (24 October 1896) p. 10. 2  See Solomon 2016: 138–40 and 824–5; Korda 2001: xvi–xvii.

Jon Solomon, Comparing the Reception of Quo vadis and Ben-Hur in the United States, 1896–1913 In: The Novel of Neronian Rome and its Multimedial Transformations: Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis. Edited by: Monika Wozń iak and Maria Wyke, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198867531.003.0006

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88  Jon Solomon with the enormously popular Klaw & Erlanger Broadway dramatization,3 and Sears, Roebuck & Co., the largest retailer in the United States at the time, bought and resold one million copies of the novel in aggressive mail-order catalogue sales, by far the largest single book contract ever negotiated up to that point in history.4 Even these were supplemented with editions that extended beyond the novel’s original copyright (1880) and its two renewals (1908, 1922).5 In terms of commercial applications, Wallace himself participated in the creation of The Tribe of Ben-Hur, an insurance company that would enrol over 100,000 members and remain viable right up until the 1970s. Ben-Hur also became a veritable brand name applied to an enormous number of commercially successful, widely advertised, and long-enduring companies, brands, and products. These included George Moeb’s Ben-Hur Cigars, which sold over three million units in 1886, five million in 1888, and nearly seven million in 1891;6 Royal Milling Company’s Ben-Hur Flour brand that ran an intensive advertising campaign in America’s most widely published magazines in 1902–3, reaching tens of millions of subscribers every week with vivid chromolithographed images of a victorious charioteer (who was conspicuously Roman rather than Judean), his horses, his chariot, and sacks of Ben-Hur Flour;7 Joannes Brothers Ben-Hur Coffee, Tea, and Spice Company, California’s largest, which thrived for fifty years, long enough to saturate the West Coast with print, billboard, radio, and even television advertisements;8 and Jergens’ Ben-Hur Perfume, sales of which proliferated from coast to coast for several decades in a variety of relatively elaborate gift boxes, and with advertising synergized in conjunction with the release of the 1925 MGM BenHur and its glamorous co-star Carmel Myers.9 In addition, the imagery of Ben-Hur inspired a number of independent brands of baking powder, fresh California oranges, Pacific salmon, whiskey and rye, canned tomatoes, soap, hair products, brands of clocks, razors, shoes, and shoe polish (Solomon 2016: 408–508 and 686–705). There were over two 3  Lew Wallace, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ: The Player’s Edition (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1900); even in Harper advertisements, the title is often spelled as the ‘Players’ Edition’. 4  Lew Wallace, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ: Wallace Memorial Edition (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1908). 5  E.g. the later printings of the 1922 Grosset & Dunlap ‘Novels of Inspiration’ edition and numerous European editions. Cf. Solomon 2016: 178–80, 792–4. 6  Bay City [Michigan] Times, 16 March 1892, p. 4. 7 E.g. Ladies Home Journal 19 October 1902, p. 33; November 1902, p. 36; The Saturday Evening Post, 18 July 1903, n.p. 8 E.g. Los Angeles Herald, 25 September 1904, p. 9; Los Angeles Times, 23 November 1941, D11; Broadcasting, 15 June 1940, p. 45; Wall Street Journal, 11 March 1954, p. 21. 9 E.g. Canton Repository, 19 December 1924, p. 34; Photoplay 29, January 1926, p. 91.

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The Reception of Quo vadis and Ben-Hur in the US  89 dozen licensed and registered boats named ‘Ben-Hur’, trains, bicycles, and automobiles, roller-coaster rides (Solomon  2016: 449–64), chariot races under electric lights, a steel construction company (still extant and now in its 117th year of operation), a major manufacturing company that produced transport vehicles for the US Army during World War II, and well over a dozen mining and petroleum operations in more than half a dozen different states (Solomon  2016: 472–7). There were also many individually owned ­businesses, (still extant) fraternal organizations, and a dozen roadways and even several towns named Ben-Hur (Solomon 2016: 410–23 and 485–9). This amounts to over one hundred real-world applications of the name, many of them repeatedly employing chariot imagery from Ben-Hur in their advertising. Very much unlike his Polish counterpart, Lew Wallace was born in a log cabin along the Indiana frontier in 1827. Years later in his autobiography, Wallace recollected watching his father, a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, prepare to fight the Black Hawk Indians (Wallace 1906: 1.13–20). Around the age of 10, when his father was elected governor of the state of Indiana and moved the family to the frontier city of Indianapolis, his stepmother, Zerelda Bishop Wallace, began taking him to church (Wallace  1906: 1.45–59; Solomon  2016: 25–7). She was a charter member of the Church of Christ, a scion of the Stone-Campbell American evangelical movement that, sweeping rapidly across the Midwest in the 1830s, rejected not only the Catholicism and papal power that were integral to Sienkiewicz’s life, but also the entire body of European Christian dogma. In those same years, Wallace was tutored by Samuel  K.  Hoshour, a Germanspeaking, American-born, ex-Lutheran minister who had also embraced the new American Christian tenets and, after several years of turmoil, established himself in Indiana (Hoshour 1884: 61–2). The young Wallace did not embrace this sect of Christianity or, for that matter, any Christian doctrine until many decades later while writing Ben-Hur in the 1870s. Yet, in the novel, he ignored any recognition of the pope, learned Catholic dogma, or scriptural exegesis. Instead he filled its first pages with the Magus Balthasar’s prophecies of the coming of the new ‘King of the Jews’. He then consciously restricted, with two notable exceptions, the Christian elements of the rest of his novel to the events of the Passion and the words of Christ as written in the four Gospels of the New Testament, thus following the Christological precepts of his mother’s Church of Christ and the rapidly expanding American evangelical movement. Wallace’s evangelical perspective provided his predominantly non-Catholic and anti-Catholic readers with literary access to pre-Christian Judea, a period and a place already rendered familiar by two of the most frequently illustrated

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90  Jon Solomon events in popularized Christian history—the nativity and crucifixion of Jesus. This differs considerably from the Roman Catholic underpinnings of and audiences for Quo vadis. In this observation, we must consider as well the quintessential distinction that Wallace chose to set his novel in the period in which Christ was carrying out his earthly mission and suffering the Passion. In contrast, Sienkiewicz focused instead on the period immediately after (perhaps in part because of the international popularity of Ben-Hur), when the Apostles of Christ, in particular Peter, were actively carrying out their missions and the earliest generation of Christians were being martyred in Neronian Rome. The chronological difference between the historical settings of the two novels (Ben-Hur in the third and fourth decades of the first century, Quo vadis in the seventh), not to mention the geographical settings (Ben-Hur in the Holy Land, Quo vadis in Rome), is also influenced by the different theologies of the authors and in turn had a profound impact on the plot lines and characters of their novels and even the reception by the public as well as the dramatization and commercialization of the two literary properties. In Europe, a palaeo-Christian historical romance set in Neronian Rome would find a broader acceptance among non-evangelical readers for whom historical Rome and the Vatican were geopolitical and theocratic realities. For the purposes of this comparison, I need not recount in any detail Sienkiewicz’s higher education, his multi-decade experience as a journalist, his extended travels in the United States and Western Europe, his popular reputation as Poland’s greatest prolific novelist, his many philanthropic ac­tiv­ ities, and the many academic awards and honours he received, including, of course, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1905, the year that Lew Wallace died. But let us compare his background and successes with his American predecessor and counterpart. Wallace was self-educated. The usual educational and preparatory path for mid-nineteenth-century American authors like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Samuel Clemens, and Edgar Allen Poe—studying for the clergy, attending an institution of higher learning, travelling in Europe, or working as a journalist or at least in a newspaper office—was not the path taken by Wallace. His youthful lack of self-discipline and expressively artistic rebelliousness frequently brought him more discipline and punishment than formal education. In his late teens he had already run away to join the army, and it was between his military service in the Mexican War in Texas in the late 1840s and the American Civil War in the 1860s that he trained in the law and passed the bar exam. Busy with a law practice at home in Indiana, his military adventures in Mexico and the United States, and a few successful

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The Reception of Quo vadis and Ben-Hur in the US  91 campaigns for local political office, approximately thirty years went by before Wallace published in 1873 his first novel, The Fair God, about the Aztecs and Spanish conquistadores in Mexico.10 It took him another seven years to publish Ben-Hur, in part because in 1878, 1879, and early 1880 most of his time was consumed serving as Governor of the New Mexico Territory, where he had to control Billy the Kid and renegade Apache Indians, not to mention inhabit a desert city some 2,000 miles from his New York publisher, Harper & Brothers. It took him another thirteen years to publish his third and final novel, The Prince of India. Immediately after the publication of Ben-Hur, an admiring President James Garfield appointed Wallace to a four-year term in Constantinople as the United States Minister Plenipotentiary to the Ottoman court. When he returned to the United States in 1885, Wallace found himself to be the celebrity author of a bestselling novel. He had previously gained public recognition during the Civil War as President Abraham Lincoln’s appointee and the hero of the Battle of Monocacy that thwarted a Confederate attack on Washington, DC, and, after the war, as President Andrew Johnson’s appointee as a judge on the tribunal that tried the conspirators in the assassination of Lincoln. Now he engaged in extensive lecture tours, penned several contributions to popular magazines, and wrote a sort of prequel, The Boyhood of Christ, all of which contributed to the marketing success of Ben-Hur. By 1888–9, sales of his novel had reached 100,000 copies per year in the US alone. We could argue here that the burgeoning success of Ben-Hur in the late 1880s was due to the personal celebrity of Wallace and his national literary visibility, advantages not available to Sienkiewicz in the United States. But at the same time Ben-Hur’s European sales were burgeoning as well. Just to cite one example, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt’s German translation, Ben Hur: eine Erzählung aus der Zeit Christi, published in 1887, would enjoy well over one hundred printings. Sales numbers only reveal part of the story here, for of additional im­port­ ance is that Wallace, as a former practising attorney, had a uniquely thorough understanding of literary copyright laws. Along with Harper & Brothers, he engaged in several protracted copyright disputes to protect his current profits and future profitability. One of the most embattled of these disputes was with the English stereopticon company Riley Brothers.11 Claiming immunity from Wallace, Harper, and American copyright law because they were a British 10  Lew Wallace, The Fair God, or, The Last of the ‘Tzins. A Tale of the Conquest of Mexico (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1873). 11  Cincinnati Enquirer, 27 April 1896, p. 9; The Optical Magic Lantern Journal and Photographic Enlarger 7 October 1896, pp. 166–7; Solomon 2016: 516–29.

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92  Jon Solomon company, Riley Brothers sold their sets of Ben-Hur painted slides illustrating passages from the novel to entrepreneurial lecturers who circulated the US showing the slides while reading abridged adaptations of relevant selections. Wallace and Harper could not legally put a stop to the slide presentations, but they were ultimately able to force Riley to ‘cease and desist’ in publishing their adapted abridged texts because doing so infringed upon the American literary property copyrighted by Wallace and Harper. Another dispute was with Ellen Knight Bradford. Bradford began pro­du­ cing successful but unauthorized tableau/reading performances of ‘A Night With Ben-Hur’ in America’s largest metropolitan opera houses and concert halls in the late 1880s.12 Wallace and Harper threatened her with legal action, and she deceased. However, inspired by her innovative adaptation of his novel, Wallace himself then authorized and participated in the development of his own dramatization of Ben-Hur, publishing his own copyrighted adaptation, Ben-Hur, in Tableaux and Pantomime, which would be played around the country and provide the legally shrewd Wallace with steady royalties night after night for over a decade. This was still in an era in which legal licensing of a literary property was a rarity. Not only did the law not yet provide easily for such arrangements, the practice of external licensing was also—contrary to what we know well today—thought to interfere with sales of the original property instead of increasing them. In fact, by producing Ben-Hur, in Tableaux and Pantomime and authorizing the Tribe of Ben-Hur organization, Wallace and Harper & Brothers were actually at the forefront of the licensing concept. Although today we can appreciate Wallace as a bestselling celebrity author and a pioneer in transforming a single literary property into a personal fortune for its author by consciously promoting book sales, guarding copyright protection, licensing dramatic adaptations, and authorizing external commercialization, Wallace was never considered a literary genius. He was never given honorary degrees or, like Sienkiewicz, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. For that matter, there is no evidence that such goals were ever in his sights. What Wallace did accomplish, however, was monumental, especially considering his lack of formal education and his time-consuming ac­tiv­ ities as a soldier, general, lawyer, territorial administrator, and diplomat. But he would never be regarded as a great American novelist. On one of his lecture tours to New England, he was scheduled to meet such distinguished 12  Boston Globe (28 February 1889) 2; (18 April 1890) 4; The Washington Post (18 April 1890) 4; Detroit Free Press (16 May 1891) 5; Solomon (2016: 220–9).

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The Reception of Quo vadis and Ben-Hur in the US  93 Yankee literary figures as William Dean Howells, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich. None of them showed up.13 But a bestselling author, whatever the amount of education, natural talent, acquired skill, and laborious effort and time spent on their most popular work, cannot produce a successful novel if the audience—the consuming public—is not amenable to being swept up in a buying frenzy like those that greeted the publication of Quo vadis and Ben-Hur. For Ben-Hur, American readers were already likely to be particularly receptive to a novel about Jesus. Prepared by the (American) Jefferson Bible and the rationalizing (European) works of David Friedrich Strauss and Ernest Renan earlier in the nineteenth century, there was already a place in the American market for the occasional publication that offered a rethinking of the earthly mission of the Christ.14 The unforgiving and distant Calvinist god of the Puritan settlers of the early American colonies was well along in the process of giving way to the more kindly, loving, and immanently approachable Jesus of the American evan­gel­ ic­al movement. In the decade before the publication of Ben-Hur, Henry Ward Beecher, the renowned clergyman, lecturer, and Christian essayist, had published The Life of Jesus, the Christ (1871), and his sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, the celebrated author of the first great American bestseller, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in the 1850s, wrote her own biography of Jesus, Footsteps of the Master (1877).15 But despite the celebrity and previous successes of these authors, neither of their books captured the public’s attention like Wallace’s Ben-Hur. Whereas they had written quasi-historical books about the life of Jesus, Wallace wrote a novel, indeed ‘a tale of the Christ’, about an ultimately heroic Jewish teenager who quickly matures under the cruel lash of Roman slavery, defeats his treacherous Roman rival in what would become recognized as an iconic chariot race, and then witnesses the miraculous healing of his leprous mother and sister by Jesus, whom he had met before in a chance encounter in Nazareth, and then encountered again repeatedly during the Passion. Wallace packaged this story about the young Jewish protagonist with a prologue describing the nativity of Christ, which tied the various parts of the novel together by allowing Balthasar to appear there and throughout, predicting the coming of a new ‘King of the Jews’ for Judah Ben-Hur to follow and even support by raising an army. Because the story of Ben-Hur takes place one generation before that of Quo vadis, Christ does not actually appear in the latter, except as an apparition on 13  Letter from Lew Wallace to Susan Wallace (25 December 1886), Indiana Historical Society. 14  Jefferson 1902, Strauss 1840, Renan 1864. 15  Beecher 1871, Stowe 1877.

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94  Jon Solomon the Via Appia that leads Peter to turn back to Rome. Unlike Judah Ben-Hur, Marcus Vinicius is a Roman soldier who converts to Christianity through love and the teachings of the Apostles. He has no direct encounter with Christ. Despite these important differences, advertisers and critics found several reasons to compare the two blockbusters. When Curtin’s translation of Quo vadis was published by Little, Brown & Company in the US in October 1896, the initial advertisement in the Boston Daily Advertiser did not compare the two novels but focused primarily on Sienkiewicz’s Polish literary pedigree (even though the newspaper misspelled his name as ‘Henry K.’ Sienkiewicz). The advertisement mentions that he is the author of With Fire and Sword and The Deluge three times and describes the scope of the novel this way:16 This remarkable romance, dealing with history and religion, with the customs of Rome in the days of Nero, and the martyrdom of the early Christians, although of strong contrast to the famous ‘With Fire and Sword’ series and the author’s novels of modern Poland, is likely to take a place as the greatest of his works.

One week later, however, the Chicago Tribune review of Quo vadis put the book in its historical and literary contexts, and in doing so it made two different comparisons to Ben-Hur.17 An 1890s review in the Chicago Tribune should not be dismissed as simply a local review from a secondary but blossoming Midwestern American city searching for cultural relevance. As was already common in the 1890s, an excerpt of the Chicago Tribune review was syndicated and quoted two weeks later in an ad in the Boston Daily Advertiser, thereby giving at least part of the review a much wider and perhaps even national circulation.18 After remarking upon the immense task undertaken by Sienkiewicz in describing Neronian Rome, as well as that undertaken by Jeremiah Curtin in translating the work, the anonymous Chicago Tribune review concludes the first of its four sections with this paragraph: ‘Quo Vadis’ is a large book in every way. It constantly suggests the terrifying but fascinating canvases of Verestchagin, or the thunderous tones of ‘Siegfried’, or the living scenes of Zola’s ‘La Débacle’. Yet to the vivid realism

16  Boston Daily Advertiser, 17 October 1896, p. 5. 17  Chicago Tribune, 24 October 1896, p. 10. 18  Boston Daily Advertiser, 7 November 1896, p. 8.

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The Reception of Quo vadis and Ben-Hur in the US  95 of ‘La Débacle’ it adds the chaste style and spirit of ‘Ben Hur’. It is not overpraise to say that it is a combination of the best elements in both.

By conjuring up images of larger-than-life European paintings, operas, and novels, the reviewer lavishes praise on the narrative scope of Quo vadis, reflecting the current popular conception of ancient Rome and its architectural monuments, unparalleled imperial system of government, cruel treatment of Christians and slaves, and long-enduring civic decay. This conception is in essence a latter-day adaptation of the view espoused by Gibbon and then reinforced by Wallace’s own descriptions of the Romans (Wallace certainly had read Gibbon) and Roman imperial rule in Ben-Hur.19 The reviewer continues his praise by pointing out that Quo vadis embraces within its epic scope ‘the chaste style and spirit of “Ben-Hur” ’, here recognizing the reverence with which the American evangelist had treated the person of Jesus and the pious obeisance offered to his every appearance and that of his immediate family in the novel. The Boston Daily Advertiser ad again invokes Ben-Hur, this time in an unfavourable comparison to the climactic episode in the arena of Quo vadis: The greatest of Polish novelists has chosen a subject of intense interest to the whole Christian civilization. A tremendous subject, and right grandly does the author rise to it. A masterly picture of Roman life at the critical moment when Christianity ceased to smoulder and begun to blaze. The world needs such a book at intervals to remind it again of the surprising beauty of Christ’s central ideal . . . A climax (the scene in the Arena) beside which the famous chariot race in ‘Ben-Hur’ seems tame.

Preceding the specific mention of the iconic Ben-Hur chariot race, the ‘interval’ that the text refers to is no doubt the sixteen-year gap between the publication of Ben-Hur in 1880 and the publication of Quo vadis in 1896. In the comparison itself, the reviewer prefers Quo vadis’s arena scene, perhaps because Wallace composed his ‘famous chariot race’ with technical vocabulary taken from Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, including detailed physical descriptions of the circus, chariots, and the strategy of the race itself, whereas Sienkiewicz’s arena scene carries much greater emotion in the torment of the martyred Christians and the thrillingly unexpected rescue of Lygia. 19  See also Scodel in this volume.

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96  Jon Solomon William Henry Shelton complained to The New York Times that, in their lengthy praise of Quo vadis as the ‘Novel of the Year’, the newspaper had neglected even to mention Sienkiewicz’s previous novels, which he and some others considered to be far superior.20 In his letter to The New York Times book editor, Shelton tells the world that his friends warned him not to read Quo vadis because it was ‘not up to the standard’ of Sienkiewicz’s previous novels, and that he had ‘abandoned his legitimate field; . . . thrashing old straw for cheap popularity’. Bringing Ben-Hur into the equation, Sheldon queries whether Sienkiewicz chose to write a novel about Christians in Neronian Rome specifically to bring his previous novels to the attention of the Englishspeaking market. Going further, he surmises that perhaps Jeremiah Curtin, ‘with his shrewd newspaper sense’, was behind the entire enterprise and made the suggestion to Sienkiewicz to ‘do the Ben-Hur act’, thereby suggesting that he must have written Quo vadis specifically to cash in on ‘American weakness for the religious novel’, to which Sienkiewicz himself may have been exposed during his travels in California back in the mid-1870s. Of course, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ was not published until 1880, but it had been translated into Polish seven years before the appearance of Quo vadis.21 In this instance, however, Shelton’s complaint depends on his opinion that the prose of BenHur did not match that of Quo vadis (which was itself inferior to the literary quality of Sienkiewicz’s previous works), and that the publication of Ben-Hur preceded the appearance of Quo vadis by more than a decade. An observation made in the Massachusetts Springfield Republican in 1899 compared the influence each novel had on its readership, noting specifically that the demand for Quo vadis, and especially its palaeo-Christian setting, created interest in Sienkiewicz’s other novels, as Ben-Hur had for those of Wallace: One thing seems tolerably clear: if it were not for ‘Quo Vadis’, the name of the great Polish novelist would not be a household word in this country. His great trilogy of Polish historical romances, ‘With Fire and Sword’, ‘The Deluge’, and ‘Pan Michael’, dates back many years, and the English translation found only scattered readers until ‘Quo Vadis’, with [its] narrative of Nero and the Christian martyrs, appealed to that large class of readers who are not specially stirred either by pure literature or by profane history, but

20  William Henry Shelton, letter to the editor of The New York Times 18 December 1897, p. 16. 21 Lew Wallace, (Zofja Grabowska, trans.), Ben-Hur: opowie´s’c z czasów Chrystusa (Warsaw: Wydanie Redakcji WĘdrowca, 1889).

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The Reception of Quo vadis and Ben-Hur in the US  97 who respond quickly to a story which throws, or seems to throw, fresh light on the life of Christ or the history of the early church. The demand for ‘Quo Vadis’ was a demand of essentially the same sort as the demand for ‘Ben Hur’, and just as admirers of that book proceeded on the strength of it to essay ‘The Fair God’ and ‘The Prince of India’, so the readers of ‘Quo Vadis’ have bravely attacked the big Polish trilogy.22

Thus far we have sampled a critical review, a comment from a member of the reading public, and an observation about secondary book sales, all focusing on the literary and retail aspects of the two novels. Not surprisingly, extraordinary sales would almost always be a factor in pairing and comparing these two bestsellers. But because of their pre- and palaeo-Christian subject matter, many of the comparisons would focus interestingly on the novels’ theology, morality, and treatment of religious history. The Chicago Tribune for 23 August 1897 quotes Julian Hawthorne, author and critic, who offers high praise for the powerful Christian voice expressed in Quo vadis: In some respects this Polish writer with the strange name has surpassed any of his predecessors. He is as learned as Flaubert, and carries his learning more lightly. In portrayal of character he is occasionally the equal of Kingsley. In the spirit which informs his work he is the superior of both. No  voice stronger than his on the side of Christ has ever been raised in fiction.

Such praise was not only the result of the religious intensity conveyed in Quo vadis. The widespread interest in the Polish novel that swept the United States in 1897 and 1898 was contemporary with the recently fomented and realized American desire for international imperialistic conquest. 1898 would be the year in which the Spanish–American War and the US Marines would bring the territories of Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines under American military control. This was not just a matter of military and economic conquest. The war was justified by a spiritual belief in the ‘imperialism of righteousness’ that had percolated up to the White House during the presidency of William McKinley, who sought to ‘civilize and Christianize’: Territory sometimes comes to us when we go to war in a holy cause, and whenever it does the banner of liberty will float over it and bring, I trust, the blessings and benefits to all people.23 22  Springfield Republican, 25 June 1899, p. 15.

23  Judis 2004: 4.

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98  Jon Solomon This view is implicit in clergyman Frank Crane’s ‘Pulpit Editorial’ for October 1897, delivered in Chicago and syndicated in the Los Angeles Times, which says that Quo vadis ‘brings the atmosphere of early Christianity much more vividly home to the reader than does Ben-Hur’.24 He then develops the determined Christian resistance featured in Quo vadis into a manifesto for Christian imperialism: No one can peruse it without feeling the intense dynamics of the Christian faith. It is one of many illustrations of the fact that the words of Jesus have been the source of a thousand fold more heroism upon earth than the stirring pages of Homer or Ariosto. What a mighty energy must be in words that raised men to the sublime deeds depicted in Quo Vadis—that inspired the Crusades, that gave impulsion to the Templar movement; and that in our day sends missionaries to the edge of the world!

In strong contrast, the broad dissemination of a historical novel that depicts a romance as well as religious heroism will also inevitably incur the wrath of readers who find offence in the portrayal of hallowed personages in a secular artistic treatment. In 1898 George Burton in The New York Times, without consciously acknowledging that Ben-Hur and Quo vadis are set in different historical periods, respectively the Tiberian and the Neronian, specified that Ben-Hur was ‘a vivid enough picture of the mass of Hebrew people . . . at least in part a social study of the times in Palestine’, while he identified Quo vadis as ‘a startling sociological study of the Romans’.25 His purpose was to look for moral instruction in these two novels, and he found Quo vadis in particular to be ‘morally unhealthful’, explaining that it described the ‘most revolting sensualism that the world has ever seen’, and concluding therefore that ‘as a novel the book has no excuse for existence’. We are fortunate in this regard to have a brief comment from Lew Wallace himself, who was asked for the 23 August 1897 edition of the Chicago Tribune to comment on the influence of historical novels about early Christianity.26 As the acknowledged American master of the popular historical novel, Wallace readily affirmed that it was the only medium that could so easily and effectively ‘advance religious ideas’ to the public: ‘In no other way can attention be so easily secured or so large a ‘pupillage’ gained by a teacher.’ But then he assumed the persona of the professional author. In evaluating Wallace’s 24  Los Angeles Times, 12 October 1897, p. 6. 25  New York Times, 9 April 1898, RB245.

26  Chicago Tribune, 23 August 1897, p. 10.

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The Reception of Quo vadis and Ben-Hur in the US  99 response, we must bear in mind that he had written Ben-Hur seventeen years earlier, had long since achieved public celebrity and personal wealth from his novel, and had weathered the storms of personal attacks from cranks and literary snobbery from the literati. So in responding as a soldier/administrator/ diplomat turned lawyer, turned popular author, he said: At the same time, it is the most difficult of resorts: not every idea is worth the heading. That, however, may be safely left to the public. It is also true that success depends in great measure on the manner of presentment. Admitting the value of their central idea and the excellence of the garb in which they come clothed, it still remains that religious novels are subject to a censorship unknown to other works in the realm of fiction. It must be approved by the clergy, by the religious press, and by orthodox Christian sentiment generally. Therein lies the supreme difficulty. Of this no one should complain. Resolving religion into a business: the business of the church is to save souls and to take care of its own.

Wallace’s prose may require a bit of parsing, but what I believe he is saying is that (i) not every religious historical novel is worth reading and its effectiveness will be determined only by the public itself, (ii) even if the religious content is valuable, the novel must be well designed and written, and (iii) assuming that the novel contains a worthy religious message and is well written, then it still must escape not only critical reviews but a unique battery of religious scrutiny by the clergy, religious press, and, as I recounted earlier, the social and religious climate into which the book is introduced. He describes the latter as ‘the supreme difficulty’ but adds that the author of a popular religious novel is delving into the business of religion, which has its own goals— to save souls and embrace its own community. Unlike the Catholic Sienkiewicz, Wallace could say this with authority because he had achieved enormous religious impact even though he never publicly or privately embraced any aspect of the Christian faith, except for the concept of revelation. In his writings he periodically but consistently affirms that Jesus was a human being, and his divinity was only the Spirit within him: Should one ask of another, or wonder to himself, why I, who am neither minister of the Gospel, nor theologian, nor churchman, have presumed to write this book, it pleases me to answer him respectfully – I wrote it to fix an impression distinctly in my mind.

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100  Jon Solomon Asks he for the impression thus sought to be fixed in my mind, then I would be twice happy did he content himself with this other answer – the Jesus Christ in whom I believe was, in all the stages of his life, a human being. His divinity was the Spirit within him, and the Spirit was God.27

Considering that Ben-Hur would become such an international success as a religious novel, much like Quo vadis, Wallace’s iconoclastic Christology could hardly fail to come to the notice of the Vatican. In fact, although Ben-Hur was later claimed to be the first work of fiction to be blessed by a pope, in this instance the nonagenarian Pope Leo XIII, Pope Leo had actually read a ­doctrine-doctored version. Enrico Salvadori, one of the pope’s ‘honorary chaplains’, had translated the novel into Italian, but it was Cardinal Rampolla, the Papal Secretary of State, who conveyed the Apostolic Blessing specifically on Salvadori’s rendering because of the ‘various modification of ideas which the translator has taken the liberty to introduce into the work in the interest of piety’. Wallace’s theological assumptions had thus been transformed into a text much more palatable to the Holy See.28 Wallace’s The Boyhood of Christ and The Prince of India were also both censured for doctrinal and historical errors.29 Again, Wallace himself had consciously rejected the basic tenets of Roman Catholicism, and he was not alone in finding fault with what was then often referred to disparagingly as ‘Romanism’ and ‘Papism’. Nonetheless, Quo vadis was apparently not submitted to the equivalent religious censorship in the US and achieved considerable success there, despite the strong current of hostility towards Catholics and European immigrants.30 Interestingly, the preface of the earliest Italian translation of Wallace’s novel, Ben Hur: una storia di Cristo, translated by H. Mildmay and Gastone Cavalieri in 1900, states quite clearly that their inspiration was Quo vadis, pointing out that ‘in the loftiness of inspirational concepts and the breadth of erudition, its author is no less commendable and praiseworthy than Sienkiewicz’. While critical readers no doubt had their individual preferences for either Quo vadis or Ben-Hur as literature and could make judgements dependent upon their religious beliefs and moral training, there is evidence to demonstrate that amateur dramatists were inspired by both novels without any 27  E.g. Lew Wallace, The Boyhood of Christ (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1888) Preface. 28  The Christian Work and the Evangelist 74, 20 June 1903, p. 895. 29  New Catholic World 81, April 1905, p. 138. 30  Interestingly, the preface of the earliest Italian translation of Wallace’s novel, Ben Hur: una storia di Cristo, translated by H. Mildmay and Gastone Cavalieri in 1900, states quite clearly that their ­inspiration was Quo vadis, pointing out that ‘in the loftiness of inspirational concepts and the breadth of erudition, its author is no less commendable and praiseworthy than Sienkiewicz’.

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The Reception of Quo vadis and Ben-Hur in the US  101 particular preference. In popular culture, they could both represent a generic image of early Christianity. In 1899 in Boston, for instance, a fund-raising presentation for the Working Boys’ Home constructed ‘very elaborate and beautifully staged’ tableaux of ‘the first four centuries of the Christian era’.31 These included ‘the gateway scene’ from Ben-Hur and ‘a garden scene’ from Quo vadis, as well as an arena scene, another in the catacombs, and a scene of ‘Three Marys at the Tomb’. In November 1899, Broadway producers Marc Klaw and Abraham Erlanger introduced their spectacular and highly publicized dramatization of Ben-Hur, publicly endorsed by Wallace, who had not coincidentally insisted on being paid a huge royalty that amounted to 10 per cent. The Klaw & Erlanger production played across the country (and in England and Australia) for twenty years in nearly 6,000 performances (Solomon  2016: 311–407). At the time this was by far the most commercially successful play ever produced in the United States, and it would be Erlanger, long after Wallace’s death, who would oversee the sale of the film rights, which ultimately evolved into the 1925 spectacular MGM feature. This great success came despite a religious climate that discouraged any type of dramatic entertainment as immoral, the same that produced George Burton’s negative evaluation of Quo vadis. Indeed, Wallace himself had insisted that Jesus was not to appear on stage or be impersonated in any way. An 1899 column in Pennsylvania’s Harrisburg Patriot demonstrates once again that many thought of Ben-Hur and Quo vadis as more or less interchangeable religious and action narratives set in the early period of Christianity. The column also addresses the issue of profit-oriented ex­ploit­ ation of religious subject matter by businessmen: Religious plays appear to be the coming fad. New York is more than ordinarily interested in ‘Ben-Hur’, which has been most magnificently staged at the Broadway Theater. . . . Of course the play has more or less to do with religion, and as it follows the book it must necessarily teach a powerful lesson. About the only objection that the stern religionists find in the play is that the teachings and miracles of the Redeemer are used to make money. This question seems to have stirred up considerable comment as the [New York] ‘Herald’ and other papers devoted long editorials to its discussion.

31  Boston Herald, 4 April 1899, p. 16.

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102  Jon Solomon Everyone admits that the lessons to be drawn from the staging of ‘Ben-Hur’ are ennobling and positive in their tones. Surely the question of money should not arise as there are other things than the stage connected with religion that are profitable for men in business. ‘Quo Vadis’ has also been drama­tized and has met with considerable success in Chicago.32

We do have some scant evidence of head-to-head competition in ticket sales for the contemporaneous dramatic adaptations of both novels. A syndicated press release on behalf of the Quo vadis production at McVicker’s Theater in Chicago claimed that, while it was earning less money than Ben-Hur, this was because the Ben-Hur ticket prices were twice as high: ‘Quo Vadis’ is still breaking records at McVicker’s Theater in Chicago, where it entered on its second month last night, with three more weeks to run. The business done during the week which closed Sunday night was as large as that of the holiday week proper—an unusual happening in the theatrical world. For each week the receipts were within a few dollars of $14,000. Comparing this with the receipts of ‘Ben Hur’, which is crowding Mr. Litt’s Broadway Theatre in New York, where at just double the McVicker’s Theater prices—$2 being asked for the best seats—the gross takings for Christmas weeks showed $21,000, the presumption is that more people have seen ‘Quo Vadis’ than have seen ‘Ben Hur’.33

At the turn of the century this kind of advertising disguised as an impartial news report was not uncommon. Ultimately, compared to Ben-Hur, dramatic adaptations of Quo vadis had a relatively short run. This is probably attributable to such elements as artistic control, copyright maintenance, and royalty collection. Wallace authorized only the single Klaw & Erlanger dramatization in 1899 to the exclusion of all others, and it enjoyed a record-setting run. By contrast, there were six competing American dramatizations of Quo vadis, including adaptations by F.  C.  Whitney and Stanislaus Stange, mounted in 1899 and 1900,34 but the market did not accommodate this proliferation well. According to a news­ paper account, Whitney’s dramatic adaptation of Quo vadis was ousted from 32  Harrisburg Patriot, 23 December 1899, p. 13. 33 E.g. Kalamazoo [Michigan] Gazette, 9 January 1900, p. 6. 34  New York Times, 13 December 1899, p. 6; 27 March 1900, p. 7; San Diego Union, 30 November 1899, p. 6; Philadelphia Inquirer, 9 September 1900, p. 12; 22 October 1905, p. 4; Detroit Free Press, 15 August 1900, p. 4; Chicago Tribune, 26 March 1911, p. 8. See also Mayer in this volume.

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The Reception of Quo vadis and Ben-Hur in the US  103 the entirety of England in 1900 by Wilson Barrett’s presentation of the story.35 An exclusive entry in The New York Times was ‘The “Quo Vadis” Controversy’, a short piece that included a printed confession by Sienkiewicz himself (in English) that he had no legal means to prevent copyright or agreement infringements in the United States.36 Moreover, while Wallace and—after his death in 1905—his estate were still collecting 10-per cent royalties from the nearly 6,000 performances of the Klaw & Erlanger Ben-Hur that were staged between 1899 and 1920, a notice in the Los Angeles Times reports that Sienkiewicz was not collecting any royalty at all from approximately 150 Italian performances in Naples and Rome.37 Working in an entirely different dramatic genre, in 1909 Jean Nouguès composed an operatic setting of Quo vadis, from a libretto by Henri Cain. It premiered in Nice, was staged in Paris, London, and Milan, and then at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in 1911. There is no equivalent operatic setting of Ben-Hur, in the US or abroad. In 1895 Joseph J. Reinisch had proposed a German operatic version of Ben-Hur modelled on the Heinrich Bulthaupt/Anton Rubinstein operatic Christus, and Wallace himself had proposed an opera to Edgar Stillman Kelley, one of America’s foremost com­posers at the turn of the century and the artist who composed the incidental music for the Klaw & Erlanger dramatic production. But neither work was completed. This is not surprising in that the plot of Wallace’s ‘Tale of the Christ’ is less conducive to an operatic adaptation that the romance of Quo vadis. Moving on to the genre of film, we find considerable irony in the fact that the Ben-Hur copyright Wallace so carefully protected and which brought his literary property so much commercial success also prevented Ben-Hur from inspiring an early silent-film adaptation as successful as Guazzoni’s groundbreaking 1913 cinematic version of Quo vadis. The Kalem Company had made an ambitious, 1,000-foot, multi-scene film of Ben-Hur already in 1907, and that film was distributed surprisingly widely, given that it was produced in the era before cinemas. But shortly after its release, the Wallace estate, Harper & Brothers, and Klaw & Erlanger together filed a lawsuit accusing Kalem of violating their literary and dramatic copyright. This legal dispute developed into an important moment in cinematic history. Indeed, the ‘BenHur Case’ was ultimately adjudicated by the United States Supreme Court in 1911 and established the legal precedent for cinematic copyright for all

35  Philadelphia Inquirer, 4 November 1900, p. 16. 37  Los Angeles Times, 15 July 1900, III 2.

36  New York Times, 11 April 1900, p. 9.

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104  Jon Solomon subsequent American films.38 But legally Kalem’s film had to be withdrawn from distribution, and thereafter the prospect of producing a cinematic adaptation of Ben-Hur dimmed because of the upfront cost of purchasing the rights to the property. Even though there was talk of producing a film in the mid-1910s, it was only after Abraham Erlanger and then Samuel Goldwyn paid more than $1 million in 1922 for the rights to film Ben-Hur that another Ben-Hur film would be made. It was for this reason that when George Kleine brought Quo vadis to Broadway in April 1913, Ben-Hur was legally muted and presented no competition. Conditions in the 1920s provide a strong contrast. By that point MGM’s 1925 Ben-Hur was legally verified and protected by Erlanger’s copyright. Powered by MGM’s corporate marketing department, it became an international blockbuster, earning some $10 million in worldwide box-office receipts and thereby dwarfing Gabriellino D’Annunzio’s problematic 1925 adaptation to screen of Quo Vadis. Every few years, new crops of commercially successful literature produce a singular blockbuster property that sells an extraordinary number of units, makes a deep impression in popular culture, and engenders new artistic cre­ ations and/or commercial enterprises. It is not a coincidence that Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) was one of the first of these, and that it was the common prototype for Ben-Hur and Quo vadis, both of which in turn became huge successes at the end of the nineteenth century. These works demonstrated time and again that novels set in antiquity could establish modern relevance, a particularly wide distribution, and financial rewards for a variety of artists, producers, and entrepreneurs. In this chapter we have seen the two leading literary properties of the late nineteenth century make differing impressions on readers, critics, political leaders, and even a pope, inspiring much praise while evoking also disappointment and condemnation. As it turned out, although comparisons were inevitable and made for interesting newspaper copy, both properties achieved what such rare ex­amples of literary properties do, namely the bypassing of critical and sectarian roadblocks and the garnering of unparalleled popularity and commercial success—predominantly in the United States for Ben-Hur and in Europe for Quo vadis.

38  For details, see Solomon 2013: 189–204.

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PART II

QU O VA DI S UP TO THE SE C ON D WOR LD WA R

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7 Quo vadis on the Stage David Mayer

The Anglo-American stage history of Quo vadis marks an intriguingly ­problematic point in the trajectory of a popular, widely praised novel and its later re-emergence in a series of respected and valued silent and sound films. It is a sad fact that, despite two—perhaps three—English-language adaptations brought to American and British theatres in 1900 and 1901,1 all these variant Quo vadis stage plays, despite being well cast, offering elaborate settings, massed choirs, and numerous supernumeraries, were—at best—mediocre productions which achieved indifferent success in finding substantial metropolitan audiences, in contrast to the version staged in Paris in 1901. Whereas other more fortunate plays could count on metropolitan runs of several months, Quo vadis’s success, such as it was, occurred on both countries’ provincial ­circuits. Away from the larger cities, Quo vadis companies played short engagements to audiences of America’s rural and small-town Christians, who were drawn to the theatres by advertisements stressing the religiosity of the drama and promising large casts, vivid scenery, and substantial choirs. Always on the move, travelling companies, although receiving few critical plaudits, briefly earned substantial profits for their investors. Touring Quo vadis in Britain was far less remunerative and, in consequence, briefer. This chapter describes the three Anglo-American stage adaptations of Sienkiewicz’s novel and notes their brief histories in contrast to the sustained success of other plays in the newly emergent genre to which they belong. I  account for the impetus to find a means to dramatize Quo vadis in ways which acknowledged conflict between the Roman world and new Christianity and which gave full scope to action sequences that stretched well beyond the stage’s technical capabilities. And I address possible reasons for the relative failure of these stage adaptations as well as briefly exploring the success of the French version. 1  ‘Two Versions of “Quo Vadis” ’, New York Times, 9 April 1900.

David Mayer, Quo vadis on the Stage In: The Novel of Neronian Rome and its Multimedial Transformations: Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis. Edited by: Monika Woz ń iak and Maria Wyke, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198867531.003.0007

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108  David Mayer The publication of the novel Quo vadis coincided with the repeated success on the British and American stages of what were termed ‘toga plays’. The notable profits generated by two earlier well-constructed toga plays, Wilson Barrett’s The Sign of the Cross (1895)2 and William Young’s adaptation of General Lew Wallace’s novel Ben-Hur (1899), appear to have beguiled the novel’s English and American publishers, translator-adapters, and theatrical entrepreneurs into viewing Quo vadis as a tempting opportunity to cash in on this bonanza and to develop the Polish novel for stage performance. However, their vision of wealth was delusory. Quo vadis resisted attempts to shoehorn it into a stage play. The relative failure of Anglo-American stage adaptations of Quo vadis can, in part, be laid at the door of its success as a novel, which describes key scenes of action (in theatrical language of the day, ‘sensation scenes’): the chaos ensuing during the Great Fire of Rome in ad 64 and those moments of terror in the arena where Christians are martyred and where the heroine, Lygia, faces a particularly cruel martyrdom bound to the horns of an enraged aurochs bull. Such scenes were nearly beyond the resources of any theatre. There was absolutely no way in which the staging of the latter scene appeased critics and forestalled complaint. And there was a further reason for the several stage adaptations’ limited appeal: the novel is aimed at a Roman Catholic readership and features characters who are too aligned with Catholic dogma to have appealed to predominantly Protestant Anglo-American audiences. The term ‘Toga play’ was coined by ‘Carados’ (the pen name of the journalist H. Chance Newton), in 1895–6 writing weekly in The Referee, to characterize an emerging melodramatic theatrical genre set in ancient Rome,3 in which an innocent Christian ingénue is pursued by a fast-living Roman aristocrat, usually with connections to the imperial court. The young woman is steadfast in her faith and, although she is attracted to the young Roman, keeps him at a distance and is further protected and chaperoned by other Christian worshippers. Attracting the jealousy of the Empress—who secretly desires the young Roman—and the lascivious interest of the Emperor, the young woman and her fellow Christians are to be sacrificed to the lions in the arena. At this juncture either she is somehow rescued by her Roman lover who (impressed and converted by her virtue, beauty, and doctrine of tolerance, peace, and pre-papal Christianity) has declared himself a Christian but has the means for

2 For the film adaptation of The Sign of the Cross (1932) by Cecil  B.  DeMille, see Stubbs in this volume. 3 Mayer 1994.

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Quo vadis on the Stage  109 both to escape death or (declaring himself a Christian and rejecting Roman paganism) joins her in the arena to share her martyrdom. Barrett’s The Sign of the Cross follows the latter pattern of a shared martyrdom; Ben-Hur enacts the ordeal of a wealthy Jewish youth who, with his family, suffers under Roman tyranny, eventually achieves power and wealth as an adopted Roman, and, directly inspired by Jesus (whom he encounters first as a prisoner of the Romans and again when he is a bystander at the procession to Calvary and sees his mother and sister miraculously cured of leprosy as they witness the Crucifixion), finally converts to Christianity. However, neither The Sign of the Cross nor Ben-Hur, nor any other mainstream Anglo-American toga play, ends with a vision of Jesus on the Via Appia, nor does any celebrate the founding of the Church of Rome. Although dramas that enacted Romans resisting tyranny had long been a staple of the English stage,4 none of those plays addressed conflict between Roman paganism and emerging Christianity. Toga plays as a genre emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, most likely propelled by the success of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel The Last Days of Pompeii (1834). Lytton’s novel was adapted for the stage in 1834 by John Baldwin Buckstone, again a year later by Edward Fitzball, and in America in the same year by Louisa Medina, and once again in 1872 by John Oxenford. However, the more memorable and long-lasting version was as a pyrodrama, a dramatic spectacle with fireworks. An erupting volcanic Vesuvius and a fiery disintegrating Pompeii, mounted out of doors by the fireworks entrepreneur James Pain, drew thousands of spectators. Beginning in 1882, Pain’s The Last Days of Pompeii played throughout the summers at New York’s Manhattan Beach resort, and travelled in replica productions, providing summer entertainment to many American cities until as late as 1904.5 Another influential toga play was the Henry Herman, William  G.  Wills, and E. W. Godwin spectacle Claudian (1883). Beginning in Leeds, travelling to London, and then across the Atlantic to America, the play, set in the ­fictional Syrian city of Charydos, dramatized the suffering of a voluptuary Byzantine ruler, Claudian, who is made to atone for his crimes of seduction and betrayal of his victim, a young Christian female, by being unable to die.6 Claudian enacts a similar conflict between paganism and early non-doctrinal

4  Most prominently Ben Jonson: Sejanus (1603), Catiline (1611); Shakespeare: Titus Andronicus (1591), Julius Caesar (1599), Antony and Cleopatra (1606), Coriolanus (1608); Joseph Addison: Cato (1713); James Sheridan Knowles: Caius Gracchus (1815), Virginius (1820). 5  Mayer 1994: 90–103. 6  Mayer 1994: 30–89.

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110  David Mayer pre-papal Christianity that made it possible to draw audiences from across the spectrum of modern Anglo-American Christianity. As the leading role of Claudian was performed by the actor-manager Wilson Barrett, who went on to write and star in The Sign of the Cross, it is likely that Claudian partly inspired this subsequent work. The Sign of the Cross makes no great demands on staging and, significantly, unlike Quo vadis, is sparing in its use of supernumeraries. A raid by Roman soldiers on a clandestine Christian service is the only spectacle. In contrast, Ben-Hur, adapted for the stage by William Young and elaborately mounted by the Klaw & Erlanger management, depended upon a large cast of actors and extras. Further, it required stage machinery to simulate a Roman galley rammed and sunk and an even more elaborate deployment of live horses and chariots mounted on treadmills set before moving backcloths for the climactic race. But their setting in the Byzantine Empire and the Rome of the JulioClaudian emperors, reigns hostile to emergent Christianity, and the timely conversion of their lead characters from paganism or Judaism readily identify each of these rivals to Quo vadis as toga plays. A further characteristic of many toga plays is the conspicuous absence of religious doctrine specific to an identifiable Christian denomination, and most dealt in general Christian moral platitudes. Only a few dramas, such as those derived from Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman’s novel Fabiola; or, The Church of the Catacombs (1854),7 were aimed at Roman Catholic audiences. Rather, there are in many toga plays bearded elders who offer moral advice, but none so identified with Roman Catholic dogma as Peter. Peter, listed in the American Theatre programme for Quo Vadis as ‘Peter the Apostle’, is—as in the novel—a character of significance in what I shall identify as the Gilder– Chase adaptation. However, the role of Peter is omitted from both the British and American versions by Stanislaus Stange. Nonetheless, there is no indication that the presence of this watered-down Peter in the Gilder–Chase adaptation deterred attendance by Protestants, given that he was no longer characterized, as in the novel, as the founder of the Church at Rome. The brief progression along America’s eastern seaboard of the Gilder–Chase adaptation, with its appeal to audiences as a religious experience, suggests that the primitive Christianity of the converts and their opposition to Roman paganism were sufficient to make the stage version of Quo vadis generally acceptable to spectators of all Christian persuasions. 7  Rev. Frederick Oakley and Clarke Claypole (pseudonym, probably the actor Edmund Tearle, who took the leading role of [Saint] Sebastian), From Cross to Crown; or, The Christian Martyrs, Theatre Royal, Chester, 7 April 1897, and subsequent two-year tour of the provinces.

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Quo vadis on the Stage  111 One production, the most commercially successful of the three, was an ‘unauthorized’ adaptation of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel by Stanislaus Stange with an elaborate musical and choral score by Julian Edwards. Its co-producers, F. C. Whitney and Edwin Knowles, wisely sensing that the play had to be tried out, developed, and polished before uncritical unsophisticated audiences, launched the production on America’s West Coast and worked eastward, playing to small cities and towns as they journeyed. The production opened in Manhattan at the New York Theater on 4 September 1900 and, although drawing more audiences than a rival Quo Vadis, nonetheless failed to achieve a profitable run. However, recognizing the strength of their provincial box office, Whitney and Knowles commissioned two additional Quo Vadis companies. The former New York company was redirected to tour the eastern states, the two younger companies toured the central and southern states and the west, playing short engagements.8 Keeping to America’s hinterlands and only occasionally venturing into larger metropolises, these companies survived for two seasons. Stange’s play was thereafter revived by amateur players and fit-up professional companies. A second Quo Vadis, a skewed variant of Stange’s adaptation, had opened four months earlier at London’s Adelphi Theatre, staged by the doyen of toga dramas Wilson Barrett, who appeared in a leading part. Barrett, recognizing the limits in Stange’s American script and accepting that he no longer possessed the youthfulness to appear as a juvenile lead, refashioned the narrative to cast himself in the leading romantic–tragic role of the voluptuary-philosopher Petronius and correspondingly enlarged the role of Petronius’s love interest, the slave girl Eunice, performed by Daisy Atherton.9 However, despite being reconfigured by and for Barrett, this version failed on the London stage and petered out in Britain’s provincial playhouses. A further adaptation of Quo vadis—billed as the ‘authorized’ version—by Jeanette Gilder, launched at Manhattan’s Herald Square Theater with Sienkiewicz’s blessing five days later. Although considered the more literate text, it was ridiculed on its premiere in New York and closed after a mere thirty-two performances, its meagre box-office business overshadowed by the rival production.10 However, rather than abandon and close the play at that point, the company’s management team moved the production to the city’s American Theater, where Quo Vadis was partly recast and reshaped to a new script written by Charles W. Chase, who worked from a fresh translation by 8  St Paul Globe, 12 August 1900. 9  ‘Mr. Wilson Barrett’s “Quo Vadis” play in Edinburgh’, The Sketch, 6 June 1900, p. 278. 10  Buffalo Courier, 10 May 1900.

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112  David Mayer John  T.  Wilcox.11 After playing for some weeks to meagre audiences, this revised version then decamped into the provinces for split-week12 tours along provincial circuits and eventually, as the other versions had, fizzled out. Evidently, it is more a matter of gossip than proven fact that accounts for the near-simultaneous adaptations of Quo vadis. Premiered only months apart in London and New York, their proximity may be more coincidental than intentional. To adapt the novel as a toga play may have seemed to promise riches to all parties. Moreover, and to begin with, the claim by Little, Brown & Co. Sienkiewicz’s American publishers, that the Jeanette Gilder adaptation was ‘authorized’ and that the adaptation by Stanislaus Stange was an infringement on their American edition were spurious because, at that date, the novel Quo vadis and Jeremiah Curtin’s 1896 English-language translation were equally unprotected by either British or American copyright legislation. Under US copyright law enacted in 1831 and not modified until 1909, copyright principally covered unpublished material. Once an author’s work was in print, it became legally accessible to anyone who sought to adapt it for the stage. Further, prior performance of a play on an American stage nullified British copyright, where dramatic copyright was obtained by staging an advertised ‘copyright performance’ attended by a paying audience.13 However, there is also the probability that, once it became known to Little, Brown & Co. that Stange’s adaptation was being mounted on the West Coast, these publishers sought to counter the rogue production with their own. They accordingly hired the New York production firm of Sosman, Landis & Hunt, and, at the producers’ insistence, the novelist Jeanette Gilder was engaged to produce a version that acknowledged Curtin’s translation. Equally baffling is the producers’ choice of Gilder. As far as can be ascertained, Gilder, an occasional dramatic critic, had never written a play, choosing instead to novelize accounts of her girlhood. Jeanette Gilder’s Quo vadis adaptation is her only recorded effort at writing for the stage. The choice of Chase to write a new version from Wilcox’s translation is equally puzzling. Chase was also unknown as a dramatist. Wilcox’s translation was never published. If the exact circumstances behind the Gilder–Chase adaptation are uncertain, the financial manoeuvrings to produce the Stange text were a matter of public knowledge. A year before any production of Quo vadis was even mooted, the play’s co-producer 11  I infer this by examination of the programme for the American Theater for 12 January 1901. Gilder’s name has been replaced by Chase’s, and Wilcox is credited with the translation. 12  Split-week: playing two venues in a single week, an indication that Quo Vadis failed to gain sufficient audiences to justify remaining in just one city or town for an entire week. 13  Stephens 1992: 105–15.

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Quo vadis on the Stage  113 F. C. Whitney had experienced serious reversals and was desperate to find a profitable venture. He hit upon the idea of a massive toga play with many scenes and a cast that approached 200 actors, choristers, and supernumeraries, the latter to be engaged as the play toured. Quo vadis offered tempting possibilities. He began seeking backers, engaged another manager, Edwin Knowles, as co-producer, approached well-known actors to take leading roles before the script was written, and hired Stanislaus Stange to adapt the novel. Stange, in 1899, was not the well-known librettist of musicals which he later became, but he had already established an effective working partnership with the composer Julian Edwards, resulting in a few moderately successful mu­sic­al comedies. By the spring of 1900, a script had been written, and the play was in rehearsal in California.14 Little is known of Whitney and Knowles’s approach to the eminent actor Wilson Barrett (which may have occurred even before an American production was contemplated). Barrett was familiar with American circuits and had written and premiered The Sign of the Cross in 1895 while touring America’s Midwest and Border States, but there is no account of what persuasion convinced Barrett to consider Stange’s script or when Barrett determined to reshape that script to favour the love story and tragic suicide of Petronius and Eunice over the love story of Lygia and Vinicius. It isn’t known if Stange rewrote his American script at Barrett’s insistence. All that is known is that, when the curtain fell at the Adelphi Theatre to a mixture of applause and boos, the curtain speech was made by Stanislaus Stange.15 As the earliest of the three adaptations, Stange and Barrett’s was the first to face the critics. Max Beerbohm, writing in The Saturday Review, immediately called attention to the drama as an inferior toga play and a failed melodrama. It was to be a complaint that dogged all Anglo-American adaptations of the novel. In common with other critics, Beerbohm complained that Quo Vadis was unable to bring onto the stage the episodes of action and intense peril which enlivened the novel and—eventually—early films, and that audiences learned of them ‘only at second hand’, that is through narration, not enactment: The moon is a chill substitute for the sun, and those who basked and reveled in Wilson Barrett’s ‘The Sign of the Cross’ will not, I fear, take kindly to the pale shadow of it which rose, last Saturday evening, from the horizon of the Adelphi. Mr. Stanislaus Stange, though he has copied most of Mr. Barrett’s 14  Supplement, Los Angeles Herald, 30 April 1905. 15  ‘ “Quo Vadis” at the Adelphi’, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 6 May 1900.

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114  David Mayer figures with the passionate minuteness of a pre-Raphaelite, has not written a good melodrama . . . The progress is very slow. It might be described as un­event­ful, since all the chief marvels of the play happen ‘off ’, and are known by us only at second-hand. True, Mr. Stange’s stage-directions provide for the burning of Rome before our very eyes. But the London County Council does not permit real holocausts on any stage. Consequently, Nero’s fiddling is accompanied by nothing more awesome than some pink magnesium lights behind transparent back-cloths.16

The critic for Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper also noted the play’s similarity to The Sign of the Cross but also the failure of ‘incident’, stating that ‘much of it is introduced in a jerky manner injurious to natural effectiveness. The action also suffers through deficiency of concentration in the fate of Lygia and her convert [Vinicius].’ He commended the acting but, echoing other London critics, complained, What will probably prove the greatest objection to this piece in this country is the infusion of Scriptural diction into the dialogue, whilst the allusions and appeals to the Deity are distressingly frequent.17

This was a repeated complaint because George Bernard Shaw, reviewing The Sign of the Cross in 1895, had noted that Barrett, too, larded his dialogue with scripturally styled language: Barrett has given me such unbounded delight by his feat of persuading the London critics that several of his passages in his Sign of the Cross are quotations from The Bible.18

Although ‘the chief marvels of the play happen[ed] “off ” ’, the play’s postLondon tour was advertised with pictorial posters that unashamedly depicted Ursus grappling with the aurochs while Lygia lies unconscious at the beast’s hooves as Vinicius attempts to revive her (Figure  7.1). In reality, only the ex­ter­ior of the arena was depicted and Barrett, in the character of Petronius, peered into the wings and breathlessly narrated what was occurring.

16  Max Beerbohm, ‘ “Quo Vadis” and “Nil Praedicendum” ’, The Saturday Review, 12 May 1900, reprinted in Around Theatres, New York (Simon & Schuster), 1954: 75–8. 17  ‘ “Quo Vadis” at the Adelphi’, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 6 May 1900. 18  Shaw 1932: 12.

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Quo vadis on the Stage  115

Fig. 7.1  Poster for Wilson Barrett’s British production of Quo vadis in 1900, adapted by Stanislaus Stange and staged at the Theatre Royal, Chatham. Author’s collection.

One further consequence of the London staging of Quo vadis was the debate in the weekly theatrical paper The Era that rumbled on from early May until the end of June over the critic of the Echo having written, ‘Mr. Barrett himself elects to play the character of the famous “Arbiter Elegantarium [sic]” (not “Elegantiae”, Mr Barrett!).’ There followed a quarrel in which the critic of the Echo’s grasp of Latin was challenged by other former schoolboys and Barrett’s own secretary over how Petronius was justly styled.19 When Whitney and Knowles formed their three American road companies of Quo Vadis, the Manhattan company took up a brief residence in the Brooklyn Academy of Music before touring the eastern states, while the Midwest and southern and the Far West companies began touring. Their arrival in each town was heralded by newspaper and leaflet announcements, ‘First and Only Time Here – The Great Religious and Historical Drama QUO 19  The Era, 30 June 1900.

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116  David Mayer VADIS. More Music than an Opera, A Mammoth Company 32 Speaking Parts Reverently Acted – Great Choir of Trained Voices.’20 The producers, aware that beyond the immediate towns in which Stange’s Quo Vadis played there were untapped audiences, arranged with local railroads to offer ‘excursion rates on all Lines of Travel’.21 Despite three companies on the road between 1900 and 1905, reviews that describe the production and the nuances of Stange’s text are exceedingly sparse. What can be assembled from various accounts is that critics found the drama—in six acts and eight scenes—laboured and ponderous. They found the role of Petronius, ‘whose plaything was his emperor’, engaging for his wit and tenderness toward Eunice, but also found Stange’s dialogue archaic and seeming to render him ‘ill at ease’. Nero was characterized as lacking sufficiently ‘despicable cowardice . . ., and the object of laughter’.22 Although the original company at the New York Theater had attempted to bring on Lygia on her way to the arena bound to the horns of a bull, that device was dropped. Petronius continued to peer into the wings to describe Lygia’s ordeal. Only when Ursus carried the unconscious Lygia back on stage, and the Roman mob demanded her freedom, did the action pick up. Critics were in agreement about the play’s cloying religiosity but justified that element, stating that, while it retained the atmosphere of the romantic novel, The history of the play seems to be that it appeals not only to the regular theatrical clientele, but by reason of its semi-religious character. It also has a peculiar interest for that element of churchgoers, members of the cloth, as well as the average laymen, who seldom enter a theatre. To the student of history it has been found to make especial appeal because of its convincing pictures of Augustinian Rome at the dawn of Christianity.23

Accounts of the Jeannette Gilder ‘authorized’ adaptation are even fewer. She appears to have described a younger Lygia courted by Vinicius, ‘a dashing young patrician, no better no worse than most of his class . . . a man of brutal passions purified by his love for Lygia and how his heart is changed by her religion’.24 Thus Gilder’s emphasis falls on the romance between the two and how each fares when encountering Nero’s corrupt court and the contiguous

20  Barre, Vermont, Evening Telegram, 10 October 1901. 21  Barre, Vermont, Evening Telegram, 10 October 1901. 22  Los Angeles Herald, 11 November1907. 23  Washington Times, 3 February 1901. 24  ‘Two Versions of “Quo Vadis” ’, New York Times, 9 April 1900.

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Quo vadis on the Stage  117 wiles and cruelty of Poppaea. Petronius has a role as a courtier and wit, and his dedication to Eunice is enacted, but his love and sacrifice are distinctly secondary to the developing romance between Lygia and Vinicius. Further, Petronius is merely one of those who surround Nero. Chilo, the Greek phil­ oso­pher, and Lucan, the poet, also contribute witty banter and sarcastic interpretation. Running for a mere thirty-two performances and never venturing on the road, Gilder’s adaptation was able to include a procession of captives and their guards into the arena in which Lygia was prominently visible, tied to a live bull’s head. The play’s scenery was commended as ‘literary art’ and scenical picture[s] dependent on ‘considerable stage carpentry’.25 Through their successive—and seemingly inevitable—failures, these theatrical adaptations tell us why emerging motion pictures offered what the stage could not. Quo vadis is a vivid pictorial novel. It provides scenes of activity and high action which do not rely on words or on crowds of people alone, scenes which the reader’s imagination can complete and—better still—which can be enacted out of doors and which depict perilous situations. On the movie screen, lions and other dangerous wild beasts can appear to be in close proximity with human actors, and clever camera work makes it appear so. On the screen terrified characters can flee from burning and collapsing buildings on sets where there is real fire and smoke, but where falling burning timbers and masonry present no danger to actors or spectators. The stage cannot effectively and realistically bring dangerous animals and humans together. Touring stage companies cannot traverse the country with packs of lions or even a domesticated bull. On the stage, creating the illusion of fire is, at best, problematic. Chemical fire, fluttering partly opaque backcloths, flickering red and orange lights—the stock approach of the Victorian stage was old hat but still in use.26 In 1900, with many theatres still using gas lighting even as the newer electrical devices were being introduced, the theatres themselves were flammable tinderboxes.27 Aware of the limitations of the theatre in depicting such scenes of perilous action, all three Quo vadis productions resorted to a stage practice that had emerged in the 1880s on both sides of the Atlantic. This was the use of wellrehearsed supernumeraries in massive crowd scenes and, in those contrived scenes, the simulation of a populace revelling, in social or political crisis, in extreme danger, or going about their domestic lives.28 Extras occasionally provided a valuable function in all adaptations of Quo vadis. As balletic revellers 25  New York Tribune, 14 April 1900. 26  Fitzgerald 1881: 52–4. 27  Fitzgerald 1881: 28–33. 28  Mayer 2009: 154–68.

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118  David Mayer in the tastefully ornate home of Petronius, garlanded extras served as an element of memorable stage design and also contributed to the narrative but, elsewhere, in attempts to create the Roman populace’s response to the city in flames or their witness to Lygia’s near-martyrdom and then their demand for her release, they functioned as distractions and, sometimes, clumsy ones at that. These three attempts to translate Sienkiewicz’s novel into stage spectacles belong as much to the industrial and commercial history of the early twentieth century as to the history of the theatre in that first decade. Each production was a speculative venture intended to capitalize on the enormous popularity of a novel. Each required large and costly casts which had to be engaged and rehearsed. All required music that had to be composed and expensive choirs to engage and train. All required the engagement of supernumeraries who also had to be trained, usually apart from the permanent company of actors and choirs, before being integrated with the company, then replaced again and again as the companies toured. Each production required expensive wardrobes and scenery which had to be carried from venue to venue in special trains whose Pullman accommodation served as homes on the road for many (but probably not all) of the casts. The system of speculative capital investment worked for one of the ventures. For the other two attempts to stage Quo vadis, it did not. That none of the three attempts was regarded as an artistic success, that each was viewed as an inferior and mimicking toga play is, of course, a disappointment, but, as the saying goes, that’s show business. It is ironic that the most enduring version of Quo vadis survives in George Bernard Shaw’s parody toga play Androcles and the Lion (1913).29 Shaw, drawing on the ancient tale of the encounter between the slave Androcles and a wild beast, and intentionally mimicking the conventions, setting, and conflicts of earlier toga pieces, assembles the key ingredients of Sienkiewicz’s cast—Christian ingénue, Roman officer, Christian strongman, emperor, dangerous wild beast (a wounded lion with a long memory, not an aurochs), courtier fop—and again brings the climactic action into the arena, although with comic results which favour the Christian few and disconcert the Roman majority. Reviewing The Sign of the Cross for The Saturday Review in 1896, Shaw had noted, ‘[Wilson Barrett] has drawn a terrible contrast between the Romans . . . with their straightforward sensuality and the strange, perverted voluptuousness of the Christians with their shuddering exaltations of longing 29 George Bernard Shaw, Androcles and the Lion, a Fable Play, St. James’s Theatre, London, 1 September 1913.

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Quo vadis on the Stage  119 for whip, the rack, the stake, and the lions.’30 Later and elsewhere, Shaw had used the term ‘crosstianity’ to describe public demand for spectacles in which punishment was visible and excessively cruel and had cited images of the Crucifixion and Christian martyrdom pandering to this taste.31 Toga plays, with their climactic episodes set in the arena or in the arena’s prison dungeons, were, in Shaw’s view, a theatrical rendering of ‘crosstianity’. Androcles and the Lion, with a structure and a cast of characters similar to both The Sign of the Cross and Quo vadis and with the savage arena episode of the latter drama, was recognized as a parody of the toga play.32 Shaw, however, turns the arena spectacle from an intended cruel and visible martyrdom-by-lion into a parodic celebration, with Androcles not being killed and devoured but dancing happily with the lion he had previously befriended. The public’s taste for toga plays and for the outdoor spectacle of such pyrodramas as The Last Days of Pompeii appears to have been limited almost exclusively to the English-speaking world. The single exception was Paris, where in 1901 and again in 1926 Quo vadis was staged, and where both productions received conspicuous attention from the press. The French theatre had not experienced the phenomenon of the toga play and was thus not bound by the constraints or expectations generated by this exclusively Anglo-American dramatic genre. Further, in Roman Catholic France, the inclusion of the Apostle Peter as a dramatic character posed no problem to devout audiences. The earlier of these productions arose from the management of one of France’s revered actor-managers, Benoît-Constant Coquelin (Coquelin aîné), who was well known in Britain and America, where he had toured with Sarah Bernhardt and performed his best-known role as Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac. In 1897, Coquelin became lessee of Paris’s notorious Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin, a theatre where ‘Authors and managers tried to attract by heaping together horrors – adultery, rape, incest, murder, and suicide – all in one play.’33 Challenging its reputation as the ‘blood-tub of Paris’, Coquelin brought in new writers and in 1900 engaged Émile Moreau to adapt Quo vadis for his stage. The production, directed by Louis Péricaud, opened on 16 March 1901, with orchestral and choir music by Francis Thomé, and a cast that included Coquelin’s son Jean (Coquelin fils) as Chilo. Of all the known

30  Shaw 1932: 12–13. 31  Shaw 1934: 357–8. Shaw uses this term in several earlier prefaces, but it is most clearly explicated in his preface to On the Rocks (1933). 32  ‘Had it come fifteen years earlier, this play might have been taken—or mistaken—as a satire on Quo vadis or The Sign of the Cross,’ Henderson 1956: 593. 33  Matthews 1880: 175.

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120  David Mayer theatrical productions of Quo vadis, Coquelin’s is the most documented and illustrated with numerous photographs (see Figure 7.2).34 Coquelin made no attempt to stage Rome burning, and his approach to Lygia’s ordeal in the arena was to stage the massed spectators’ horror at her near-martyrdom, their relief at her rescue, and their vociferous angry demands for her release. What is also evident is that this production featured Peter preaching to Christian captives in the stadium’s prison. The second Quo vadis on the Parisian stage is more problematic. Advertised as an ‘opera in five acts’ because of its massed choirs and a score by JeanCharles Nouguès (who had in 1909 composed an operatic Quo vadis that had successfully toured France and had been restaged with a different cast in Vienna), the production was mounted at the Stade Vélodrome Buffalo and opened in July 1926. The production appears to have been very much an action spectacle strongly influenced both by Enrico Guazzoni’s 1913 film and by Gabriellino D’Annunzio and Georg Jacoby’s 1924 remake in which the Christians’ martyrdom is starkly dramatized. Built to accommodate The Drama of Civilization, William (Buffalo Bill) Cody’s 1904 European tour offering, the Stade Vélodrome Buffalo was an open-air arena with a dirt horse and cycle track encircling a large oval grass-covered centre that in all likelihood became the performing space for the Quo Vadis company. The producers of this Quo Vadis apparently opted for a more explicit rendering of the novel’s scenes of action and may have included one in which Lygia’s bull is wrestled to the ground—as in the rodeo sport of ‘bulldogging’. All that is known of this production, apart from an advertising poster, is the cover illustration of Le Petit Journal Illustré, depicting an accident when the unnamed actress playing Lygia fell from the bull to which she was tied, but also showing the bull falling and spectators and nearby actors rushing to her aid (Figure 7.3).35 We can view these various attempts to dramatize—and abridge— Sienkiewicz’s novel with live actors and to reap vast profits from these endeavours as acts of overreaching folly. Quo vadis on the stage was a toga play too far. Certainly the ultimate failures of all but Coquelin’s Paris production would seem to confirm this harsh judgement. In spite of the tremendous technical resources of the late Victorian stage, it was an impossible challenge 34  Le Théatre for April 1901 devotes an entire issue to this production, beginning with a colour photograph of one scene on the cover and colour photographs of Cora Lapacierie as Lygia and Gilda Darthy as Poppaea. Additionally, the journal’s text describing the production and sixteen photographic images of the production are accessible online at https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/ btv1b8406024b (accessed 10 September 2019). See also Dagna in this volume. 35  Le Petit Journal Illustré, 15 August 1926. See Dagna in this volume for earlier productions of the opera.

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Quo vadis on the Stage  121

Fig. 7.2  Ursus and Vinicius display the unconscious Lygia below the emperor’s box in Émile Moreau’s adaptation, directed by Louis Péricaud, at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin, Paris, March 1901. Le Théatre magazine.

to meet the demands of staging Quo vadis, to place before an audience the lurid, perilous spectacles that had thrilled the novel’s readers. Quo vadis’s theatrical promoters had recognized that there was a large audience for religious melodrama and had hoped that Quo vadis, as in other contemporary toga plays, would speak to their audiences’ enjoyment of dramas in which

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122  David Mayer

Fig. 7.3  Accident at the Stade Vélodrome Buffalo in Paris, 1926. Le Petit Journal Illustré.

spirituality was joined to spectacle and more worldly sensations. Early cinema, however, provided an alternative medium readily suited to the depiction of scenes of cities in flames and large-scale martyrdom with ferocious wild beasts stalking the arena. The interest here lies in the theatre promoters and adapters’ struggles to succeed and, in their limited achievement, to mark an intriguing moment in the histories of the novel and the theatre.

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8 Dangerous Liaisons: Quo vadis? (1913, dir. Enrico Guazzoni) and the Previous Theatrical Adaptations of Sienkiewicz’s Novel Stella Dagna

Cinema as a Constructor of Worlds In the first months of 1913, the highly anticipated film Quo vadis?, made by the Roman production company Cines and directed by Enrico Guazzoni, was released in film theatres worldwide.1 Today we know that the film turned out to be a success beyond all expectations and was a cornerstone in the process of the deep transformation that cinema, as spectacle, underwent in those crucial years.2 At the time, however, a film of over two hours’ duration, presenting a complex story of several characters, settings, and intersecting storylines, represented both a visual and a production gamble. As referenced by the film’s publicity material, ‘the dangers of such an endeavour were neither little nor trivial’ (La vita cinematografica 1913, n. 1, p. 10).3 A widespread advertising campaign and a well-conceived distribution strategy were essential, but not enough to secure the film’s success. What was really necessary was a strategy for developing a mise en scène that would undermine some of the established reception practices of the audience. 1  In this research I have benefited from the help of several friends and colleagues. I would like to thank Paola Polidoro, Massimo Capezzone (Biblioteca del Burcardo), Espen Bale (BFI), Daniela Currò, Maria Assunta Pimpinelli (Cineteca Nazionale di Roma), Matteo Pavesi (Fondazione Cineteca Italiana), Stefania Carta, Anna Sperone, Mario Grifo (Museo Nazionale del Cinema), Cristina Morandi, Selese Roche (translation), Ivo Blom. 2  About the importance of Quo vadis? (1913) for the evolution of cinema in the 1910s, see at least Paolella 1949, Bernardini 1980: 146–52, Wyke 1997: 119–20. 3  Unless otherwise indicated, all the translations are by Cristina Morandi and Selese Roche. Stella Dagna, Dangerous Liaisons: Quo vadis? (1913, dir. Enrico Guazzoni) and the Previous Theatrical Adaptations of Sienkiewicz’s Novel In: The Novel of Neronian Rome and its Multimedial Transformations: Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis. Edited by: Monika Woz ń iak and Maria Wyke, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198867531.003.0008

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124  Stella Dagna Although cinema had been in existence for less than twenty years, it already had a ‘tradition’ that proved an obstacle and a cause of irritation to the ambitious Enrico Guazzoni: ‘The cinema had only just emerged as an industry and already, to justify the mental laziness which should in fact be anathema to any innovative process, it had invoked a nonexistent tradition’ (Guazzoni 1941: 5). The task of changing attitudes was complex, yet Quo vadis? fully met the ambitious requirements. Its revolutionary impact is broadly recognized by historians, but it was also acknowledged by its contemporaries. An advertisement published before the premiere of the film in the prestigious magazine La vita cinematografica announced: ‘Today, cinematography has definitely entered into a new era . . . a new and daring milestone; the new adaptation of Quo vadis?’ (Cavallaro  1913b: 18). Primarily, the film marked a major step forward in winning over an educated and wealthy audience, which had been the cinema’s long-time ambition: ‘In advance of everyone else, Cines was able to present such delightful creations, that today, not only the working class but the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy benefit from and enjoy them,’ comments an enthusiastic Beato Dall’Orto in Giornale d’Italia.4 In short, Quo vadis? proved to be a groundbreaking work, crucial in changing the way in which the cinema of the time was created, presented, and experienced. But what made this film so special? Film historians mentioned the film in particular for its spectacular set designs and crowd scenes. It is undeniable that its staging capitalizes on the cinegenia of Sienkiewicz’s descriptions, resulting in a series of tableaux vivants rich in detail and, especially, spatial depth: Nero’s orgy, the praying at the Ostriano, the imperial ship at Anzio, the Fire of Rome, the events at the arena, and Petronius’s feast. All these key scenes, full of references to the extra-filmic iconographic tradition (Blom 2001, certainly act as spectacular ‘attractions’, whose efficacy is enhanced by the principle of contrast (luxury opposed to Christian sobriety and violence opposed to elegance). However, this aspect alone is not enough to explain the revolutionary impact the film had on the cinema of the period, since in 1913 such strategies were not really all that new. Italian productions of the time such as La caduta di Troia (1911) by Giovanni Pastrone or La Gerusalemme liberata (1911), also directed by Guazzoni, had already made use of magnificent set designs and a creative use of depth of field. Even the reference to a very well-known and beloved novel was certainly not something unusual, considering that in the early years of 4  Beato Dall’Orto, ‘Un romanzo tradotto in verità sensibile e il trionfo di un capolavoro’, Giornale d’Italia (12 March 1913), cited in La vita cinematografica, 1913, n. 23–4, p. 24.

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Dangerous Liaisons  125 cinema, especially in Italy and France, a typical practice of ‘art films’ was the bold adaptation of classic books and plays.5 What really marked the ­revolutionary and innovative production of Quo vadis? by the Cines studio was the h ­ armonious union between this colossal aesthetic and the coherent, complex narrative ­structure with its many parallel plots. The ‘attractions’ of the s­ pectacular scenes here are integrated into a stratified narration, a narration that justified the choice of the feature-film format, thus making it no longer just an eccentric option but a necessary and perfectly functional one (Bernardini 1980: 150). In his public statements, Guazzoni created a reputation for himself as a ‘painter-director’ by insisting, in particular, on representing himself as a master in managing hordes of extras. Yet the director himself also draws attention to the importance of narrative construction: ‘Shakespeare taught me that a drama does not need to be embodied in this or that character but that all characters can cooperate in carrying out the action. This results, not in the representation of an individual, but of a whole world’ (Guazzoni  1918: 5). Matilde Serao—writer, journalist, and close observer of the Italian society of that time—echoes these words when, after attending the premiere of the film, she wrote, ‘Yes, it is a world in itself, the world that Cines has built.’6 On the metaphorical level, Quo vadis? revealed the ability of cinema to become a creator of worlds, not only in a visual sense (scenes packed with events, crowds of extras, and spectacular locations) but also in a narrative sense (multifaceted characters, complex and convincing plots). The ‘world’ built by Cines, however, was only a projection of the ‘world’ built by Sienkiewicz, and, for an audience in the 1910s, it was not unfamiliar.

Selective Transmediality When the new film Quo vadis? hit the screens of film theatres worldwide, the story of Lygia, Vinicius, and Ursus was already familiar to the audiences who flocked to see it. Such familiarity was in large part due to their reading of Sienkiewicz’s novel (an incredible publishing success) and the wide distribution of many derivative works. ‘Quovadism’ reached even those who did not read the book: illustrations, parodies, theatrical spin-offs, and adaptations 5  For an interesting comparison between three 1913 film adaptations of literature, Quo vadis, Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei, and I promessi sposi, see Menichelli 1913. 6  Matilde Serao, ‘La vita palpitante di un grande romanzo’, Il giorno (4 March 1913) cited in La vita cinematografica (1913, n. 23–4, p. 23). For further discussion of this article, see Wyke and De Berti and Gagetti in this volume.

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126  Stella Dagna contributed to a collective imagination.7 In short, as established in recent studies, Quo vadis was, and it still is, a transmedial work.8 Despite being the product of all these influences, the film was promoted almost obsessively as a perfectly faithful adaptation of Sienkiewicz’s novel.9 And, to judge by the reviews, it was received as such by most of the public. This choice was strategic: Guazzoni’s goal—to exalt the new and refined form of narration that film had developed—faced the significant challenge of bringing to the screen ‘the book as a whole’, a task that was considered ‘impossible’,10 to the extent that ‘just the attempt to do it seemed foolish’ (Cavallaro 1913a: 17). Well aware that impossible tasks exert a special charm on the public, the new Quo vadis? was presented as ‘an integral and faithful representation . . . in all the smallest details’ (La vita cinematografica 1913, n. 11, p. 39), in which ‘not even one word from Sienkiewicz's novel has been omitted or forgotten’ (La vita cinematografica, 1913, n. 13, p. 58). Even the film’s highly praised ‘historical accuracy’ could be considered an expression of a broader adherence to the original text. The latter, in fact, owed not a small part of its success precisely to its meticulous and well-documented reconstruction of daily life in imperial Rome. Promising an audience that was already familiar with the novel complete fidelity to the text was meant to expose the film to strict scrutiny. At the same time, the fact that the film could count on a knowledgeable audience gave it the sort of external support that was particularly advantageous in a film making use of such a new and complex form of narration. If those who were watching the film already knew the characters’ stories, personalities, and relationships, then it was possible to take some liberties, which might otherwise be difficult to do. Some narrative passages could be taken for granted, just mentioned in broad terms, thus saving time without forgoing the secondary plots; or a character could make a brief appearance without needing a lot of context. They could, for example, make use of audiences’ knowledge to enhance the atmosphere, seeing the shot of the lions trapped in the dungeons during the Fire of Rome would remind the viewer of Sienkiewicz’s detailed description of the roars that echoed over the burning city, thus amplifying the sequences’ frightening effect.11 7  See also Solomon in this volume. 8  Gagetti and Woźniak 2017. On the concept of ‘quovadism’, see Marinelli 1984. 9  On the exaltation of fidelity to the original as a rhetorical technique designed to promote the literary adaptations of silent cinema, see Buchanan 2012: 26–7. In the case of Quo vadis?, however, the insistence on the link between the film and the original novel is truly exceptional, even at the time. 10  Quo vadis?, Catalogue Pathé, n° 4, March 1902 (http://filmographie.fondation-jeromeseydouxpathe.com/4534-quo-vadis). 11  Activating literary and iconographic references during the film screening gave viewers a richer experience, but it was not essential in order to understand the film. Furthermore, in 1913 almost half

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Dangerous Liaisons  127 It goes without saying that the statements about the film’s absolute fidelity to the novel should not be taken literally. In fact, Guazzoni’s adaptation appears to introduce some changes, both expressive and ideological.12 Today, however, it is difficult to comprehend the specifics of the adaptation mech­an­ isms employed on the ‘original’ text. Of course, time has always had an impact on cultural works, and in particular on the performing arts (and silent cinema was in many ways one of them). At the moment, we do not have a single copy of the film that conforms to the version projected in film theatres in 1913. The most complete copy available is the 1996 restoration, although twenty minutes are still missing from it. Moreover, the intertitles are not original but were re-edited from an English version that drew on different sources, which we can safely assume were simplified in comparison with the original texts.13 Many of the evident discrepancies that are clear today, when compared to Sienkiewicz’s text, could be attributed to this problem of survival.14 The relationship between the film and the original novel was therefore exalted in every way by the promotion campaign. On the other hand, it denied any kind of influence from previously staged adaptations, both cinematic and theatrical. To date, we know of two Quo vadis film adaptations made before the 1913 version: the first in 1901 by Pathé Fréres,15 and the second, Au temps des premiers chrétiens, in 1910 by Film d’Art,16 which lasted respectively three minutes and about a quarter of an hour. It is not surprising that, when promoting its new two-and-a-half-hour colossus, Cines did not acknowledge these two previous works as significant. Indeed, in those two films the reference to the novel was intended as a cultural brand, aimed at guaranteeing for these brazen syntheses some reflection of the prestige in which Sienkiewicz’s book was held.

of the population in Italy was still illiterate. The film also had a special edition for schools, probably simplified and censored (La vita cinematografica, 1913, n. 8, p. 24). 12  We do not want to deny the intermedial nature of the film Quo vadis? but rather to underline the complexity of the relationships that it establishes with its different sources. In this volume, Wyke, in keeping with the theories of Hutcheon (2013), analyses the process of ‘indigenization’ undergone by the story of Sienkiewicz in Guazzoni’s translation of it to film. Quo vadis? lent itself to various ideo­ logic­al interpretations. In Turkey it was promoted to an anti-Bulgarian function: Nero was compared to Tsar Ferdinando (La vita cinematografica, 1913, n. 11, p. 39). 13 Restoration by Fondazione Cineteca Italiana (Milan), Eye Filmmuseum (Amsterdam), and National Film and Television Archive (London). Length: 1944 m. Original length: 2250 m. 14  A gap could justify, for example, the disappearance of Lygia and Vinicius from the end of the film. In fact, an advertising description mentions a letter sent to Petronius by the two lovers, which is not in the restored copy. The same description mentions another episode also apparently omitted: the attempt organized by Vinicius to save Lygia from martyrdom (Cavallaro, 1913a: 24). The substitution of the intertitles also could have caused some significant changes. 15  CNC restored the film in 2016. 16  To date the film is considered lost.

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128  Stella Dagna It is much more complicated to understand why the promotional campaign did not talk about the previous theatrical adaptations of the novel, keeping silently aloof from them. Cinema magazines did not dare to attack the stage adaptations with too much virulence. However, the absence of references to them, combined with a continuous insistence on fidelity to the novel, can be considered emblematic of Cines’s general willingness to recognize the ‘original’ book as the primary and main precedent for Guazzoni’s film. However, with her usual verve, Matilde Serao attacks head-on: The prose theatre (without actually achieving the artistic and scenic beauty of the book) has filtered the characters created in the extraordinary evocation by the Polish novelist, through a meagre condensation of the Christian and imperial tragedy; the drama and music (by a French musician) have conferred on it a form of art, although without the necessary poetic or dramatic strength. . . . So throughout this artistic endeavour, while the written masterpiece, through sensations and impressions maintained its integrity as a beautiful piece of work, in the souls of those eager to get closer to the characters' real lives, it failed, multiplying events, desires and their still unfulfilled passions.17

The statement that cinema had been able to satisfy a desire left unfulfilled by theatre was quite provocative at the time. Theatre, the ‘superior’ art, and primarily opera with its millenarian tradition and its wealthy and refined audience, was a model watched with envy and a desire for emulation by the new, inexperienced, and ‘ragged’ art of the cinema. But the film Quo vadis? was also an exception in this respect; it wanted to present itself as a unique and spectacular experience. Specifically, it wanted to highlight the distance between its own logic of staging and that of its predecessors, which conformed to models based on the principles of illustration and synthesis.

Tableau-illustration: the Adaptations by Silvano D’Arborio and Émile Moreau Among the multiple adaptations of Sienkiewicz’s novel to stage, some per­ form­ances had a particular impact on the universe of Italian ‘quovadism’ 17  Serao, ‘La vita palpitante di un grande romanzo’, Il giorno (4 March 1913) cited in La vita cinematografica (1913, n. 23–4, p. 23). The translation of the Italian is my own.

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Dangerous Liaisons  129 imagery. In 1900, the Compagnia Drammatica della Città di Roma staged an adaptation of Quo vadis in ten scenes created by Silvano D’Arborio and produced by the tempestuous Achille Mauri.18 Mauri was a theatrical producer with a real instinct for recognizing the latest cultural innovations and for translating them into successful shows. Hence, he did not miss out on the opportunity of adapting the then current bestseller for the stage. The result was something of ‘rare grandeur’ (Kosko  1976: 48, n. 1), mainly due to Augusto Cicognani’s set designs. The team assembled for the project is evidence of the deep relationship established between the popular theatre and the beginning of Italian cinema. Mauri was also an early cinema operator. Five years after the staging of Quo vadis, Cicognani was the set director for La presa di Roma (1905), which is generally acknowledged as the first film produced by the Italian film industry. Moreover, according to the claims of the film historian Vittorio Martinelli, two future film stars—Dillo Lombardi and Amleto Novelli—were among the actors of the Drama Company.19 In this theatrical representation, Novelli would be a hunched and grim Nero. It is quite likely that Guazzoni himself, at the time a bohemian flâneur, watched the play. Indeed, thirteen years later he chose Novelli to play the handsome Vinicius in his film. The Burcardo Library in Rome possesses an apparently complete series of twelve photo-postcards of the stage set, which give us an idea of its structure and scenic impact. The series includes two character portraits and ten images of the actors posing in different scenes. Each postcard is numbered and titled: 1 Eunice’s Kiss (portrait); 2 Eunice and Petronius (portrait); 3 An order of Caesar; 4 The imperial triclinium; 5 Lygia’s abduction; 6 Meeting of the Christians at the cemetery; 7 Ursus kills the gladiator Croton;20 8 The conversion of Vinicius; 9 Nero sings verses about Troy’s fire while on his order Rome burns; 10 Christian martyrs; 11 Death of Petronius; 12 Quo vadis Domine?21 From a staging point of view, variety seems to be the effect sought after; nine changes of scene are quite a large number, and their sequence effectively underlines the contrasts, also symbolic, between different settings. The audience was aware that at each change of scene the rising curtain would display compositions that were both marvellous and surprising. Knowing in advance 18  See also Mayer’s chapter in this volume. 19  ‘Quo vadis?’, Treccani. Enciclopedia del cinema, 2014 (http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/quovadis_%28Enciclopedia-del-Cinema%29/, accessed 11 September 2019). 20  Scenes 6 and 7 have the same scenic design. 21  In Poland, the same photographs represented in the postcards were redesigned and reproduced in a series of coloured advertising cards. The scans can be seen online: https://myvimu.com/ collection/47795846-quo-vadis-teatr-kino-reklama (accessed 11 September 2019).

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130  Stella Dagna the key scenes of the novel and anticipating their concrete realization would increase the pleasure of discovery, as if viewers were seeing, materialized in front of them, the mental images they had pictured when reading. Guazzoni’s film, as already mentioned, also uses spectacular key scenes repeatedly to surprise its audience, but each of these cinematic moments in the film is woven into a complex warp of causal relationships and included in a concatenation of different shots linked by a (simple) spatial coherence. In the theatrical adaptations of the early twentieth century, each tableau is generally complete in itself. It has a similar role to an animated illustration. The set designs of the play are elegant, meticulous, and most of the time organized to highlight the symmetry of the composition. This characteristic is especially evident in the final scene, where the Appian Way is drawn on the painted backdrop as perfectly convergent with the exit point in order to create, in a certain sense, a symbolic representation of the bright road of the Church heading toward the future (Figure 8.1). Seven scenes out of the ten are dedicated to the Christian community; on the other hand, Petronius and Eunice are the only two characters to get individual portraits in the series of photo-postcards. It can be assumed that in Italy the celebration of two characters embodying the Roman classical trad­ition

Fig. 8.1  Christ appears to Peter on the Appian Way. Illustrated postcard, no. 12 of the series dedicated to the representation of Quo vadis? by Silvano D’Arborio, staged by the Compagnia drammatica della Città di Roma in 1900. © Biblioteca Museo Teatrale SIAE, Rome.

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Dangerous Liaisons  131 was in tune with the upsurge of nationalist fervour at the time, and the young Italian state took every opportunity to celebrate the triumph of the city and its glorious past. However, during these years the nationalistic reference to ­imperial Rome was contextualized within the more general myth of the ‘Third Rome’. Coined during the Risorgimento, it expressed the hope that the Eternal City would once again become a point of reference for the world, after the ‘Rome of the Caesars’ and the ‘Rome of the Popes’ (Giardina and Vouchez 2008). Seen from this perspective, the story of Quo vadis? was not in conflict with the self-celebratory outlook of the young Italian state, since it did not describe Rome’s decline and fall but the approach of its second glorious era, as the capital of Christianity. In France, obviously, the ideological perspective was different. As could be predicted, in the homeland of the Revolution, the adventures of Lygia and her companions, apologists for Christianity, faced considerable political resistance. In March 1901, a year after Mauri’s mise en scène, the legendary Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin in Paris staged a new version of the story. Coquelin aîné, declared that he would gladly play all the roles, especially that of Chilo, ‘amusant comme toute’.22 Instead his son Jean went on to play the part. The work is considered one of the most important French adaptations of Sienkiewicz’s novel for the stage.23 As a consequence, it could not fail to gain an echo in the Italian cultural world, which was particularly influenced by French theatre. The novel was adapted for the stage in five acts and ten tableaux24 by Émile Moreau, who had been a collaborator with Victorien Sardou and who had already written the play Nerone (Schneider 1901). Twelve pieces of composed music by Francis Thomé accompanied the play,25 and the performers were first-rate actors. It was sumptuously staged and a very popular success. In the special issue of the magazine Le Théatre dedicated to the show, the critic Henry Fouquier states that Moreau adapted the novel ‘very faithfully’ and a few lines later enlarged on that idea, stating that it was laudable ‘to omit nothing essential, to add nothing useless’ (Fouquet 1901: 30). Theatrical adaptation requires changes, even if only to respect the unity of time and place of each scene. Fidelity, in this case, is relative; it is evaluated according to the

22  Ange Galdemar, ‘La Genèse de “Quo vadis?” ’ (Le Gaulois, 1901) cited in Kosko 1976: 49. 23  See Mayer in this volume. 24  Tableaux: 1 The Hostage; 2 The Orgy on the Palatine; 3 Eunice’s Kiss; 4 The One Who Has Seen; 5 Opali’s necklace; 6 The Fire of Rome; 7 The Martyrs; 8 Quo vadis domine?; 9 The Circus; 10 The Testament of Petronius. 25  ‘L’auteur de la musique. M. Francis Thomé’, in Le Théatre (1901, n. 55, p. 19).

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132  Stella Dagna principles of succinctness and the necessity of variation. Some important narrative passages in Moreau’s adaptation actually deviate from the original literary source. Lygia, for example, is taken by Chilo to the imperial court at Anzio, and receives her necklace directly from Nero as an engagement gift. Chilo is crucified in the arena before Lygia’s rescue. Strangely, there is no Bacchic dance at the Palatine orgy. A more substantial change, however, is the absolute centrality given to the character of Petronius. While the adaptation by D’Arborio closed with the scene of Peter’s vision, in the piece by Moreau the honour of the ending is reserved for the death of the arbiter elegantiarum. This choice signals the ideo­logic­al closeness of Moreau to the aesthete’s world, to the detriment of the celebration of the religious message.26 In addition to that, before he dies Petronius does not write a letter but launches his invective directly against Nero, who goes to his house for the sadistic pleasure of personally communicating the death sentence to his old friend. One of the critics who was particularly vigilant about the need to preserve the novel’s religious message called the play ‘the apotheosis of Petronius’,27 and criticized the decision to place Christian Lygia and the newly converted Vinicius at the scene of the double suicide of the arbiter elegantiarum and Eunice. On stage they throw petals to accompany the demise of their friends, in a celebration of their ‘beautiful death’—hardly in keeping with the precepts of their Church (Figure 8.2). From the doctrinal point of view this critique was incontrovertible, but from a stage perspective, to judge from the images printed in the press at the time,28 it cannot be denied that the decision to gather together the main characters in such an evocative scenario was visually very effective. Evidently, the guideline for this adaptation as a grand spectacle considered the scenic effect to be of more importance than ideological coherence. The scenography, designed by Eugène Carpézat, Lemeunier, Brard and Couder, matched the high ambition of the production, except in the fire scene, which was heavily criticized for its unconvincing impact (Kosko  1976: 51). The climax to this continuum of wonder was the glorious picture representing the circus. The scene was dominated by Nero’s loggia and by his ­courtiers and the vestals. The crowded stairs seemed to expand as far as the eye could 26  The religious scene that gives the work its name was cancelled after the first performance for unknown reasons, see Aderer 1901: 24. 27 Henri Dac, ‘Quinzaines dramatiques et artistiques’ (L’Univers, 25 March 1901) cited in Kosko 1976: 128. 28  The scene is reproduced in the inside cover of Le Théatre, 1901, n. 55.

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Dangerous Liaisons  133

Fig. 8.2  Last scene of ‘The testament of Petronius’ in the Quo vadis? adaptation by Émile Moreau staged at Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin. Second cover of Le Théatre, 1901, no. 55. Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Turin.

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134  Stella Dagna see (Fouquet 1901: 10). It is no coincidence that the scene of the circus was repeatedly reproduced in promotional materials: on the colour cover of the magazine Le Théatre’s special issue on the play (1901, no. 55),29 and on the art nouveau poster created by Robert Boullier (Figure 8.3).30 Although Henri Cain tried to maintain the coherence and the complexity of the plot, critics and commentators treated the play as an exemplary case of adaptation-illustration: ‘It's like a sort of magnificently illustrated edition of the novel by M. Henryk Sienkiewicz: a beautiful volume, with golden corners and back, with large coloured images.’ Other critics were more unsatisfied: ‘It's not exactly a play, it's a gallery. It's not exactly a drama, it's a Salon.’31 It is difficult today to judge whether Serao’s allegation that these plays were ‘­meagre summaries’ of the novel was justified; nevertheless, it is clear that the integral representation of Sienkiewicz’s narration was not considered a priority. On the other hand, perhaps they should not be judged too harshly for failing to achieve what they never intended.

Densification: Quo Vadis? by Henri Cain and Jean Nouguès If Italian cinema generally looked to theatre as an important benchmark, its (unilateral) link with lyric opera was even stronger. The fact that opera houses were the parlours of the aristocracy and of the upper-middle class was an important part of the attraction for this new form of ‘upwardly mobile’ entertainment. However, there was also a structural similarity. The dramatic the­ atre placed the word at its centre, something definitively denied to the cinema in the 1910s while, in opera, during the performance, the music prevailed over the text. The elements of the story had to be universal, simple, and understandable. By its very nature, the mise en scène of opera also tends to stylization.32 Strengthened by its history and experience, lyric theatre had built a production context designed to support its special communication requirements with the public. Some of the material that Cines prepared in order to publicize the release of Quo vadis? was similar to theatre programmes that briefly outlined the story represented on stage. Even the emblematic shots, showing the leading characters and their interpreters at the beginning of the film, call 29  See Figure 7.2 in this volume. 30  Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris, 1-AFF-000330. 31  Émile Faguet, ‘La Semaine dramatique’ (J. Des Dèbats, 25 March 1901), cited in Kosko 1976: 50. 32 For the relation between theatre and cinema in the 1910s, see Brewster and Jacobs 1997; Urbańsky 2016.

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Dangerous Liaisons  135

Fig. 8.3  The spectacular tableau of the arena scene reproduced in a poster by Robert Boullier for Quo vadis? adapted by Émile Moreau for the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin. © Ville de Paris/BHVP/Roger-Viollet.

to mind the pages that introduced the actors in theatre programmes. Besides giving the film actors deserved artistic recognition, this helped the public to find its way through the film’s story.

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136  Stella Dagna However, both Cines and Guazzoni, opposed to the deferential attitude of cinema toward the lyric-opera tradition, took a different approach, one that we could call ‘combative’. First, they physically and symbolically occupied opera’s traditional spaces by securing some of the most prestigious theatres in the world as unprecedented locations for the screening of their film. At the French premiere in the luxurious Palace Gaumont, a crowd of musicians and choristers created spectacular synchronizing effects by providing an accompaniment for the film. Its music was composed by Paul Fosse, who was inspired by Jean Nouguès’s lyric version of Sienkiewicz’s novel (Bernardini 1980: 149). The symphonic accompaniment also created a strong bond between the sound and the images they accompanied during the viewing experience, thus ­avoiding a narrative that was too fragmented. A similar function was performed in Japan by benshi, professional commentators who explained and interpreted the film during the projection.33 Jean Nouguès’s opera, based on Henri Cain’s libretto, was probably the most important version among those Guazzoni had to consider in designing and making his own film (whether he admitted it or not). Indeed, he claims that he got the idea of staging Sienkiewicz’s story two years before the actual release of the film (Guazzoni 1918: 55)—coincidentally the year the production reached Italy.34 In fact it premiered in 1909 in Nice and then in Paris, but opened in Italy only in May 1911. The national premiere was held at the Teatro Dal Verme in Milan and shortly after at the Teatro Vittorio Emanuele in Turin. The Italian translation of the libretto was made by Giovanni Pozza, a bohemian theatrical critic and journalist who had already translated works by Richard Wagner and Christoph Gluck for the Italian public.35 For this occasion, Leopoldo Metlicovitz created a publicity poster on which Nero’s silhouette towers over the burning of Rome.36 With perhaps more than a hint of chauvinism, Serao declared that the ‘only’ beautiful thing about this opera was the performance of the Italian tenor Mattia Battistini, but in spite of that it was a huge success.37 The world of the music critic may have turned up its nose, but the public flocked to the theatre and kept doing so for years

33  ‘A beautiful film . . . called “Quo Vadis?” has come to Japan. This film was presented even more beautifully by the artistic explanation of the benshi, who understood the film very well’ (Kinema Record, January 1914, pp. 8–9, cited in Komatsu 1996: 41). 34  On the genesis and the fortune of the Quo Vadis? by Nouguès, see Suchowiejko 2017: 64–9 and Kosko 1976: 53–4. A description of the opera is also in Manuwald 2013: 240–6. 35  Henri Cain, Quo vadis? Opera in 5 atti e 6 quadri, Casa Musicale Lorenzo Sonzogno, Milano, n.d. 36  02698_VE 52716, Collezione Salce-Museo Nazionale, Treviso. 37  Battistini, who played Petronius on several occasions, felt that his role was too small. He asked for an extra aria and Nouguès composed for him an additional solo, ‘Amici, l’ora attesa è questa’: see Chuilon 2009: 197.

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Dangerous Liaisons  137

Fig. 8.4  The reaction of the audience to the death of Chilon during the Paris premiere of the Nouguès opera. Drawing taken from the illustrated book by Paul Delaroche. © Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

(Figure 8.4). It is estimated that in 1928 the opera had had more than 7,000 performances (Suchowiejko 2017: 65). The distinct difference between Guazzoni’s film and Cain’s opera is the technique used to adapt the literary source. Cain worked in line with the

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138  Stella Dagna trad­ition for composing opera libretti—a model that could be defined as ‘densification’. In short, in addition to condensing the story by removing secondary narrative lines, the mise en scène merged events that the novel sets in different moments and places, thus making each act extremely (and unrealistically) dense with events. Moreover, not only did the film refuse to imitate this technique, which had been broadly practised until then even in the ‘normal’ screen adaptations of historical dramas, but it seems to have targeted it for an openly polemical purpose. Narrative densification is more or less imposed by the physical limits of the theatre’s mise en scène. By very blatantly distancing himself from it, Guazzoni lays claim to the strong points of cinematic representation, which are the freedom to change location and to multiply story spaces and times. Unlike previous adaptations, Cain’s libretto splits the story into ‘only’ six tableaux (across five acts). For example, in the second tableau, which takes place on the imperial terraces, we not only witness Poppaea’s scene of jealousy, but also Vinicius’s assault on Lygia, Nero’s deranged speeches, the Fire of Rome (made effective through special magic-lantern techniques developed by Eugène Frey),38 the emperor’s reactions to it, and Petronius’s brave intervention to suppress a popular uprising (Figure  8.5). In the final tableau, as had already occurred in the play at the Théâtre de la Port Saint-Martin, Vinicius and Lygia also attend the farewell banquet of the arbiter elegantiarum. However, perhaps aware of the criticism of Moreau, Cain had the foresight to get them out of the scene before the suicides.39 In each tableau the events frantically follow each other, but once again they are not at the centre of the presentation. Rather, they act as a connection between the most intimate and introspective moments when the characters sing about their inner emotions and spectacular dramatic outbursts, represented here, in particular, by Natalia Trouhanova’s dances and the parts of the c­ horus. This alternation is fundamental to both the success of the opera and to the sustainability of its mise en scène. In fact, although photographs of the time confirm the critics’ universal praise for the splendour of the mise en scène,40 it

38  See Suchowiejko 2017: 68. 39  Despite these changes, even in this case the work was considered faithful to the novel, at least according to the standards of theatrical adaptations: ‘The story of the opera follows closely the story of Sienkiewicz’s novel’ (New York Times, 26 March 1911, p. 15). 40  The Bibliotèque Nationale de France has nine photographs of the setting of the Nouguès opera created in 1920 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. In the catalogue the photos are erroneously attributed to the adaptation of 1901 (FRBNF39501698). An inscription on one of the photos, however, confirms the new identification. The Societat Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, furthermore, preserves a complete series of photographs of six scenes and six scenographic plans prepared for a

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Dangerous Liaisons  139

Fig. 8.5  ‘The Palatine Terrace’, photograph of the setting of Quo vadis? by Jean Nouguès, staged in 1920. The inscription ‘Quo vadis? Champs-Élysées’, which allowed the identification of the image, can be read along the right-hand edge. © Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

was still impossible to stage some moments of the story. The clearest example is the fight between Ursus and the bull. The audience cannot see what is ­happening in the arena, since the deadly fight takes place out of sight. Then Petronius covers Vinicius’s head with his cloak, and tells his nephew about the fight between the man and the animal, and in doing so he can also share it with the audience. Since its beginning, a characteristic of cinema involved widening the spectrum of the visible to an apparently limitless extent. The film Quo vadis? brazenly represents what the theatre could only allude to: hordes of people, licentious feasts (only to a certain extent, obviously), and a real bull and lions, even if the latter remain at a safe distance from their supposed victims. Later, at the right moment, the editing would replace them with chewable dummies. The multiplicity of sets designed for the filming of Quo vadis? indicates a programming decision that offered an alternative to the ‘density’ of theatrical Spanish staging in 1920. Paul Delaroche also published a limited-edition illustrated book with drawings of the opera’s Parisian premiere (Delaroche 1910).

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140  Stella Dagna adaptations. The film changes location as often as possible, and if a set is used more than once, it often changes the point of view on the space in a way that was not customary at that point in Italian cinema. In the opening scene, for example, the conversation between Petronius and Vinicius is split between the calidarium and the tepidarium. Both locations are accurately presented but, from the narrative point of view, this change of scene is not particularly significant. Its function is rather to prove the film’s fidelity to the descriptions of the novel and the accuracy of the historical re-enactment. Theatre could not count on such luxury.

Conclusion Guazzoni’s Quo vadis? was created, as are all the works that forcefully embody the zeitgeist, from a series of influences and cross references in which the stage tradition also played an important role. As we have seen, the film not only drew inspiration from theatre’s mise en scène (the structure of consecutive tableaux) and its examples of grandeur, it also drew on its actors (Amleto Novelli) and its musical accompaniment (Nouguès at the Paris screening). At the same time, it is clear that the conscious intention of Guazzoni and Cines was to demonstrate on screen what cinema was capable of doing and theatre could not. Guazzoni wanted to ‘break the bonds of time and place’ (Guazzoni 1918: 55), primarily in two ways: first, by the staging of monumental architecture and crowds of extras that not even the most magnificent French theatre could have attempted; and second, by sticking as closely as possible to the narration which would multiply the characters and break the story into dozens and dozens of different sets and locations. Years later, this strategy led to the development of the concept of the ‘specifically filmic’. In 1913, however, Italian cinema was still far from this avant-gardist awareness. In order to make a clear distinction between itself and theatre, cinema invokes in films such as Quo vadis?, among others, its privileged connection with literature and the visual arts. Hybridization, for such a young art form, remained an important value. This film is a sort of hypertext, full of cross references meant to be set in motion by the spectator’s memory based on his or her cultural knowledge. Even today, by spotting a quote or an inside joke in the flux of film images, spectators feel a strong sense of gratification and fulfilment, since they identify themselves as privileged recipients of that playfulness. In fact, this type of

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Dangerous Liaisons  141 dramatic mechanism has much in common with today’s digital and postmodern cinema—ambitious, bold, and desiring to amaze. Moreover, they also have in common a departure from tradition (yesterday it was the theatre, today ‘classic’ analogue cinema) as well as an established connection with literature or, now, comics, video games, and TV series. The cinema, an art of more than a hundred years’ duration, constantly reinvents itself. However, it also continues claiming that its nature is to be a creator of worlds: these worlds are both closed in the fascination of the film experience and open in the heritage of cultural references that the public of every age brings to its viewing experience. The Quo vadis? directed by Guazzoni marked one of the fundamental stages in the development of this model for storytelling and spectatorial enchantment.

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9 Word and Image Competitive Adaptation in the Feature Film Quo vadis? (1913) Maria Wyke

About six months after the Italian feature Quo vadis? had its French premiere at the Gaumont Palace in Paris (the largest cinema in the world, capable of accommodating over 6,000 spectators), the film was drawn on by the critic and man of letters René Doumic as evidence of how cinema was failing to recognize its limitations as an art form and was developing, instead, improper ambitions: Before an enthusiastic crowd, for instance, they recently showed Quo Vadis?, a mammoth cinematic reconstruction adapted from the famous novel by Sienkiewicz. Everything trooped through it: Nero, Petronius (that master of style), the imperial box, Christians and wild beasts, vestal virgins, etc. Between every two cinematic tableaux on the luminous screen, you know, there appeared an explanatory inscription, usually copiously written. This interminable succession of tableaux and placards, in which the complete novel was cut up into wordless images—images which, moreover, seemed to  me more than mediocre in their grouping of actors, their decors, and ­costumes—was the most stupefying film that I have ever seen. (Abel 1988: 86–7)

In the monthly magazine Revue des deux mondes (15 August 1913), under the ominous title ‘Drama review: The Cinema Age’, Doumic used the example of Quo vadis? to attack the upstart medium as cheap, facile, modern, realist, and international—in sum, a universal theatre for illiterates. Such disdain for cinema as ‘wordless images’ belongs to early critiques of the adaptation of novels and stage plays to screen, critiques that regularly judged film adaptations to be vulgar cultural usurpers (substituting mere images for words, fragments of Maria Wyke, Word and Image: Competitive Adaptation in the Feature Film Quo vadis? (1913) In: The Novel of Neronian Rome and its Multimedial Transformations: Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis. Edited by: Monika Woz´niak and Maria Wyke, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198867531.003.0009

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144  Maria Wyke reality for literary fictions) and a threat to the survival of theatre, the book, and even literacy itself.1 This chapter (drawing on recent work in adaptation studies) seeks to reconceptualize the relationship between the Polish novel and the Italian film, viewing cinema not as an inferior but as a more varied mode of expression with extensive ideological and aesthetic, as well as massmarket, reach (Cartmell and Whelehan 2010: 24–5).

Cinema as Adaptation Adaptations, according to the theorist Linda Hutcheon, are ‘deliberate, announced, and extended revisitations of prior works’ (2013: xvi). The Italian feature Quo vadis? (1913) invites consideration as an adaptation even in Hutcheon’s strong definition of that troublesome term. Firstly, the film’s dir­ect­or Enrico Guazzoni is on record as stating that, in the early 1910s, he aspired precisely to overthrow the initial limitations of cinema and, since Sienkiewicz’s novel was widely known throughout Italy, to translate onto the screen (‘tradurre sullo schermo’) its grand vision of Rome’s imperial age.2 The film itself obviously takes from the novel its title, characters, and plot line (such as the fictional lovers Lygia and Vinicius and the fictional strongman Ursus, as well as Nero and his court, the burning of Rome, the martyrdom of the early Christians, and the climactic appearance of Christ to the Apostle Peter on the Via Appia). It unfolds as a series of ‘moving illustrations’ of the novel (Scodel and Bettenworth 2009: 18–19), a visual form of homage that would be difficult to follow or appreciate for a spectator who had not read the book.3 However, the intertitles (those interminable placards that so irritated Doumic) are more difficult to interpret in terms of their relationship to Sienkiewicz’s text. The print of Quo vadis? (1913) that survives in the Cineteca Nazionale archive in Rome has intertitles in Spanish, most likely in readiness for ex­hib­ ition abroad. The print in the British Film Institute National Archive possesses French intertitles, but carries a stock date of 1922 and is therefore a

1 For such criticism of cinema more generally, see Elliott  2003: 54, and Cartmell and Whelehan 2010: 2–4. 2  As recorded in Redi 1991: 37–8. Cf. Bernardini 2005: 32. 3  For a detailed account of the film’s intimate relationship with the novel, particularly in terms of its greater spatial diversification and narrative complexity relative to stage adaptations, see Dagna in this volume.

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Word and Image  145 later reissue.4 And the hybrid version restored in 1996 by the Fondazione Cineteca Italiana (Milan) and the EYE-Film Institute Netherlands has English intertitles assembled from a number of surviving prints including a goodquality Dutch print in colour. These intertitles in Spanish, French, and English are not identical and vary in their complexity and the degree of dialogue they employ.5 Those of, or based on, prints from the period of the film’s original release are predominantly plain explanations of ensuing actions expressed, in strong contrast to the narrative of the novel, in the present tense: for example, at the start, ‘Petronius—arbiter elegantiae—welcomes his friend Vinicius back from Armenia’. Only with the death of Nero towards the close of the film does an intertitle adopt both the past tense and a more poetic modality of destructive fire contrasted with productive rain: ‘Thus died Nero. Like fire, he brought nothing but destruction, mourning, pain and death. But from the rain of strife and blood sprang a new life: the life of Christianity, in the sign of love and peace.’6 Appropriately enough, at the film’s close, it puts its literary allegiance manifestly on display by quoting from the novel. Through the character of Petronius, moreover, Guazzoni’s feature makes explicit intermedial reference to literature, for it figures ‘the arbiter of elegance’ as the accomplished writer known to literary history.7 Early in the film, he is found in his study writing at a desk which is heaped with papyrus and pens and surrounded by buckets of scrolls (Figure 9.1). In his last scene, he reads out his farewell letter to Nero deploring the emperor’s inferior artistic skills. Thus Petronius is a textual character, who can embody the authority and the artistry of the Polish author and his Neronian narrative (not least because he had already done so in the novel itself).8 Finally, the production company Società Italiana Cines promoted its product in advance as an adaptation of the novel and as a film whose artistry it should communicate with reference to the novel. Within a four-page spread of the magazine La Vita

4  I am most grateful to the BFI’s curator of silent films, Bryony Dixon, for details of the stock date of its print. 5  The French reissue of 1922 differs from the others, particularly in its frequent use of past tenses for narration and of pictures to illustrate the intertitle cards. For the growing complexity of intertitles in the course of the silent era (with a view to easing the transition between word and image), see Elliott 2003: 90–6. 6  As pointed out by Scodel and Bettenworth 2009: 53 n. 52. The two intertitles are from the 1996 restoration. 7  For the importance of Petronius as a sympathetic focalizer of the narrative in Sienkiewicz’s novel and his identification there with the author of the Satyricon, see Scodel and Bettenworth 2009: 22–8 and in the Introduction to this volume. 8  The hounding and suicide of Petronius in the novel have been read as vehicles for the expression by Sienkiewicz of his fears about artistic repression, see e.g. Damiani 1946.

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146  Maria Wyke

Fig. 9.1  Petronius writing at his desk. Screenshot from Quo vadis? (dir. E. Guazzoni, 1913). © Collection EYE Filmmuseum, Netherlands.

Cinematographica published on 13 January 1913, an advertisement placed by the studio proclaimed: Alongside the many imitations and the many remakes, there have even been attempts at cinematographic adaptations of this powerful and compelling novel. But the public, constantly unsatisfied or downright disappointed, is still waiting for a representation of Quo vadis? such as appeared in literature, one that captures its imagination. . . In this great presentation from Cines, the novel of Henryk Sienkiewicz has been followed faithfully and to it nat­ur­al­ly we should refer to describe this new film of extraordinary artistic value.9

The Mission of Cinema Guazzoni’s Quo vadis? deserves evaluation as part of the rich afterlife of Sienkiewicz’s novel not just because its makers invited the original Italian audience of 1913 to evaluate it in that way. Silent cinema inserted itself into a 9  The translation of the Italian is my own.

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Word and Image  147 growing network of receptions of the nineteenth-century novel as a radically new way of experiencing Neronian Rome, related to but distinct from its reconstruction in other high cultural forms (such as the novel, theatre, opera, painting, dance, and sculpture) or more popular forms (such as circus shows). The Roman past was brought into the present moving in real time, embodied by actors, emotionally coded by colouring and musical accompaniment, and thus rendered powerfully immersive.10 The film Quo vadis?, moreover, stands at the forefront of a highly successful three-pronged mission launched by the Italian film industry in the early 1910s that ultimately enabled this pioneering, feature-length adaptation of the Polish novel to reach spectators of all classes throughout Italy and across the world (Wyke 1997: 119–20 and Bertellini 2013: 3). One facet of the film industry’s mission at this point was to nationalize the Italian public. Italian entrepreneurs saw film-making as a powerful instrument with which to stake a claim to the past, to deliver it in the public space of the cinema to a collective audience that transcended region, dialect, class, politics, age, and gender, and thus to unify their country. Italians had been urged to take ownership of their Roman and Christian past ever since the struggle for unification. In the logic of film producers, cinema could shape the historical consciousness of its mass domestic audience and, by providing in particular lessons on the common cultural heritage of ancient Rome, lay solid foundations for a shared national identity (Garofalo 2012: 366–70). The film company Cines, managed by powerful aristocrats and businessmen and funded by the Vatican’s bank, built much of its production strategy on these principles. Its first trademark of the twins Romulus and Remus suckling a she-wolf signalled the studio’s location in the capital city but also its dis­tinct­ ive symbolic investment in the history of ancient Rome (Tomadjoglou 2000). The backers of Italian film production also sought to increase the artistic status of cinema and to legitimate it as a respectable form of entertainment. They proposed to accomplish this facet of the industry’s mission through increased capital investment, the development of complex, multireel articulations of prestigious but well-known literary or dramatic narratives, their re-enactment in a grandiose yet accessible register, and the use of high-quality photography to showcase cinema’s technical virtuosity and enhance the sensation of spectacular realism (Muscio 2013: 163–5). Sienkiewicz’s novel Quo vadis provided an exceptional resource—grounded in the city of Rome, progressing toward spiritual uplift while lingering over secular pleasure, and rich 10  For silent cinema as a radically new and important mode of classical reception, see Michelakis and Wyke 2013: 1–15.

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148  Maria Wyke with thrillingly vivid depictions of court, catacomb, and arena (Woźniak 2016: 7–9). By 1900, the Polish novel had already appeared in a number of Italian editions (low-cost as well as luxurious)11 that, according to one worried Jesuit (Pavissich  1900: 25), were being displayed in the windows of bookshops across the country and read avidly by every type of person. Its success in Italy was swift, substantial, and widespread, while its artistic qualities received conspicuous endorsement with the award to the author in 1905 of the Nobel Prize for Literature (Scodel and Bettenworth 2009: 8). At almost two hours in length, Guazzoni’s Quo vadis? was promoted in 1913 as a cultural artefact aspiring to the duration of a play or an opera and the narrative complexity of the now internationally celebrated novel (Wyke 1997: 120). The third facet of the Italian film industry’s mission (Wyke 1997: 24–5) was to penetrate foreign markets by utilizing stories of international appeal, thus increasing profits and the commercial prestige of Italian manufacturing abroad. Guazzoni’s Quo vadis? was exported for distribution all over the world, and became a transnational cultural ambassador for Italian industrialism.12 The rest of this chapter will explore the silent film as an adaptation of the Polish novel in each of these three respects—nation-building, artistic integrity, and global profitability.

The Politics of Cinema The Italian film translates the Polish novel across media, languages, and cultures, ‘indigenizing’ (or reindigenizing) the historical fiction as one rooted in Italian soil.13 Already in 1901, the archaeologist Orazio Marucchi prefaced a Roman edition of the novel intended for the young with a topographic map of the ancient city and a detailed description of each of its fourteen regions (Begey 1946: 80). Twelve years later, the film lays claim to historical veracity and ownership of the Quo vadis? story through the use of location shooting (the Via Appia itself for the visitation of Christ to the Apostle Peter, the Borghese gardens for the climactic baptism of the traitor Chilo by the Apostle Paul), and the construction of large-scale sets in recognizable parts of the Roman landscape (the Centocelle airfield for the burning of the city and the 11  For the success of the novel in Italy, see Begey 1946: 77–9 and de Berti and Gagetti in this volume. 12  Martinelli 1994: 47 argues for Cines as a forerunner of other Italian film companies in the vigorous pursuit of international distribution. 13  For ‘indigenization’ as an aspect of the adaptation process when it occurs across cultures, see Hutcheon 2013 : xxvii and 148–53.

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Word and Image  149 Parioli racecourse for the arena sequences).14 Cinematic images of the geography of ancient Rome kindled pride in an Italian national identity among both domestic audiences and those who had emigrated abroad (Bertellini 1999a: 47–8; Tomadjoglou 2000: 264), while for non-Italian spectators they provided the aesthetic satisfactions of a virtual grand tour (Muscio  2013: 165–6). In the reconstruction of such images, Italian film-makers understandably claimed, and were regularly credited with, a dis­pos­ition for the best photographic realism. The British trade magazine The Bioscope (20 February 1913), for example, pondering whether Quo vadis? was the greatest cinematic spectacle ever made, argued that: Its value, educationally, is thus of paramount importance; indeed, it prob­ably presents a clearer and truer portrait of a vanished age than has ever yet been presented by other means whatsoever. In Rome is a collection of historical remains which cannot be paralleled, except, perhaps, in Egypt, for antiquity and variety. The Cines Company are the first people to make use of them for the purposes of a picture play, and the result is something for all the world to wonder at.

The Cines company also asserted a material and an emotional, as well as an environmental, primacy in the reconstruction of ancient Rome. Foreign text­ual resources are subordinated in the film to the solidity of the three-dimensional architectural sets and the intricate antiquarianism of furnishings, costumes, statuary, and props, whose originals had been purloined by foreign collectors and reproduced by foreign artists but now could be seen apparently back in their rightful, native space and time. Such lavish set designs supply visible, authenticating indices of Italy’s classical past and simultaneously affirm the technical ingenuity of Italy’s film industry as a mechanism for exhibiting and memorializing the nation’s exquisite cultural patrimony.15 Both casting and acting add another temporal path straight from ancient Rome to contemporary Italy and the renationalization of Quo vadis? as Italian history rather than Polish fiction. In February 1913, when making a case for the attractiveness of its historical film for American audiences, Cines cited its ‘great historic truth’ and drew attention to the Roman character of the story, a character they argued which 14  Some of the location shooting is noted by Martinelli  1994: 49 and referred to in the reviews assembled in Martinelli 1993. 15 For the importance of set design to Italian historical films, see Rhodes  2000: 311–15; Garofalo 2012: 374–7; Blom 2016: 188–90.

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150  Maria Wyke has not lost its identity in any of the classes of the Roman people, a character which can be noticed especially in the movement of the masses and the majestic posture of each individual. A full Christian sentiment is shown throughout the work and the most famous artists of Italy have been especially engaged for the star roles.  (as cited in Tomadjoglou 2000: 269)

In the same month, the British Bioscope concurred: ‘No other artists could have acted this story as they act it, for it is a Roman tale, and they, themselves, are Romans, with all the mighty power and passion of the ancestors they have here portrayed.’ Guazzoni’s film indigenizes Sienkiewicz’s novel but also repurposes it for an Italian audience living in a different time and a different cultural context.16 The Polish narrative has been understood as a Catholic allegory composed in the face of growing nineteenth-century religious scepticism and critiques of the temporal powers of the papacy. Readers follow the gradual conversion of Vinicius as he comes to respect Lygia and her religion, and encounters the Apostles Peter and Paul. And, in the novel’s concluding sentences, we have moved into present time to read the worn inscription quo vadis, Domine? on the Via Appia’s little chapel and to bear witness to Peter’s church standing high on the Vatican Hill commanding the city and the world.17 Soon after publication, the novel also came to be interpreted as a coded and comforting patriotic manifesto for its Polish readers, in which innocent Lygia embodies Catholic Poland and her giant champion Ursus the Polish people rescuing their martyred country from the horns of its irreligious, imperial oppressors.18 By contrast, a meticulously composed key scene in the Italian film puts on display its contemporary concerns. The Roman patrician Vinicius is led to the humble home of a Christian quarryman by Peter, the leader of the religious community. Just at the point when the Apostle initiates the solemn ritual of baptism, the workman’s tools are disclosed centre-frame, hanging on a black curtain in splendid isolation above the head of the kneeling convert—an axe fastened over a sickle. These tools of the urban worker and the peasant were already in use by socialist and other labour groups in Italy as symbols of class struggle. Yet such groups were vigorously anti-clerical, and the Catholic

16  Adaptation theorists argue for the importance of analysing the repurposing of an adapted text for a new audience living in a different time and cultural environment, as Cartmell and Whelehan 2010: 21. Cf. Hutcheon 2013: 142–53. 17  E.g. Giergielewicz 1968: 135. The novel is described as ‘a call to prayer’ by Guzik 2008: 4. 18  For the novel as a patriotic manifesto see, most recently, Bujnicki 2016. Cf. D’Amico 1946: 124–5; Giergielewicz  1968: 135–7; Wyke  1997: 125; Scodel and Bettenworth  2009: 140–1; and Axer in this volume.

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Word and Image  151 Church had responded to their emergence with the creation of their own trade unions and peasant leagues (Pollard 2008: esp. 29–68). As the product of a company associated with the papacy, the film appears not to be aligning the activism of socialists and its repression by the Liberal state with the pol­it­ ical experience of Catholics, but to be subsuming that struggle. Italian spectators are invited to see only modern Catholics reflected in these modest, originary Christian workers persecuted by the Roman state.19 The later scene in the arena then continues this translation of a Polish into an Italian allegory, with Lygia embodying Catholic Italy needing rescue by the faithful from the tyranny of Italy’s secular government. The final shot of the film, moreover, in which Christ miraculously breaks the chains that bind the faithful kneeling before him (Figure  9.2), is completely disconnected from any passage in Sienkiewicz’s novel. It appears to offer the conclusion that only possession of faith in Christ will liberate Italy’s workers and lift them up into the light of

Fig. 9.2  Christ frees the faithful from their chains. Screenshot from Quo vadis? (dir. E. Guazzoni, 1913). © Collection EYE Filmmuseum, Netherlands. 19  I am grateful to the audience of a talk I gave on Quo vadis? (1913) at the University of St. Andrews for leading me to an interpretation of the baptism scene that differs from that in Wyke 1997: 124–7. On the significance of the scene for contemporary Italians, see also Dumont 2009: 483; Pucci  2011: 64; Scodel and Bettenworth  2009: 91–2 and 129 n. 11; and De Berti and Gagetti in this volume.

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152  Maria Wyke salvation. A significant shift in ideological valence has occurred, therefore, from the adapted Polish text of Quo vadis to its Italian, transculturated adaptation. Despite claims made by the production company Cines to have followed Sienkiewicz’s novel faithfully, fidelity is rarely a strong motivation behind any adaptation (Hutcheon 2013: xv), and in the Italian Quo vadis? it is ultimately overtaken by nationalism, religious polemic, and spiritual uplift.

The Art of Cinema A cinematic adaptation of a novel is a particular mode of ‘intermediality’ or translation across media. As a photographic palimpsest, it always carries a deposit of the text it has adapted, and that deposit is integral to how the film is viewed so long as spectators are familiar with the work whose traces the film bears. In such circumstances, both the film and its promoters can trade on memory of the ‘original’.20 Yet the dual consistency of a film adaptation still does not mean that fidelity to a text is the best criterion by which to judge it, not least because—as in this case—a film adaptation does not necessarily have a single source in the written words of a novel.21 Guazzoni’s Quo vadis?, despite claims to the contrary in the adverse French review of August 1913, does not simply convert the words of Sienkiewicz into a procession of images. The Polish novel was already by this time a multimedial phenomenon, and the feature film draws on the whole gamut of its manifestations. Sienkiewicz’s narrative itself, especially through the focal character of its ‘undisputed arbiter of all that was elegance and tasteful’ (1993: 1), had set up an interart dialogue with architecture, sculpture, song, music, dance, theatre, and painting.22 Readers are given access, for example, to Petronius’s private aesthetic verdict on first catching sight of Lygia: ‘That’s what the first light of dawn would look like, he thought, if it were rendered in human form by a gifted sculptor . . . The artist and worshiper of beauty woke in him at once. There was only one title for a sculpture of her: Spring! Nothing else would do!’ (1993: 26). Publication in book form then added to the author’s words an overt, material bond with an array of pictures. The original Polish edition of 20 On film adaptations as palimpsests of adapted texts, see Hutcheon  2013: 8–9 and 21, and Cartmell and Whelehan 2010: 26–7. 21  For the argument that adaptations should be decoupled from the notion of a single source or single urtext and be read ‘intertextually’, see Cartmell and Whelehan 2010: 12, 51 and 73–4. 22  Mosso 2010: 13–18 explores the two-way traffic between the Neronian paintings composed by Sienkiewicz’s compatriot and acquaintance Henryk Siemiradzki and scenes in the novel (paintings such as Nero’s Torches of 1876 and Christian Dirce of 1897). See also Skwara in this volume.

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Word and Image  153 Sienkiewicz’s novel and a number of the translations produced in France and Italy, such as those by Flammarion (Paris, 1900 and 1903), Fratelli Treves (Milan, 1901), and Libreria Editrice Bideri (Naples, 1905), were generously interleaved with especially commissioned illustrations or reproductions of celebrated history paintings.23 We should not categorize the difference between novel and film as simply that between word and image because the book was already a hybrid art,24 and the film clearly evokes some of its textual decorations, many of which had gone on to enjoy an existence independently from the editions in which they had first appeared, in exhibitions or as postcards circulated in their thousands.25 The pose momentarily adopted by Ursus in the film when wrestling the aurochs, for example, clearly mimics the illustration by Jan Styka printed in a Polish edition of the novel and in some of its Italian and French versions (Mosso 2010: 11–13). Theatrical enactments of novels are often crucial reference points for film adaptations (Elliott  2003: 6). Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis had been regularly adapted for the European and Anglo-American stage ever since its publication, achieving long runs, particularly in Italy. That mode of intermediation is brought physically to the attention of spectators by the casting of Guazzoni’s Quo vadis? Prior to obtaining a contract with Cines, the actor who played Vinicius (Amleto Novelli) had had a distinguished career in theatre including the role of Nero in an abridgement of the Polish novel performed at the Teatro Mercadante in Naples in June 1900.26 The novel had also been transformed into a number of musical works, the most popular of which was a five-act opera with libretto by Henri Cain and music by Jean Nouguès first performed in Nice in 1909, followed by Paris, London, and New York.27 Four years later, Guazzoni’s Quo vadis? opened in Italy’s most famous opera houses (such as the Teatro Costanzi in Rome) accompanied by an orchestra and a choir while, at the Gaumont Palace in Paris, eighty musicians and fifty choristers relied on Nouguès’s score to accompany the French premiere.28 Thus, on exhibition,

23  Detail on Italian editions of the novel and their illustrations can be found throughout Nel centenario and in De Berti and Gagetti in this volume. On the inclusion of famous paintings, see Blom 2001: 285. 24  On the hybrid artistry of film adaptation from illustrated novels, see Elliott 2003: 6 and 31–76. 25  See Surzyńska-Błaszak 2016 and Górecka in this volume. 26  On Italian theatrical productions of Quo vadis, see Martinelli 1993: 182 and Dagna in this volume. On Anglo-American versions, see Mayer in this volume. 27  Operas based on the novel are discussed in Urbański 2016. On Nouguès’s opera in particular, see Manuwald 2013: 240–6 and Dagna in this volume. 28  For details of the film’s premieres in Italy and France, see Bernardini 1982: 148–9; Martinelli 1993: 183; Meusy 1995: 253.

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154  Maria Wyke the Italian feature film extended its intermedial embrace to include the aural, as well as the pictorial, the theatrical, and the novelistic. The written words of Sienkiewicz’s novel were not the only source available to Guazzoni’s film and, furthermore, visual images were not the only mode of expression into which the author’s historical fiction could be translated. Silent film is a synthesized performance of sequential photography, written words, and music.29 The Italian feature Quo vadis? might ‘cut up’ the narrative of the novel (as disparagingly observed in Doumic’s review), but it had at its disposal other modes of expression that constitute the composite language of cinema—modes inherited from the visuals of photography and painting, the decor of architecture, the performance of theatre, the movement of dance, the music of opera, the democratic spectacles of the circus and the pyrodrama.30 An article in Le Courrier Cinématographique for 5 April 1913, for example, demonstrates the vital role music played during the projection of Christian martyrdom at the film’s extravagant French premiere: The annals of the spectacle have never recorded a success as considerable as that obtained by the film Quo Vadis presented at the Gaumont Palace. This enthusiasm of the great Parisian public is due not only to the comfort that the luxurious hall of the Gaumont Palace offers, and to the beauties of Sienkiewicz’s work, but also to the musical arrangement (artistic and elab­or­ate) that the conductor Paul Fosse knew how to draw out of the opera by Jean Nouguès. . . . From the first scenes, the work comes alive, the phalanx of eighty musicians distinctly emphasises the dances at the banquet. Nero sings his verses, his lyre throbs. Rome catches fire, the choirs sing the hatred of the mob . . . . The prayer of the Christians in the catacombs and the blessing of Peter resonate amid the ringing voices of the fifty choristers. The trumpets blare, the circus appears immense and packed with spectators, the chariots gallop past, shouts acclaim the victors. Then, plaintive and slow, comes the chant of the Christians who go to their torture. The voice of Vinicius appeals for the miracle that will save Lygia. . . .  The orchestra, the soloists and the choristers seem synchronised with the film and turn the spectacle into a wonder of art.31 29  This list adapts that produced by Robert Stam in order to categorize sound film as multitrack: moving photographic image, phonetic sound, music, noises, and written materials. For discussion of his views in relation to film adaptations, see Hutcheon 2013: 25. 30  For film as a composite language, see Hutcheon 2013: 35 and Elliott 2003: 144 and 195–6. 31  I translate from the French text of the article as excerpted in Martinelli  1993: 180–1. For the important connection in Italy between silent historical film and opera, see Kuhn 2012 and Dagna in this volume.

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Word and Image  155 Guazzoni’s Quo vadis?, then, is both intermedial and plurimedial (in the sense that it both absorbs and deploys a range of art forms). An adaptation of this kind raises the question of what one art form can do that another cannot (Hutcheon 2013: 35) especially given that, in the period of the early 1910s and with this film in particular, Italian cinema was attempting to distinguish itself as a modern art form—as the ‘seventh art’ that could subsume all the others.32 This aesthetic competitiveness, in which the novel Quo vadis operates as a point of reference rather more than a textual source,33 is strongly in evidence throughout the course of the film. The opening sequence introduces each of the main characters in a series of individual portrait shots and identifies the actor who plays them. Almost all of the nine dramatis personae so introduced turn to look directly out of the camera at their audience. The initial reference point for the film is thus the­ atre rather than literature, although, in this sequence and the scenes that follow, the camera often shortens the distance that theatre would have placed between actors and spectators. Correspondingly, despite offering a number of  domestic settings to begin with (the private rooms of Petronius, Aulus Plautius, and Nero), the film violates the conventional space of the pro­scen­ ium theatre by means of deep staging to which the attention of spectators is especially drawn.34 When, for example, Petronius and Vinicius visit the house of Plautius, his wife draws back a curtain to reveal a garden into whose depths all the foreground characters walk in order to encounter her son and her foster daughter Lygia, who are playing ball in the far distance. Subsequently, the space of performance expands further still in order to flaunt the larger scale of cinema’s lavishly antiquarian sets and mobile, multitudinous cast,35 with grander scenes in the triclinium of the imperial palace (a scene broken up into different planes of action and points of view), in the imperial gardens (shot on location in Rome), or before or within solid three-dimensional structures designed to represent various streets of the ancient city. When the film first introduces the Christian community processing toward Ostrianum on the outskirts of the city in order to pray, it vies not just with the

32  For silent cinema’s claims to be the ‘seventh art’ in the context of its literary adaptations, see Elliott 2003: 114–5. Cf. on the competitive intermediality of the Italian Roman history feature Cabiria (1914), Kuhn 2012: 27. 33  A distinction of this kind is also made for the relationship of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) to the Italian film adaptation of 1908 in Garofalo 2012: 373. 34  Cf. Scodel and Bettenworth 2009: 30. Blom 2016: 90–3 attributes this use of deep staging to the influence of Alma-Tadema’s history paintings. 35  This is a common strategy of Italian historical films of the period, as noted by Tomadjoglou 2000: 269.

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156  Maria Wyke enactment of theatre but also with the archaeological knowledge displayed by the novel and the material documentation of archaeology. Excavation of the catacombs had continued on beyond the period of publication of Sienkiewicz’s novel in the late nineteenth century, and Christian archaeologists like Orazio Marucchi had published endorsements of the Catholic doctrine that the Apostles Peter and Paul came to Rome and were martyred there, while correcting Sienkiewicz’s understanding of the specific location of Peter’s ac­tiv­ities.36 The scene at Ostrianum seems to provide an especially vivid authentication of Peter’s presence in Rome because it is imprinted on the realistic photographic medium through which the excavations continued to be revealed to readers of twentieth-century newspapers and works of scholarship, and because on screen the catacombs are fully restored, brightly lit, and in use, whereas in archaeological reports they were in ruins, dim and empty. The Cines production company could turn Church legend into thrilling history by gathering spectators up from their cinema seats and taking them along with Rome’s early Christians through a real extra-urban landscape to an underground basilica. There, in the flesh, the fisherman preaches to his responsive flock, unaware that the spies Chilo and Vinicius are putting them all in danger. In the crypt, the camera also pans slightly past the unsettled patrician to demonstrate the film’s grasp of current archaeological knowledge about early Christian iconography (however anachronistic for Neronian Rome)—drawn on the wall is not just the fish, but also the anchor, the alpha and the omega, and the chi-rho. The technical virtuosity of cinema comes into its own when the city of Rome catches fire. In conspicuous divergence from the orange, yellow, green, and blue tints deployed throughout the rest of the restored FCI/EYE print, the fulfilment of Nero’s ambition to sing as Rome burns is chemically tinted a hellish red, reminiscent of nineteenth-century paintings of the infamous event.37 In a green and pastoral long shot, Vinicius gallops straight at the camera along the tree-lined Via Appia toward Rome and Lygia’s rescue. Abruptly, in the next shot the camera has turned to capture his frantic ride up closer, from the side, in scorching red. Immediately, real flames completely fill the screen. Then, through smoke-filled streets, carefully choreographed swarms of extras race forward as buildings collapse around them. Their physicality is emphasized as Vinicius plunges in the opposite direction, pushing

36  Wyke 1997: 116–7. See also Ziółkowski in this volume. 37 For the process of restoring the film’s original colours, see Read  2009: 9–46 and colour plates P1–5.

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Word and Image  157 them out of his way. Historical reconstruction is experienced individually when reading a novel, collectively when watching a film. So colour, the movement of crowds, and, undoubtedly, music encourage spectators of Quo vadis? to identify en masse with the suffering of ancient Romans and gain a stake in the historical action (Wyke 1997: 20). Additionally, the superimposed flames that burn upward from the base of the film frame and leave the ancient city in ruins evoke the susceptibility to combustion of silent cinema’s nitrate film stock. Fire can operate metaphorically as a vehicle for self-reflection on cinema’s technical ability to ignite emotion in and about the past, as it does when it appears as a motif throughout the subsequent Italian historical epic Cabiria (1914).38 The capacity of cinema to exceed the representational possibilities of painting is densely exploited in the arena sequences of Quo vadis?39 In a vast openair auditorium constructed by the film-makers for height, width, and depth, three discrete spectacles build up suspense until the moment when Lygia will be brought out to die, and all are presented before a huge gathering of onscreen spectators whose gesticulated appreciation of these visual thrills acts as a prompt to similar responses from spectators off-screen in cinemas. The first sequence of chariot racing is relatively short and evokes similar scenes depicted by artists such as Jean-Léon Gérôme, Alexander von Wagner, and Ulpiano Checa in the late nineteenth century.40 However, the film’s sequential photography replaces the stasis of the picture frame with the rapid motion associated with modernity. It also adds a forward story since, after the fourhorsed chariots have completed three swift laps, the winner rides over to the imperial box waving his victory palm. Next, two particularly celebrated paintings by Gérôme are placed in sequence and endowed with an expanded temporal dimension and considerable movement—Ave Caesar, Morituri Te Salutant (1859) and Pollice Verso (1872).41 The camera pans along with the gladiators as they march toward the imperial box to salute the emperor. A brief static citation of Pollice Verso is preceded by the combat between a retiarius and a mirmillo, although not followed by the kill. Throughout the fight between the gladiators, the camera 38  On the motif of fire in Cabiria (1914), see Campassi 2003: 58. 39  See further Wyke  1997: 120–3 and Blom  2001: 287. Mosso  2010 explores the relationship to painting of this and several other sequences in the film. 40 Scodel and Bettenworth  2009: 4 note that no such race occurs in Sienkiewicz’s novel. The sequence was most likely inspired by the chariot race described in Lew Wallace’s novel Ben-Hur (1880) and then frequently performed in its stage adaptation. 41 For the prior circulation of Gérôme’s paintings in exhibitions and as engravings etc., see Blom 2001.

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158  Maria Wyke frequently cuts away to look up at the visual pleasure it causes in the crowd, the vestal virgins and, especially, the emperor. Finally, the temporal, spatial and aural difference of cinema is emphasized by the amount of film time given over to a single long shot of Roman soldiers relentlessly driving the Christians to the back of the vast arena—a shot accompanied at the film’s premiere in Rome by a fifty-strong choir assembled from the city’s churches singing liturgical motifs (Bernardini  1982: 148–9). The martyrs turn to take up a position in the distance that for a moment matches the composition of Gérôme’s The Christian Martyrs’ Last Prayer (1883), but then the camera proceeds on elsewhere to capture in close-up the lions underground with their trainers, beginning to emerge screen-left into the sunlight, heading towards their prey, and devouring them. Unlike Gérôme’s painting, Guazzoni’s film can isolate and multiply internal points of view (including looking up from the arena at the disturbing ecstasy of Nero seated on high) and alter the distance of external spectators from the terrible events unfolding on screen (cutting in closer than the painting to capture in more detail the supplication and the facial expression of terrified men, women, and children). The concluding, climactic moments in the arena, however, draw on the graphic literary description to be found in Sienkiewicz’s novel and on a performative tradition for ancient Rome’s reconstruction quite different from the historical fiction or the history painting of the cultural elite.42 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the circus companies which travelled around Europe and the United States included on their bill wild animal acts, athletic displays, acts of strength, Graeco-Roman wrestling, equestrian acrobatics, and mythological or historical re-enactments such as Barnum & Bailey’s Nero, or The Destruction of Rome. When Ursus wrestles the ‘aurochs’ to the ground, he mimics those popular cultural practices.43 This ‘king of force’ achieves public celebrity as a hero because he defeats a beast and rescues a girl in an exploit that, in narrative terms, bears profound allegorical significance.44 Audiences of the film who were unfamiliar with the novel or even illiterate could still find an exciting point of entry into Roman history through this humble servant and millworker. Thus, the competitive aesthetics of the film 42  Mosso 2010: 15–18 argues that, in the presentation of Lygia’s torment, this sequence also evokes the iconography of martyrdom in Siemiradzki’s Christian Dirce (1897). 43  On the democraticisng connection between Ursus and circus strongmen, see Reich 2015: 23-50; Bertellini 1999a: 47; Wyke 1997: 44 and 123; Brunetta 2008: 203-4; dall’Asta and Faccioli in this volume. 44  Ursus is played by the strongman or forzuto Bruto Castellani. For the strongmen who often followed in Italian cinema, see dall’Asta and Faccioli in this volume.

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Word and Image  159 Quo vadis? claim for cinema the status of being a more democratic art form than painting, theatre, opera, or the novel. For, unlike those other forms, it draws the working classes into history, even if it is at the service not of class struggle but of Christianity. The production company that made Quo vadis? extended this assertion of superiority as an art form explicitly to include other films. The four-page advertisement Cines published in La Vita Cinematographica two months before the film’s release described the public as ‘unsatisfied or downright disappointed’ with earlier cinematic adaptations of the Polish novel. The first known adaptation of 1901, produced by the French company Pathé Frères, adopted the approach to a literary source customary for early cinema where key moments with strong recognition value for audiences are radically compressed into a single kinetic scene lasting only a few minutes45 (at a banquet on the Palatine, the imperial court watch a gladiatorial combat and a lascivious dance, Ursus rescues Lygia, and Nero sings as Rome burns in the background).46 Little can be understood without adequate knowledge of the adapted text. But twelve years later, brief homage has been replaced by a far more ambitious, interventionist cinematic strategy. In 1913, Guazzoni’s feature film draws on the Quo vadis story in all its multimedial manifestations to define the modern medium as an art form in competition with all others, as nonetheless socially inclusive, and as now fully matured.

The Commerce of Cinema As a means to attract middle-class audiences to the cinema and increase ­profits, Cines promoted the film Quo vadis? as a product of high artistic status, attained by virtue of its adaptation of an illustrious novel. In December 1912, the Italian production house dedicated to this enterprise the entirety of its monthly magazine Cines Revue. Lavishly illustrated with scenes from the film, and containing text in Italian, French, German, and English, the publication appears to have been designed for anticipated audiences at premieres both at home and abroad.47 The opening claim that in its production Cines 45  Early cinema’s strategies for literary adaptation are discussed by Buchanan 2012. 46  A restored version of the 1901 film was shown at the Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna in 2016. I have no information currently on another French film adaptation entitled Au temps des prem­ iers chrétiens (1910), presumed missing. 47  I am very grateful to Raffaele De Berti and Elisabetta Gagetti for their kindness in providing me with access to this publication. My description of its contents is greatly indebted to their analysis, for which see De Berti and Gagetti 2016 and their chapter in this volume.

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160  Maria Wyke has faithfully followed Sienkiewicz’s novel is shored up by the substantial details subsequently given of the film’s plot line—to the extent that the film is said to conclude (more in the manner of a literary work than any cinematic adaptation) with the contents of a letter from Vinicius to Petronius describing the happiness he and Lygia have found through Christ in Sicily. Given that the released film did not end in this way but with a vision of Christ before an unindividuated group, it may be thought that Cines was here presenting its film reassuringly as subservient even to the medium of the adapted work. Despite this act of transcriptive fidelity, however, most of the prefatory remarks in the magazine constitute a clear boast of artistic equivalence.48 Cines acknowledges the difficulties of producing an adaptation because, it says, the novel is a masterly work of re-enactment in which the life of imperial Rome is forcefully relived and sensuously breathed. But, it claims, the difficulties were not insurmountable and the company has now produced for the public of the whole world a perfect adaptation (‘una riduzione perfetta’). Furthermore, a hint of cultural superiority lies within the additional, poetic claim that Cines was able to complete its great work not just because it was in possession of the most perfect technical means to do so, and the most exceptional academic and artistic expertise, but also because it had around it for inspiration the city of Rome ‘constantly singing, through its arches, through its columns, through its ruins decorated by beautiful sunsets, its eternal glorifying song of ancient power and of ancient beauty’.49 The commercial systems for distribution and exhibition of Quo vadis? reveal equally bold approaches toward attracting the higher classes (as yet unaccustomed to cinema) to see it. Exclusive concessions to exhibit the film were put into place for each region of Italy. From Milan to Naples, it opened in prestigious opera houses where the price of tickets was raised substantially higher than was usual for film-going. A special screening was arranged in the palace on the Quirinale for the Italian royal family and their court.50 These tactics were evidently successful, as newspapers reported on the unusual and appreciative constituency seated in the Teatro Costanzi at Rome on the 48  For the operation of a reassuring rhetoric of transcriptive fidelity in the promotion of silent-film adaptations, see Buchanan 2012: 26–7. 49  The translation is my own, taken from the Italian text of Cines Revue 1.3 (December 1912), p. 83, as the English version contained there is somewhat awkward and a little inaccurate. 50  The Italian distribution and exhibition of the film are discussed by Bernardini 1982: 148–9 and Martinelli 1994: 49. Hendrykowska 1996 comments on the exceptional distribution of the film across all the divided parts of Poland (Russian, Prussian, and Austrian) and its unsurprisingly enthusiastic reception.

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Word and Image  161 opening night of 12 March 1913 (not only regular frequenters of film but also the flower of the aristocracy and notable intellectuals, artists, journalists, industrialists, and financiers),51 while the film remained in circulation until the end of World War I. In New York, the commercial life of Quo vadis? was significantly prolonged by the American distributor George Kleine, who arranged for it to be screened initially on Broadway at the high admission price of $1.50 for highbrow audiences and then, some ten months later, downtown at a cost of between 15 and 50 cents for working-class Italian immigrants (Bertellini 1999b: 244–5). Quo vadis? was the first film ever to play in a Broadway theatre in this manner, running at the Astor in Manhattan from April to December 1913. This radically new pattern of distribution and ­exhibition was continued in Britain, where the exclusive rights to Quo vadis? were sold at auction and a four-week opening held at the immense Royal Albert Hall, before a wider release across the country in small provincial venues (Christie 2013: 115–16). At such venues, the distributor put a programme on sale that provided British spectators with a synopsis of the story and an assurance that ‘every incident of the novel appears to have been preserved with remarkable fidelity’.52 Many of the reviewers who saw Quo vadis?, in sharp contrast to the critic René Doumic, were outspoken about the respects in which they judged the film’s re-enactment of Neronian Rome to equal, or even to trump, that of the novel it was adapting. On 4 March 1913, a few days in advance of the prem­ iere, the journalist Matilde Serao enthused in the Neapolitan newspaper Il Giorno that, to bring to life, in its setting and its episodes, Quo vadis?, all of Quo vadis?, was like proposing to create a world, in elements that are the most difficult to reproduce, of the exact colouring of the environment of imperial Rome . . . The vast and impressive Neronian tragedy passed from the vision of the book to the real and throbbing evidence of its action . . . . It is a spectacle never before seen. The cinematograph has never created anything like this. Yes, Cines has reconstructed a world. A world of beauty that enchants and thrills.53

51  A sample report from the Giornale d’Italia, from which I take this description, is quoted in De Berti and Gagetti 2016: 57. 52  A number of the brochures are available for viewing in the special collections of the British Film Institute Library that are dedicated to the British distributor William F. Jury. 53  Quoted in Martinelli 1993: 175–6, the translation of the Italian is my own. On Serao’s response, see also Dagna and De Berti and Gagetti in this volume.

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162  Maria Wyke The modern medium’s capacity for realism and movement permits Serao to suggest that Sienkiewicz’s book offers a literary vision of Roman history, whereas Guazzoni’s camera offers both the photographic evidence and the action. Given such contexts of distribution, exhibition, and consumption, it is no surprise that the cover of the British programme for sale at cinemas where the Italian feature was shown makes no reference at all to the Polish novel or any of its characters, but carries instead an image of Christ standing over a scroll and gesturing out at the programme’s readers, with the Latin tag Quo vadis? inscribed on a crossbar above his head. Inside, the programme even argues that there are times when mere words appear totally inadequate to fittingly describe anything great and magnificent, and in attempting a pen picture of the colossal production of ‘Quo Vadis?’ we find language almost fails us to convey anything like the beauty, fascination, magnificence, and power to enthral of the production process.

In the excited rhetoric of promotional materials like this, the competitive intermediality of the film achieves victory over the book—as René Doumic foretold it would. Momentarily, writing ‘a pen picture’ fails, and the cinematic medium overpowers ‘mere words’.

The Victory of the Image In face of the disdain shown toward cinema’s rising ambitions expressed by men of letters such as René Doumic, I would argue that Guazzoni’s Quo vadis? not only engages in close and sustained competition with the other arts but even plays out the victory of cinema over them at its close. At the end of the Italian film, in contrast with the end of the Polish novel it adapts, the romance of Vinicius and Lygia receives no closure (despite the promise made that it would in the Cines Revue). Writing in Turin’s Il Maggese Cinematografico (no. 3, 25 May 1913), a disappointed critic complains how much better it would have been to have included, after all Nero’s atrocities, a sweetly sentimental scene of the loving and peaceful life of Lygia and Vinicius far from Rome.54 Likewise, neither Peter nor Paul experience martyrdom in the film. 54  Cited in Martinelli 1993: 176–7.

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Word and Image  163 Among the closures that are provided—for Petronius and his beloved Eunice, for the repentant Chilo, and for Nero—it is productive to pause over that for Petronius. Here, as in the opening of the film, explicit intermedial reference is made to literature and the written word when Petronius ceremoniously reads out his farewell letter to Nero deploring the emperor’s inferior artistic skills. While in novels letters float on a sea of words, on film they are denaturalized as a mode of representation.55 This thematizing of another medium or ‘metamediality’ is made even more explicit in the 1922 French rerelease, where a handwritten letter commands our attention, filling the screen in order for it to be read. Petronius is here a master of the word, and the hand that holds up the paper on which his words are written draws our attention to his favoured medium. However, the film does not end with the suicide of Petronius or even that of Nero. After the Christians are set alight as human torches, after Peter sees the sacred apparition on the Via Appia, after the emperor throws himself on a slave’s dagger, the last shot (coloured green by a dye-tone process) gradually illuminates Christ again, standing before a bright white cross. He looks down at the suppliants before him, whose chains he breaks, and then out of the camera directly at the audience of the film (Figure  9.2). This constitutes a vision rather than a scene because it is without location (and without precedent in the novel).56 And, as a vision, it can be interpreted as another moment of ‘metamediality’ after that set in motion by Petronius—that is, as a comment on the process of adaptation from book to film.57 The slow revelation of Christ is like a stylized performance of the triumph of the visual.58 The picturesque (the horrific human torches, the reverential apparition on the Via Appia, and now this liberating epiphany) supersedes the textual.59 The kneeling faithful are invited to adore a master of the image rather than mourn the loss of a master of the word. Quo vadis? concludes by suggesting that seeing (not reading) is believing, and cinema (not literature) should be the church in which Christians might find liberty and salvation.

55  On the ways in which cinema can create textual scenes, see Elliott 2003: 99–112, esp. 101. 56  As noted in the Turinese magazine Il Maggese Cinematografico (25 May 1913). 57  Scodel and Bettenworth 2009: 7 describe the shot as an authorial or authoritative comment on the divine necessity, rather than the historical contingency, of the rise of Christianity and the fall of Nero. 58  I am indebted for this metacinematic interpretation to the analysis of a scene in Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings (1927) by Judith Buchanan. There she argues that, when Christ finally appears in the film, seen subjectively by a girl he has just cured of blindness and who is now learning to see, the scene is ‘like a stylised rehearsal of the coming of cinema itself ’ (Buchanan 2007: 58). 59  See Elliott 2003: 99–112 for occasions where film adaptations react against their founding texts.

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10 Illustrating Quo vadis in Italy (1900–1925) between Cultivated Tradition and Popular Culture Raffaele De Berti and Elisabetta Gagetti1

In Italy, from the very beginning of the twentieth century, that is less than four years after the first translation of Quo vadis appeared,2 Sienkiewicz’s novel generated its first illustrative paratexts. Before analysing them, their media, and their contexts, some consideration of the term ‘paratext’ and its utility is needed. On the following pages, it is inclusively adopted echoing Gérard Genette’s definition as it relates to literature and cinema (mainly in 1992 and, especially, 1997), which further differentiates ‘peritexts’ (prefaces, titles, credits, illustrations that are situated within a book or film) and ‘epitexts’ (such as reviews, postcards, interviews, trailers, brochures, or posters that are located outside a book or film). Paratexts can ‘heavily influence, even guide, the reading of texts, although they distance themselves from any kind of authorial intention’ (Klecker 2015: 411). In itself, ‘paratextual study not only promises to tell us how a text creates meaning for its consumers; it also promises to tell us how a text creates meaning in popular culture and society more generally’ (Gray 2010: 26). Illustrated editions of Quo vadis quickly multiply in the first twenty-five years of the century, starting from that of Treves (1901) down to the popular edition by the publisher ‘Gloriosa’ (1921). Running in parallel with these peritexts is the regular production of illustrative epitexts, both of the novel and of the film adaptations directed by Guazzoni (1913)3 and D’Annunzio and 1  Raffaele De Berti is the author of the introduction and first section, ‘The Paratexts and their Context’; Elisabetta Gagetti is the author of the sections ‘Same Choices, Different Meanings’, ‘One Scene, Several Strategies’, and the Conclusion. Translations into English are by the authors unless other­wise identified. 2  Firstly, by instalments, in the Corriere di Napoli (starting from February 1897), then, in book form Henryk Sienkiewicz 1898). In both cases, the translator was Federigo Verdinois. On his translation, see Gagetti and De Berti 2017: 117–18 (with further references). 3  We drew on the ‘hybrid’ copy Fondazione Cineteca Italiana, Milan–EYE Film Instituut Nederland, Amsterdam (length: 1,944 m). About this and other extant versions, see Dagna and Wyke in this volume. Raffaele De Berti and Elisabetta Gagetti, Illustrating Quo vadis in Italy (1900–1925): between Cultivated Tradition and Popular Culture In: The Novel of Neronian Rome and its Multimedial Transformations: Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis. Edited by: Monika Woźniak and Maria Wyke, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198867531.003.0010

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166  Raffaele De Berti and Elisabetta Gagetti Jacoby (1924 according to its censorship certificate, but first screened on 16 March 1925 in Rome).4 They include a whole series of postcards, both pic­ tor­ial (among which we can count the extravagant medium of Mastroianni’s sculptogravures) and photographic (set stills). This chapter will analyse the illustrations contained within editions of the novel and the postcard series external to it or its film adaptations as paratexts, that is not in respect of their aesthetics or fidelity to the novel but as elements expanding the possible interpretations of Quo vadis (as were the films themselves) with regard to the society and culture of their time, and with regard to the expectations of the audiences they were addressing. Sienkiewicz’s novel itself works on several levels, each one involving a large audience: its plot full of adventures and love affairs speaks to a popular audience; its accurate description of the life and the topography of ancient Rome speaks particularly to an educated one. Moreover, the novel unites both audiences in their engagement with its religious dimension and emotional sensitivity. The iconographic choices made in the paratexts we will examine play the role of glosses on that text, voicing through their illustrations of it diverse responses to the work. Within the overflowing imagery that has been drawn from Quo vadis, only three classes of documents will be taken into consideration here, as the most broadly diffused and, in our judgement, the most telling about different readings of the novel: images from illustrated Italian editions of the novel, postcards, and film brochures. Fully to appreciate the strategies of these materials, a further selection is needed, so we will examine here, as case studies in icono­graph­ic choices, the illustrations of the two luxury editions published by Treves (1901 and 1913)5, and those of the cheaper and more popular editions published by Casa Editrice Nerbini (1906–7) and ‘Gloriosa’/Casa Editrice Italiana (1921). No relevant new edition of the novel takes us beyond the film directed by D’Annunzio and Jacoby; yet, once the publishing house ‘Gloriosa’ became aware in 1923 of UCI’s project to shoot that new film version,6 it reprinted its

4  Our reference is to the restored and digitized copy of Fondazione Cineteca Italiana, Milan, and Haghefilm, Amsterdam (2003), from a positive nitrate copy preserved at the FCI (length: 2,808 m). Martinelli 1981: 186 provides the release date of 1925. 5  Sienkiewicz 1901; Sienkiewicz 1913a. Both were quickly followed by cheap paperback editions. 6  See e.g. two pieces of evidence (two more paratexts): the interview with Giuseppe Barattolo, head of the UCI, in Al cinemá. Settimanale di cinematografia e varietà, year II, no. 35, 2 September 1923, 3 (‘È per ciò che con elementi italiani e stranieri faremo il Quo vadis? . . .’); and the advertising for the film Dio dell’oro (Alles für Geld: Reinhold Schünzel, 1923) as an ‘interpretazione meravigliosa di Emil Janning [sic], il prossimo Nerone nel “Quo Vadis” della Unione’ (La rivista cinematografica, year IV, no. 18, 23 September 1923, 8).

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Illustrating Quo vadis in Italy ( 1900–1925 )   167 1921 edition, while Nerbini’s edition was still being reprinted as late as 1985, with only a few changes to the illustrations.7 Variations across these editions will be compared with the two series of postcards concerning Quo vadis that displayed either sculptogravures by Domenico Mastroianni (1913) or stills from the set of the two Italian film adaptations (by Enrico Guazzoni, 1913; and by Gabriellino D’Annunzio and Georg Jacoby, 1925). Stills from the sets of Guazzoni’s film were used as illustrations not only for a series of stand-alone postcards (thirty-six are known to us), but also within an advertising brochure produced by the Cines studio (December 1912) and in the ‘edizione cinematografica’ of the novel published by Treves (1913). In the Cines brochure, the photographs mostly do not follow the plot of the film but are used simply as suitable images to illustrate the novelization of the film’s own adaptation of the original novel, even if they relate to a different context (for example, on p. 92 a still of the suicide of Petronius and Eunice illustrates the banquet on the Palatine). Not all of the forty-four images in the brochure are published in Treves’s 1913 edition, which, in its turn, contains more (seventy-eight) and different set stills. All the subjects of the postcards appear in Treves’s edition, and twenty-one of them also in the Cines brochure. Such paratexts can give new overtones to the meaning of the novel. Given the high number of illustrated editions and illustrative postcards published in Italy, our inquiry has been limited to the period 1900 to 1925, to coincide with the last years of the silent-film era and the dying away of the echo caused by D’Annunzio and Jacoby’s film , whose strong sensual register had been paralleled in some illustrated editions of the novel.

The Paratexts and their Context To begin with the illustrated editions of Quo vadis, both of those by Treves— one of the most prestigious Italian publishers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—are targeted at the upper-middle and upper classes, given the high editorial quality of its books. The edition of 1901 is illustrated by fifty-four drawings designed by Adriano Minardi,8 and the edition of 1913 by 7  Enrico Sienkiewicz 1985, with cover and sixteen illustrations by Tancredi Scarpelli alone (this edition was printed first in 1944, in its turn with minor differences from those of the earlier edition listed below). 8  Cassoni 1984: 63; Catalogo Bolaffi 1995, ad vocem; Pallottino 2010: 198, 229, 241, 276; Faeti 2011: 164 and fig. 44 on p. 161.

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168  Raffaele De Berti and Elisabetta Gagetti seventy-eight set stills from Guazzoni’s film. On the other hand, the publications by Nerbini and ‘Gloriosa’ (respectively associated with the production of American comics and biographies of film stars) are directed at lower-class readers. Both their editions have a stronger accent, in their illustrations, on adventurousness and sensuality, which is particularly interesting as they thus anticipate one of the main registers in the film directed by D’Annunzio and Jacoby. Consistent with their target of a ‘popular’ readership, both Nerbini and ‘Gloriosa’ published the novel in signatures (that is, in sheets containing multiple pages), with a view to the possibility of being bound into a hardback book and into a complete paperback volume. There are five Nerbini editions between 1906 and 1914,9 with differences in the numbers of signatures and of illustrations, and with different illustrators as well: Giuseppe Rossi (1876–1952),10 Sirti (dates unknown),11 Tancredi Scarpelli (1866–1937).12 The two editions published by ‘Gloriosa’, and illustrated by Fabio Fabbi (1861–1946),13 appeared in 1921 and 1923,14 the latter enriched with a cover designed by Carlo Nicco (1883–1973).15 The catalogue of the publishing house Fratelli Treves, established in Milan in 1861, was set up from an eclectic perspective, operating with a diversified price policy (depending on the quality of its editions), and aiming to cover all social classes and all fields of culture and education: literature, science, trav­ elogues, school texts, and dictionaries. Their novels were by famous authors, both Italian (such as Giovanni Verga, Gabriele d’Annunzio, Edmondo De Amicis,16 and Luigi Pirandello) and foreign (such as Gustave Flaubert, Jules Verne, Victor Hugo, and Leo Tolstoy), but writers who were even more popular, 9  Sienkiewicz 1906–1907: sixty-two signatures, with fifty-six illustrations by Giuseppe Rossi and Sirti and a one-page catalogue; Sienkiewicz 1908: sixty-two signatures, with fifty-seven illustrations by Giuseppe Rossi and a four-page catalogue; Sienkiewicz  1910: sixty-two signatures, with fifty-seven illustrations by Giuseppe Rossi and a three-page catalogue; Sienkiewicz 1913b: twenty-two signatures, with nineteen illustrations by Tancredi Scarpelli and Giuseppe Rossi; Sienkiewicz 1914: five small volumes (consisting of a hundred pages each), with nineteen illustrations by Scarpelli and Rossi; at the end of the novel instead of a catalogue, there is a short story by Victor Hugo, Claudio Gueux, and, on the cover, highlighted by red lettering the imprint ‘Edizione popolare illustrata’. 10  See Comanducci 1974: 2820 and 2822. 11  Nom de plume of Guido Sartini. 12  An illustrator since the beginning of the twentieth century, Scarpelli worked for various publishing houses, but above all for Nerbini. See Faeti and Pallottino 1988: 89–126. 13  Faeti and Pallottino 1988: 37–51; Bernucci 1993: 607–9. 14  Sienkiewicz 1921: in thirty-six signatures, of eight pages each, sold at 30 cents; Sienkiewicz 1923, accompanied by a cover by Carlo Nicco, in eighteen signatures of sixteen pages each; each signature consisting of two instalments and sold at 60 cents. 15  Nicco was active as a poster illustrator for variety shows and worked for La vita cinematografica, illustrating films and portraying actors, as well as conceiving the logo of the Turinfilm company ‘Rodolfi film’ (Della Torre 2014: 54–5). In the 1920s, Nicco devoted himself, above all, to children’s books (Faeti 2011: 288 and fig. 79 on p. 287). 16  His book Heart (1886) was Treves’s greatest publishing success. It came out in 1886 and remained a textbook in Italian schools for decades, reaching one million copies sold in 1923.

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Illustrating Quo vadis in Italy ( 1900–1925 )   169 like Luciano Zuccoli and Henry Rider Haggard, were not unrepresented. By 1910 Treves’s catalogue contained 188 titles, including new works and reprints. Treves published periodicals as well, among which the most successful was L’Illustrazione Italiana (1873–1962). It clearly reflected the moderate political position of the publishers and their commitment to Italian constitutional monarchy. Owing to the introduction of racial laws in 1938, the Treveses ultimately ceded their family business to Aldo Garzanti.17 Ever since its first Italian edition, the fortune of the novel Quo vadis was so great that its title was adopted for various other publications, such as the weekly of social literature Quo Vadis?, whose first issue was published by the socialist press Nerbini on 24 December 1901. Edited by Alfredo Angiolini, its explicit aim was to take art to the working classes, to entertain and educate them by means of a lavishly illustrated periodical.18 In the newspaper’s heading, a woodcut by Luca Fornari depicted workers marching on their way to knowledge, led by a female character attired in classical style, wearing a short chiton, a baldric on her left shoulder, and a diadem with a star above her forehead (Figure  10.1).19 The masses explicitly recall the socialist paintings of Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo,20 ranging from Ambasciatori della fame (1895; private collection) and Fiumana (1898; Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan) to the very famous Quarto stato (1901; Museo del Novecento, Milan). One year later, the

Fig. 10.1  Masthead of the weekly newspaper Quo Vadis?, published by Nerbini. Source: authors’ collection.

17  On the Treves publishing house, see Decleva 1997. 18 Cf. La Direzione 1901: ‘Until today, until the start of this century, which was named after the workers, art was the privilege of kings, popes, nobles, the rich. We are trying to bring a breath of new art even to the people who labour, to entertain them and, at the same time, to teach them.’ 19  In 1906 Luca Fornari went on to complete sixty-five illustrations for the edition of Quo vadis published by Società Editoriale Milanese. 20  On the painter: Fratelli 2007.

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170  Raffaele De Berti and Elisabetta Gagetti weekly newspaper changed its title to Avanti! della Domenica, a supplement now of the socialist daily newspaper Avanti! Giuseppe Nerbini, socialist and firmly anti-clerical,21 had started his activity in 1897, focusing mostly—alongside political and propagandist texts—on the novels of Russian and French authors, such as Tolstoy, Gorky, Hugo, and Zola, the social function of which was ‘not insignificant for the advancement of new ideas’ (Tortorelli 1983: 49). His audience consisted of literate farmers and workmen, and lower-class employees. Sienkiewicz’s novel is among Nerbini’s greatest successes in the first decade of the twentieth century. Quo vadis was always in the publisher’s catalogue, from its first edition in signatures (1906–7), followed by four others between 1908 and 1914. The decision of the anti-clerical Nerbini to publish Quo vadis finds initial explanation in an article by Giovanni Baldi devoted to Sienkiewicz which was published on 2 November 1902 in the weekly Quo Vadis? There Baldi notes how in the novel ‘a parallel was drawn between the dying pagan world and the nineteenth century, between the rise of Christianity and the authority of new faiths’ (Tortorelli 1983: 13). From this point of view, the persecuted Christians are considered as little different from modern working Italians who fight against the rich to assert their rights and who have no part in the power of the Church and the clergy.22 Moreover, the idea of a ‘socialist Jesus’, frequently found in the articles and illustrations published in Quo Vadis? and later in Avanti! della Domenica, is frequently present in much of the socialist propaganda of that time. Further evidence that Nerbini compared Quo vadis to the nineteenth-century novels of social denunciation is the publication of Victor Hugo’s short story Claude Gueux. The Last Day of A Condemned Man (1829) at the end of the 1914 illustrated edition of Sienkiewicz’s novel. ‘Gloriosa’, Casa Editrice Italiana, established in Milan in 1921 by Nino Vitagliano, relied mostly upon popular periodicals devoted to current events (such as Excelsior) and cinema (such as Cine-Cinema, which paid great attention to novelizations of films and, as mentioned, biographies of film stars). Particularly interesting, in order to understand the target audience of the publishing house, is the monthly Maschietta (Flapper), launched in 1924. An 21  Giuseppe Nerbini’s relationship with the Italian Socialist Party was quite loose, but at least until 1914 his publishing house can be considered socialist. Later, Nerbini would join the Fascist Party, and in the 1920s and 1930s the Florentine publisher was known above all for introducing American comics to an Italian audience: Mickey Mouse (Topolino), Flash Gordon (Gordon Flasce), Radio Patrol (Radio Pattuglia), Secret Agent X-9 (Agente Segreto X-9). On the history of the Nerbini publishing house, see Tortorelli 1983 and Listri 1993. 22  Cf. Scodel in this volume on how, in the United States, Protestant groups attached to the ‘social gospel’ found congenial elements in Sienkiewicz’s Catholic novel.

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Illustrating Quo vadis in Italy ( 1900–1925 )   171 illustrated humorous magazine, it explicitly took up the French model of Le Sourire (1899–1940), with art-deco-style designs that anticipated future images of pin-ups in erotic poses. In Maschietta, a great majority of the illustrations were by French cartoonists, such as Jean Chaperon and Fernand Couderc, who both also worked at Le Sourire. The drawings used to illustrate the different series of novels are also quite significant. Usually published by ‘Gloriosa’ in weekly signatures, the novelizations paid special attention to successful popular writers. In the series Biblioteca ‘I grandi romanzi illustrati’, a pre-eminent role as designer was played by Fabio Fabbi, who illustrated, among other novels, Rocambole (L’eredità misteriosa) by the ‘feuilletonier’ Pierre Alexis de Ponson du Terrail, I Borgia by Michel Zévaco, and Ettore Fieramosca by Massimo d’Azeglio. But what is most remarkable is finding Fabbi at work illustrating both Quo vadis and a great classic of nineteenthcentury eroticism, Aphrodite by Pierre Louÿs.23 With regard to our second group of case studies, the oldest Italian postcards illustrating Quo vadis are, quite surprisingly, photographic. Even if they would reach their widest circulation with the series of stills from the two films (1913 and 1925), twelve numbered photographs from the theatrical staging of the novel seem to have been issued on the different occasions of its per­form­ ance, such as in Rome at the Teatro Manzoni in 1900 (Figure 10.2).24 Pictorial postcards, on the other hand, when they can be traced back at least to the terminus post quem given by their postmarks, such as those signed by Vincenzo La Bella (c.1917) and Antonio Del Senno (early 1920s), seem to emerge sometime after the publication of the main editions of the novel and the release of Guazzoni’s film. Sculptogravure is, no doubt, the least known medium displayed on postcards. It is a technique at which Domenico Mastroianni (1876–1962) excelled.25 He was a sculptor in different materials as well as a painter. His sculptogravures, also known as photosculptures, are images realized in three steps. First, low reliefs in plaster or plasticine were modelled on panels measuring 50 × 70 centimetres; then photographs of the reliefs were taken and printed as postcards;

23  On ‘Gloriosa’, Casa Editrice Italiana, see Carotti 2007. Another illustrator active in the same series, Carlo Nicco, was responsible for the cover for the 1923 edition of Quo vadis. 24  Silvano D’Arborio, Quo vadis? Riduzione teatrale in 10 quadri. Compagnia drammatica della Città di Roma, diretta da Achille Mauri, scene di A. Ciccognani. The whole series is preserved in the archive of the Biblioteca del Museo Teatrale del Burcardo, Rome, and was displayed at the exhibition ‘ “Quo vadis” la prima opera transmediale. Da caso letterario a fenomeno della cultura di massa’, curated by M. Woźniak (Rome, Istituto Polacco di Roma, 13 November 2016–5 January 2017). For the performance, see Dagna in this volume. 25  Lauri 1915: 160; Franco 2008: 67–8; Della Volpe 2014.

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172  Raffaele De Berti and Elisabetta Gagetti

Fig. 10.2  Postcard depicting a scene from a theatrical staging of Quo vadis written by Silvano D’Arborio. Source: authors’ collection.

finally, the original models were destroyed in order to recycle their material for new projects. Among Mastroianni’s quite extensive oeuvre, at least two series related to Quo vadis are known: one consisting of thirty subjects in two variations, sepia and coloured (the latter are known as ‘sculptochromies’ or ‘photochromosculptures’); and a selection of eighteen subjects in colour. Printed by the famous postcard publisher Armand Noyer in Paris, where Mastroianni lived for a long time, they were published in Italy under licence by Edizioni Artistiche Fotografiche ‘A. Traldi’ in Milan. The two films, released respectively in 1913 and 1925 (but with a censorship date of 1924), are an important iconographic reference point for this study of the novel’s most significant illustrative paratexts in Italy, because of their influence on a varied typology of illustrations and being themselves sites for the accumulation of all the preceding illustration strategies concerning Quo vadis. That is, in a continuous circulation of media, the films drew on paintings, book illustrations, and postcards for their visual adaptations and in turn influenced further representations of the novel in those media. An art­ icle by Matilde Serao, published on 4 March 1913 in the daily Neapolitan newspaper Il Giorno, anticipates the great success and enthusiasm that would follow in the coming months, both in Italy and abroad, from the release of Enrico Guazzoni’s film Quo vadis?: ‘Well, no representational form could ever give a more palpitating, more complete, more truthful, more beautiful version

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Illustrating Quo vadis in Italy ( 1900–1925 )   173 of what an animated Quo vadis? might be, if not that of filmic reconstruction when pushed to wondrous limits.’26 In 1897, Serao, without reading the novel, had refused to publish it in instalments in the daily newspaper she edited, Il Mattino (according to Verdinois 1907–8: 797, the first Italian translator of Quo vadis). Yet she had soon changed her mind. Her later enthusiastic endorsement of film as the best medium for the novel’s adaptation became a fantastic advertisement for Guazzoni’s feature, whose first official screening was in Rome on 8 March 1913.27 Moreover, the production company Cines had very carefully prepared its marketing strategy for the film, devoting the entire issue for December 1912 of its monthly Cines Revue: Rivista Illustrata Internazionale di Cinematografia to Quo vadis?, with texts in Italian, French, German, and English, and lavishly illustrated with set stills. It is a real luxury brochure, the main target of which was probably the audience attending the first screenings. But it was probably very useful to cinema owners as well for arranging their own promotional campaign, each adapting it to their particular needs. The brochure states that ‘in this magnificent representation of Cines [the] romance of Henryk Sienkiewicz has been faithfully followed’, and that the brochure ‘traces again the main lines of the succession of pictures’ (Cines Revue 1, 1 December 1912, p. 84). In several cases, the anonymous author of what we could call a ‘cineracconto’ or novelization of the film in the third person follows the original novel more closely than the film adaptation, so that several passages from Sienkiewicz are quoted. It should be kept in mind that a ‘cineracconto’ was often written before the final cut of a film, and that it was therefore largely based on scripts, set stills, and, in our case, prior reading of the novel. The ending provided by the studio brochure is particularly surprising, even in comparison with the film which substantially follows the novel. Nothing is said about the novel’s account of the torching of the Christians, Christ appearing to Peter on the Appian Way, Chilo’s conversion, the suicides of Petronius and Eunice, or the death of Nero.28 At the end of the story, according to the brochure, after having been rescued by Ursus in the arena, Lygia was at last reconducted to Vinicius for ever. After so much torture and so many dangers they betook themselves to Sicily where a complete rest and peace awaited them, as can be seen from the main facts of a letter sent by 26  On Serao’s comments (with slight variants in the English translation of her Italian), see also Dagna and Wyke in this volume. 27  On 7 March a premiere took place by invitation only (Redi 2009: 47). On the Italian and the international distribution of the film and its extraordinary success, see Bernardini 1982 and Dagna and Wyke in this volume. An overview of the film’s reviews is given in Bernardini and Martinelli 1993: 175–83. 28  See Scodel and Bettenworth 2009: 249–57, column ‘Novel’, nos 64–78, 82–7, and Epilogue.

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174  Raffaele De Berti and Elisabetta Gagetti Vinicius to Petronius. . . . ‘I am obliged to say to you that they are not the Fates who so sweetly weave the web of our existence, it is instead Christ Our Saviour and Friend.’29

On the same page, the last stills used in this novelization, extrapolated from different points in the film, illustrate the main idea of the letter: they show Petronius in conversation with Eunice in a loggia before their suicide, Peter preaching in the catacombs, and Lygia treating wounded Vinicius, in a pose quite similar to the attitude of the couple in Mastroianni’s In Sicilia (see below and Figure 10.3 a to d). It is difficult to state whether this ending (which omits much of what precedes it in the novel and the deaths of Petronius, Eunice, and Nero that follow it) was the first Guazzoni had in mind, and that later he changed it before shooting finished. Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that here we encounter an intersection between paratexts, because such an ending (as we shall see) corresponds to the last image in the minor series of postcards from the photochromosculptures (the coloured series) by Mastroianni. Such a coincidence is probably a clue to the dynamics between, and relative chronology of, two different types of paratext. If Mastroianni’s two series of sculptogravures of Quo vadis were issued in 1913, it is very likely that the artist worked on the low reliefs some months in advance, probably already in 1912, when ex­pect­ ation of Cines’s great production was in the air. It would have seemed a good idea to be ready, on release of the film, with a dedicated series of sculptogravures. Mastroianni, of course, followed Sienkiewicz’s novel in the sequence of reliefs he created. But, by the very end of 1912, Cines Revue suggested a different ending for the story. It is not unlikely that, at this point, Mastroianni—or, more likely, his printer and publisher Noyer—decided to make a selection fitting the plot as anticipated by the official brochure of the film studios. In any case, the quoted text is quite significant for the way it reads Quo vadis with strong emphasis on the love story between Vinicius and Lygia and their union as a metaphor for the beginning of a new era under the sign of Christ and love. Such an interpretation of Quo vadis had been initiated by the Barnabite father Giovanni Semeria, in his authoritative lecture entitled L’arte e l’apologia cristiana nel Quo vadis, delivered in November 1899 on the opening of the third year of the ‘Scuola Superiore di Religione’ in Genoa. Father Semeria, in his 29  Cines Revue 1, 3 December 1912, p. 112. In the novel, Vinicius’s letter to Petronius and his reply appear in chapter 47.

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Illustrating Quo vadis in Italy ( 1900–1925 )   175

Fig. 10.3  Subject selection and variation: (a) Vinicius at Petrone’s (no. 1 from Mastroianni’s thirty-postcard series of 1913); (b) Vinicius at Petrone’s (no. 1 from Mastroianni’s eighteen-postcard series of 1913, corresponding to no. 7 Petrone’s toilette in his thirty-postcard series); (c) last image in the Cines brochure (1912), claiming to show Vinicius and Lygia in Sicily (actually a still from Guazzoni’s film that depicts Lygia treating Vinicius in Myriam’s house); (d) In Sicily (no. 18 from Mastroianni’s eighteen-postcard series). Source: all from authors’ collection.

long, detailed, and enthusiastic analysis of the novel (an example, therefore, of another paratext), used the—at that time very recent—translation by Verdinois (1897) to point out that ‘Il Quo vadis è un dramma di anime ed è dramma di amore’ (Semeria 1899: 23), in which the pagan Vinicius matured from admiring a body to profoundly loving a soul, sealed by the approval of Christ. The central role of this drama of love, the moral tension in a realistically drawn historical context, the comparison of two different worlds (pagan and Christian): these are the perfect ingredients that make Guazzoni’s film a product

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176  Raffaele De Berti and Elisabetta Gagetti intended for and appreciated by a socially heterogeneous audience, as attested by contemporary film reviews appearing in the newspapers of all the most important towns in Italy, such as Rome, Milan, Turin, and Naples. The screening of this full-length film, spread over months to increase audience appetite, took place in famous playhouses where opera was usually performed, such as the Costanzi in Rome (today Teatro dell’Opera di Roma). On 12 March 1913, the Giornale d’Italia records about the premiere audience in Rome: The public who came there was not only composed of the usual workingclass cinema goers, but of the flower of our aristocracy and of the most outstanding personalities of the intellectual, artistic, journalistic, industrial and financial worlds of Rome. . . . The admiration, enthusiasm and applause of that public was deservedly substantial.30

Yet, given Nerbini’s response to the novel, a much-debated scene in Guazzoni’s Quo vadis? can be fully understood if put in a completely different sociocultural context than that provided by the premiere: in the house of the Christian quarryman, while the Apostle Peter is baptizing Vinicius, we distinctly see, attached to the back wall, an axe crossed by a sickle, recalling the well-known hammer and sickle. It is perhaps possible to imagine that such a design, beyond its strict ideological connotations, signifies the unity of the humble and persecuted of the two eras, the Roman and the contemporary, fighting to assert their new ideals.31 For all the Italian reviewers, Guazzoni’s film was a milestone in both Italian and international cinema, as it gave a decisive impulse to cinema itself toward becoming a popular and educational medium, but one not without grandeur and artistic dignity. The case of Quo vadis? directed by Gabriellino D’Annunzio and Georg Jacoby and released in 1925 was quite different; the film received

30  Dall’Orto 1913. The same sort of description appears, for instance, in news regarding the prem­ iere at the Dal Verme theatre in Milan: ‘Il pubblico che affollava la sala era composto di quanto di più eletto conti la città’ (Locadier 1913). 31  Between the two interpretations offered by Maria Wyke that the symbol marks the common struggle of Catholics and socialists, or that it marks the subordination of socialist to religious struggle (1997: 124–7 and 2017a: 84–5 versus elsewhere in this volume), I lean to the former. In 1913 Cines was indeed a studio close to the world of Catholic finance, yet it should be remembered that its production was so diversified that in 1914 Guazzoni himself directed Scuola d’eroi (UK: How Heroes are made; USA: For Napoleon and France), a film with Napoleon Bonaparte as a hero of the French Revolution (cf. Scodel and Bettenworth 2009: 91–3). We could possibly solve the problem by supposing that the axe and sickle not only relate to contemporary socialist organizations (given that they hang crosswise upon the wall) but are also symbols of manual work latiore sensu. It is also possible that the detail in the background of the dramatic scene might escape the control of Cines administrators.

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Illustrating Quo vadis in Italy ( 1900–1925 )   177 negative criticism,32 failed at the box office, and faced a legal action relating to the copyright of the novel.33 Its flop has often been attributed to the fact that the Italian cinematic style of the 1910s, which this later film supposedly reproduced, was then outdated in comparison with American cinema. Yet a precise comparative analysis by Giulia Carluccio of the style of the two film adaptations of the novel shows that the 1925 Quo vadis? adopts substantially the same cinematic techniques as its coeval American counterparts, including ‘un numero elevatissimo di piani ravvicinati’ (2006: 50). She argues that the film’s failure is more likely due to the choice made by D’Annunzio and Jacoby to deviate considerably from the previous intertextual imagery of Quo vadis— now a point of reference shared by a large audience—made up of the novel itself, its illustrated editions, the 1913 film, postcards, and all its other paratexts. In fact, the two directors aimed at giving ‘visual shape to sensationalism and excess’ (2006: 51); their reference model is rather more Cecil B. DeMille’s cinema of blood, sex, and religion than Guazzoni’s earlier Quo vadis? Their deviations from the novel are really remarkable, as highlighted by the smart advertising brochure34 published by UCI (Unione Cinematografica Italiana) which produced the film. The focus is no longer on the love story between Lygia and Vinicius but, above all, on the representation of a corrupt and amoral Roman world, represented by the wickedness and the insatiable erotic appetite of Nero and performed by a superlative Emil Jannings. The synopsis leaves no doubts: the action starts with Nero throwing a nubile slave into a pool to feed his morays. The film’s opening draws on ancient sources, but not Sienkiewicz’s version of them. A comparison between the advertising materials of the two film studios (Cines and UCI) shows how far the two films are from each other and how different their relationships are to the novel. On one side is a ‘drama of love and souls’ tied closely to a historically reliable novel that can be read or watched at different levels by heterogeneous audiences; on the other, a passionate and eventful plot, closer to the short stories published on cheap paper by popular presses like ‘Gloriosa’ and put on sale for very little money.35

32  Especially in comparison with Guazzoni’s Quo vadis? See, e.g., Uccellini 1925 and L’Ambrosiano, 28 February 1925, p. 5. 33  On the challenge over copyright and the requests of the censors for some cuts to scenes, see Martinelli 1981: 186–9. 34  L’Unione Cinematografica Italiana—Roma presenta il suo capolavoro: Quo vadis . . .? Visione cinematografica in sette parti, ‘La Presse’ Stab. Tipo-Lit., Milano 1925 (Nuova Edizione). 35  The censorship certificate (requested on 23 November 1924 and received the following day) orders cuts to the scenes of the orgy on the Palatine and the suicides both of Petronius and of Nero. See http://www.italiataglia.it/search/opera (last accessed: 29 June 2019).

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178  Raffaele De Berti and Elisabetta Gagetti

Same Choices, Different Meanings A wider comparison among the examined paratextual materials points out very clearly which scenes most attracted the interest of Italian publishers, illustrators, and directors; sometimes choices were quite different from those made by the first two Polish illustrators of Quo vadis, Piotr Stachiewicz (1858–1938)36 and Jan Styka (1858–1925).37 Of course, both Stachiewicz’s and Styka’s pictures were displayed in exhibitions and reproduced in magazines and on postcards in several issues,38 and, in the case of Styka, in more or less luxurious catalogues of the illustrations to Quo vadis on display in his villa ‘La Certosella’ on Capri. From the works of both Stachiewicz and Styka, a series of postcards in different issues were generated. As we might expect, the greatest interest among Italian artists was catalysed by the most dramatic sequences of the plot; yet, as they are narrated across multiple sections of the novel’s chapters, if not across multiple chapters, different elements of those sequences have been chosen from time to time. We have singled out the following five sequences for further consideration of their respective treatments in the paratexts: the banquet on the Palatine (chapter 7); Lygia’s abduction from Myriam’s house, when Ursus kills Croton the gladiator and hurts Vinicius himself (chapter 22); the fire of Rome ­(chapters 41–7); the Christians martyred (chapters 56, 58, and 62); and Lygia’s torture (chapter 66). After examining the selected paratexts according to their medium and context, they will be analysed diachronically, in order to consider whether an evolutionary momentum is discernible.39 In Treves’s edition (1901) each of these moments is illustrated by one image, but the two episodes developed across different chapters are given two or more illustrative images. When reading about the Fire of Rome, we first see Vinicius galloping between Antium and Rome, with an aqueduct operating as a typical landmark of the Roman landscape, and then Petronius speaking to the Romans, promising 36  About Stachiewicz’s work for Sienkiewicz, not only in relation to Quo vadis, see Klamka 2015 and Gagetti and De Berti  2017: 121–2. He published the illustrations to the novel in 1896, in the weekly Kraj (The Country), together with a summary of the novel (Ergo 1896), but the final result of his work—twenty-two small-format oil paintings on wood—could not be admired before 1902. They are currently on show at Oblęgorek and are all reproduced in Klamka 2015: figs. 8–29. Some colour reproductions are in Kowalska-Lasek 2016: 240–9; and in Miziołek 2016: 51–3, 62, 66, 81, 166–8. 37 On his works related to Sienkiewicz, see: Boyer d’Agen  1912; Morro  1922; Bilinski  1995; Żurawska 2005; Miziołek 2016: 60–3 and 136–42. Styka was entrusted by Flammarion with ‘150 etchings, of which 100 on copper and 50 on wood, and some painted plates’ for his luxury quarto edition of Quo vadis? in three volumes, seemingly unauthorized by Sienkiewicz and published in 1901–3, with translation by Ely Halpérine-Kaminski (Sienkiewicz no date [but: 1901–3]). 38  A selection is in Kowalska-Lasek 2016: 390–1, nos 1027–44. 39  A synoptic illustration is provided in Gagetti and De Berti 2017: fig. 5, p. 286.

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Illustrating Quo vadis in Italy ( 1900–1925 )   179 exceptional measures for the survivors of the fire. The tortures meted out to the Christians are considered to deserve three illustrations (preceded by one of gladiatorial combat). Two are set in the amphitheatre:40 the lions approaching the Christians, who are singing the hymn Christus regnat; and the crucifixion of the first martyrs (among the victims is Crispus). The third depicts the human torches in Nero’s gardens (more precisely, the moving moment when Chilo asks Glaucus for forgiveness). The other three episodes are illustrated, respectively, by Vinicius making an attempt on Lygia’s virtue, Ursus hurling himself upon Vinicius to rescue Lygia (followed by a plate where the slave is going to throw Croton’s corpse into the Tiber), and Ursus fighting the aurochs that bears Lygia on its back. Nerbini’s illustrative choices for the 1906–7 edition of the novel are very rich. Three plates are devoted to the banquet on the Palatine: Vinicius attempting Lygia’s virtue; the wrestling match offered as entertainment to Nero’s guests; and the final scene of general drunkenness when Vinicius faints after his last cup of wine. Lygia’s abduction is represented by the struggle between Ursus and Croton. The Fire of Rome is illustrated by four pictures: the usual one of Vinicius galloping against a country landscape complete with aqueduct; Vinicius and Chilo trying to get to Ostrianum while riding mules; Nero singing; and Vinicius among the Roman people (in that order). As to the events in the amphitheatre, we see as we read Sienkiewicz’s text the gladia­tor­ial combat, the lions after the massacre of the Christians, Nero ready to sing in the centre of the arena, and the crucifixions. The human torches— as surprising as it may be—are missing. Finally, Ursus kills the aurochs; he wears a loincloth, while Lygia is naked, even if we can only see her breasts. Our synoptic table (Table 10.1) shows three remarkable details in the postcards by Mastroianni printed in 1913. The table highlights which subjects Mastroianni considered essential in his thirty-postcard series (for instance, almost the whole sequence of the banquet on the Palatine is omitted). Secondly, it reveals that—in some cases—the same image is used to illustrate different subjects between the thirty-postcard and the shorter eighteen-postcard series, so that the same image appears in the former as no. 7. Petrone’s toilette and in the latter as no. 1. Vinicius at Petrone’s (Figure 10.3 b). This results from the fact that the reduction in the number of the postcards from thirty to eighteen requires selectivity, which favours multipurpose images that can work as 40  Cf. Henryk Sienkiewicz 1897: 418: ‘Before the Flavii had reared the Colosseum, amphitheatres in Rome were built mainly of wood; for that reason nearly all of them had burned during the fire. But Nero, for the celebration of the promised games, had given command to build several, and among them a gigantic one.’

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180  Raffaele De Berti and Elisabetta Gagetti Table 10.1  Subjects of the thirty-postcard series (in roman type) and ­ eighteen-postcard series (in italics) by D. Mastroianni (only the latter has captions in English as well) 1. Vinicio in casa di Petronio 2. Incontro di Vinicio e Licia alla fontana 3. Il segno del Cristianesimo = 2. First meeting of Vinicius and Lygia 4. Petronio in lettiga verso la casa di Aulo Plauzio 5. Il giuoco della palla fra Vinicio e Licia 6. Dichiarazione d’amore di Vinicio a Licia 7. La toletta di Petronio = 1. Vinicius at Petrone’s 8. Licia lascia la casa d’Aulo = 4. Lygia leaves Aulu’s [sic!] house 9. L’imperatrice Poppea auriga 10. Eunica bacia la statua di Petronio = 3. Eunice’s Kiss

11. Salute a te, diva Licia!

21. Nel giardino di Lino = 11. In Linu’s [sic!] garden 12. Vinicio e Licia al triclinio 22. La benedizione di Pietro = 9. Peter’s Blessing 13. Ursus sottrae Licia dalle 23. I cristiani nelle insidie di Vinicio catacombe = 5. The rape of Lygia 14. Licia portata in salvo da 24. L’incendio di Roma Ursus = 12. Rome on fire 15. La partenza di Licia in 25. Licia in prigione ostaggio = 13. Lygia in gaol 16. Petronio e la schiava 26. Nel Circo Eunica = 14. Ursus throws the aurochs 17. La conversione al 27. In Sicilia Cristianesimo = 18. In Sicily = 6. The Ostrianum 18. Crotone perito nella 28. Morte di Petronio lotta contro Ursus = 16. Petrone’s death = 7. Ursus smothers Croton 19. Vinicio e Crisotemi 29. Quo vadis, Domine? = 8. Vinicius and = 15. Quo vadis, Domine Chyisothemis 20. Incontro di due potenze 30. Morte di Nerone = 10. The meeting of two = 17. Neron’s [sic!] death Powers

‘résumés’. In this case, for example, as the novel’s plot begins with a meeting between uncle and nephew, both characters are needed, but the subject chosen (Petrone’s toilette) fits better than Vinicius at Petrone’s because in a single image it captures at the beginning the rich furniture of Petronius’s home, the large number of his slaves, and his clear Epicureanism. Finally, the table shows a different ordering of the eighteen-postcard series in comparison with the extended issue. The most remarkable change in the sequence is the last position given in the eighteen-postcard series to the subject In Sicily (figure 10.3 d), thus placing emphasis on a resolution to the romance. It seems, then, that Mastroianni—being unaware of the actual ending of Guazzoni’s film while he was working on his sculptogravures—prepared an extended thirty-postcard series that follows Sienkiewicz’s novel closely and ends correctly with Nero’s death and a limited eighteen-postcard issue that follows the official Cines brochure and its ending with the loving couple in Sicily.

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Illustrating Quo vadis in Italy ( 1900–1925 )   181 In Treves’s ‘edizione cinematografica’, published in the same year as Mastroianni’s postcards, the number of images (which are set stills) used to illustrate each episode in the novel reflects the selection and length of the episodes in Guazzoni’s film, thus significantly differentiating between the illustrations of this edition and that of 1901. The banquet on the Palatine (of roughly seven minutes’ duration in the film) is represented by a large choice of frames: Vinicius welcoming Lygia, the drunken guests with Vitellius in the foreground, Nero singing, Vinicius courting Lygia, Ursus rescuing Lygia (two photographs). The illustration of Lygia’s abduction does not differ substantially from that in the 1901 edition: Croton lies dead on the ground, while Ursus separates Lygia from Vinicius, hurting him.41 The Fire of Rome is, strictly speaking, illustrated twice: the first time by the set design for this sequence in the film, the second by Nero singing the words of Priam looking upon the fall of Troy. However, four photographs are devoted to the different stages of Petronius’s speech to the Roman people (the whole episode in the film lasts eight minutes, almost four of which are devoted to Petronius’s speech). Several spectacular film frames display what happens in the arena:42 a view of the imperial box, the praefectus urbi starting the games, the gladia­tor­ial combat (three frames), the lions (one frame capturing their victims and three where the beasts are the protagonists). Lygia’s torture is not illustrated: instead, three photographs show Petronius covering Vinicius’s eyes, Ursus standing alone in the arena, and Ursus holding an unconscious Lygia in his arms while Vinicius tears open his toga and shows his battle scars to the spectators.43 The various postcard series issued by the Cines studio after the release of Guazzoni’s film unsurprisingly reflect the same selection dynamics as that in the Treves ‘edizione cinematografica’. There are at least five different set stills from the banquet on the Palatine, and several set stills both of the gladiatorial games preceding the torture of the Christians and of the Christians martyred by the lions; but a single set still—so far as we know—was printed both for Lygia’s abduction and for the Fire of Rome. As for Lygia’s torment in the arena, there seem to be only two photographs utilized on the postcards: Il gigante Ursus aspetta il bufalo nel circo (‘The giant Ursus waits for the buffalo in the arena’) and Ursus e Vinicio implorano dall’Imperatore per Licia (‘Ursus and Vinicius plead with the Emperor for Lygia’). 41  The film episode is very short—less than one minute. The scene is set close to a public fountain and inside Myriam’s house. 42  In the film, from the view of the imperial box to Nero granting mercy to Lygia there is a span of around eleven and a half minutes. In Treves’s edition, illustrations of both the crucifixions in the arena and the human torches in Nero’s gardens are missing: the former scene is not in Guazzoni’s film either. 43  The corresponding film episode lasts less than two minutes. Yet Ursus’s fight with the bull is filmed but not illustrated in the edition.

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182  Raffaele De Berti and Elisabetta Gagetti The illustrations in the later edition of the novel published by ‘Gloriosa’ (1921) are remarkable from several points of view. The banquet is depicted as a veritable orgy, and for Lygia’s abduction the moment selected for illustration is Ursus wrestling with Croton (neither Lygia nor Vinicius are depicted here; it is a scene of pure violence). But the real visual climax is reached with the Fire of Rome, which receives four illustrations: the usual gallop of Vinicius (no aqueduct this time, but a milestone); the unusual image of Vinicius fainting on the ground; Nero singing; and an uncommon focus on the Roman people trying to escape the flames (with no main character in sight), the caption of which is ‘Roma arde! La città è in fiamme! Numi, salvate Roma!’ (‘Rome burns! The city is in flames! Gods, save Rome!’). Three different kinds of torture inflicted on the Christians have been chosen for visual depiction: the lions, the crucifixions in the arena, and Chilo on the cross performing a very realistic version of the ancient drama Aureolus, featuring a real bear. Lygia’s torture is displayed in its final moment when the aurochs is killed: not only is the nudity of Lygia shown in detail, but Ursus too is completely naked. Finally, the most divergent series of postcards, in different issues all printed by Traldi, is that which appears after the 1925 film, displaying stills from its sets, because although the film is based on the novel Quo vadis, it includes many shifts, cuts, and, most of all, interpolations in its plot line (as clearly shown in the synoptic table of comparisons produced by Scodel and Bettenworth 2009: 232–57). Lygia’s abduction from Myriam’s house has been suppressed in the film, so there is no corresponding postcard. Regarding the Fire of Rome, it seems that only the announcement of the news has been ­chosen. Instead, more postcards depict the torments of the Christians (the lions and the human torches), but to date we have found no postcard displaying the scene of Lygia with the bull and Ursus. However, ‘new’ postcards correspond to the 1925 film’s interpolations: Nero and Lygia in a private room in the Palace; the soothsayer interpreting Nero’s dream about his mother; Christ on the Via Crucis; and, of course, several photographs of the orgy on the Palatine, including dancers entertaining the guests, some of which are clearly set stills from scenes not in the final cut of the film. All these series (and the advertising material) put particular focus on portraits of the main characters. What then could explain the different choices made in these illustrative paratexts, published in all these different media for their respective audiences, across the period 1901–25? In the Treves edition of the novel of 1901, we note the great accuracy of Minardi’s illustrations down to their antiquarian details, such as the argentum potorium on the tables of Nero’s palace that clearly recall the shapes of the silver vessels in the famous Boscoreale Treasure discovered

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Illustrating Quo vadis in Italy ( 1900–1925 )   183 not far from Pompeii in 1895 and published in 1899 by René Héron de Villefosse. It is also interesting that Lygia is depicted wearing the peplum, a non-Roman dress that associates her with Greek statues of goddesses (visualizing Vinicius’s words, ‘A greeting to thee, o divine Callina!’),44 with the particular detail included of the small weight hung at the rear corners of the upper fold or apoptygma. It is in the image illustrating the preparation of the crosses in the arena (shaded by a correctly rendered velarium or awning) that the first naked women (and men) appear, even if they have discreet leaf garlands around their hips. The girls dancing like Maenads around the human torches are less modest (one holds a thyrsus, another wears a leopard-skin or pardalis), but such choices are due to the text of the novel itself.45 There is little room to doubt that readers of the Treves edition were able to recognize and appreciate this dense network of visual quotations from antiquity. In 1906–7, Rossi illustrates Nerbini’s edition of Quo vadis with rapidly sketched watercolours, as it seems, and shows no particular interest in his­ tor­ic­al accuracy. On the contrary, some mistakes appear in his plates, such as the shapes of vessels or pieces of furniture, or the pose of the gladiator asking Nero for mercy in the arena. Interestingly, however, in accordance with Nerbini’s socialist ideas, we do not find the aristocratic Petronius promising extraordinary measures to the grateful masses after the fire, but we do come across the officer Vinicius (at a different point in the plot) forcing his way through the angry crowd with the help of the praetorians, a crowd of men and women who have lost everything in the fire, and who are the real protagonists of the scene as illustrated. Since Mastroianni realized his sculptogravures before the release of Guazzoni’s film in 1913, the associated postcards do not reflect its influence, even if a close examination of them reveals several antiquarian citations. In Mastroianni’s complete series, the most daring episodes described in the novel—the banquet on the Palatine and all the tortures inflicted on the Christians—are completely missing, presumably because they were thought by the publishers to be unsuitably sensual or violent to be isolated from the text and circulated widely. As far as the subsequent ‘edizione cinematografica’ published by Treves and the postcards derived from Guazzoni’s film are concerned, the selection of photographic images is due not so much to the moral 44  Cf. Henryk Sienkiewicz 1897: 57. Given Minardi’s high degree of accuracy in antiquarian details, it seems doubtful that a peplum has been mistaken for a tunic. 45  Cf. Henryk Sienkiewicz 1897: 457: ‘In this terrible forest of crosses . . . the nakedness of strained female forms roused no feeling’; and 474–5: ‘matrons and maidens of Rome, drunk also and halfnaked. . . . who shook thyrses ornamented with ribbons . . . shouting “Evoe!”.’

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184  Raffaele De Berti and Elisabetta Gagetti concerns of publishers but to the cinematic material at their disposal. While the film sequence shot in the arena is quite long and articulated, the Fire of Rome, which inspired many drawings from illustrators of the novel, is rather short in its representation of the burning city and not suitable for capture in stills: the crowd on screen is moving rapidly and there is a great deal of dense smoke obscuring the view. However, the elegant poses of the actor playing Petronius and the well-choreographed masses of extras playing Roman citizens were perfect subjects for photographs that would appear as illustrations to the text or as individual postcards. The most audacious illustrated edition is, no doubt, the ‘Gloriosa’ of 1921. Fabio Fabbi, who also worked for Nerbini on other occasions, travelled widely throughout Europe (Paris, Munich, Warsaw) and Egypt, and was a respected painter of orientalist scenes, winning an award for them at the Munich ex­pos­ ition in 1889.46 He belonged, moreover, to that group of illustrators who ‘before comics and next to photography and early cinema, feed the proletarian audience with a great deal of over-excited and violent images’ (Listri 1993: 171). The case of the postcards comprising photographs of sets from the film adaptation of Quo vadis directed by D’Annunzio and Jacoby is similar to those cases that utilize photographs of the sets from the earlier film adaptation (the ‘edizione cinematografica’ of the novel published by Treves and the postcards released by the Cines studio in 1913). Here too the images selected for distribution are of episodes that appeared in the 1925 film. However, as with the illustrations deployed by ‘Gloriosa’ in 1921, the postcards place their em­phasis on eroticism and violence, and replicate the strategies of the 1925 film that deviated considerably from the narrative of the novel. In conclusion, and in answer to our question at the start of this section, as to whether there is any evolutionary momentum across the illustrative paratexts to the novel, we could say yes. The momentum is driven by the changing aesthetic tastes, education, morality, and political perspective of respondents to the book, whether illustrators, publishers, or film directors, and by broader changes of medium and society that would also have consequences for how these paratexts were consumed by the various audiences for which they catered.

One Scene, Several Strategies We now offer an exemplary case of differentiated visual strategies consistent with different audiences through analysis of the choices made in order to 46  Faeti and Pallottino 1988: 37.

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Illustrating Quo vadis in Italy ( 1900–1925 )   185 illustrate a minor episode of Sienkiewicz’s novel—Eunice kissing Petronius’s statue (described in the first chapter).47 The relevant passages from the novel are: When he [Vinicius] had said this, he turned toward the statues which ornamented all one wall of the perfumed chamber, and pointed to the statue representing Petronius as Hermes with a staff in his hand;48 then he added,— ‘By the light of Helios! if the ‘godlike’ Alexander resembled thee, I do not wonder at Helen.’ And in that exclamation there was as much sincerity as flattery; for Petronius, though older and less athletic, was more beautiful than even Vinicius. The women of Rome admired not only his pliant mind and his taste, which gained for him the title Arbiter elegantiae, but also his body.  (Henryk Sienkiewicz 1897: 11–12)

Secondly: In the unctorium only Eunice remained. She listened for a short time to the voices and laughter which retreated in the direction of the laconicum. At last she took the table inlaid with amber and ivory, on which Petronius had been sitting a short time before, and put it carefully at his statue. . . . Eunice stood on the table, and, finding herself at the level of the statue, cast her arms suddenly around its neck; then, throwing back her golden hair, and pressing her rosy body to the white marble, she pressed her lips with ecstasy to the cold lips of Petronius.49   (Henryk Sienkiewicz 1897: 12)

The scene takes place in the unctorium (or ‘anointing-room’) of Petronius’s private baths. Here Eunice, Petronius’s slave who is in love with her master, performs the soft-core version of an act of agalmatophilia: erotic markers are the full-body contact between Eunice and the statue, the girl’s loose hair, and her feeling of ‘ecstasy’ during the kiss.50 Cases of falling in love with a statue are not infrequent in ancient literature, especially from the Hellenistic period onwards, depending on, and developing, the theme of the living statue. The most ancient example is the myth of 47  Another interesting example, the beginning of Vinicius’s love for Lygia while he is convalescing at the house of Aulus Plautius (chapters 1–2), is discussed in Gagetti and De Berti 2017: 126–7 and fig. 7 on p. 288. 48  The generic ‘staff ’ corresponds to the more specific Polish ‘posoch’ (an archaism meaning ‘crozier’ or ‘caduceus’). 49  The Polish text reads ‘unctuarium’, a different reading of ‘unctorium’, and Eunice stands on a better fitting ‘stool’ (‘stołek’) instead of a ‘table’. 50  The term was first used in Scobie and Taylor 1975.

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186  Raffaele De Berti and Elisabetta Gagetti Pandora narrated by Hesiod in the Theogony (c.700 bc), while the richest literary elaboration is the story of Pygmalion and Galatea in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (10.243–97), where the ivory statue of a girl comes alive under the sculptor’s kiss (oraque tandem/ore suo non falsa premit, ‘with his lips he presses her lips, at last no longer false’, 10.291–2). This myth received great attention in the visual arts over time, but around 1890 Jean-Léon Gérôme painted at least five versions, implicitly ‘cinematic’ as a group since each depicted the couple from a different angle,51 as well as creating a polychrome sculpture that was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1892.52 Yet, even if it is highly probable that Pygmalion’s kiss influenced Eunice’s kiss, we are here confronting a different situation: the likeness of Petronius is an inanimate double of the living beloved, with no chance that it would come alive under Eunice’s lips. This kind of displaced object of love is closer to other ancient occurrences of ­statues as substitutes for absent loved ones:53 to Eunice, however, Petronius is distant not locally but socially.54 The sculptural depiction of Petronius ‘as Hermes’ in the novel is also not without importance. On the one hand, Hermes is linked to the sphere of the gymnasia (and, in fact, the statue is located by Sienkiewicz in the area of the house devoted to fitness), but, on the other hand, he is also the protector of orators, and Petronius’s witty eloquence plays a role throughout the novel. How should we imagine such a statue, combining a portrait head of Petronius with the body of Hermes? In the early nineteenth century, the curator of the Musée Napoléon, Ennio Quirino Visconti, made some observations about the so-called Germanicus, a statue ‘celebrated among antiquarians and artists’,55 that provide the basis for its entry in the Louvre catalogue today: Up to now this beautiful figure has passed for being that of Germanicus . . .; the style of the hair certainly indicates that it represents a Roman personage . . . .  A closer examination of this figure brought recognition of its analogy with that of Mercury; and, observing the symbolic gesture of the right arm, the 51  Ackerman 2000: 330, 338, 390, no. 385, figs on pp. 159 and 331 (oil on canvas in New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, dated to 1892); on the basis of photographs, four other versions of the subject can be recognized: Ackerman 2000: nos 386, 387 (probably lost), 388, 388b (in private collections). The first film version of the myth is Pygmalion et Galatée (dir. Georges Méliès, 1898). 52  The plaster cast for the statue was probably the model for the paintings (Ackerman 2000). 53 See Euripides, Alcestis 348–52 (cf. Robert  1992, 381–2; Bettini  1992: 25–38); the story of Protesilaus and Laodamia (Hyginus, Fabulae 104; cf. Bettini 1992: 12–16); and the novel Callirhoe by Chariton of Aphrodisias (4.1.10–11: cf. Olmos  1992: 257). On the theme of falling in love with a statue, see also Gourevitch 1982, Olmos 1992, and Però 2012: 95–111. 54  Another slave in love with her master shown kissing a statue of him is Callyce in L’Esclave de Phidias (Léonce Perret, 1917). For the plot, see Wyke 2017b: 79–81. 55  Monumenti scelti Borghesiani 1837, 143–4, pl. XIX.

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Illustrating Quo vadis in Italy ( 1900–1925 )   187 chlamys thrown over the left arm kept in place in the past by the caduceus which had been in that hand, . . . one could conjecture,. . . that, in the forms and with the attributes of the God of Eloquence, the ingenious artist has presented the features of a Roman orator, famous for his successes at the rostra. (Notice An XI [1803], 65–6)

It is very likely that Sienkiewicz had this portrait statue in mind when describing Petronius as Hermes,56 including in his description the caduceus that was missing in the surviving sculpture.57 But how was his verbal description translated into visual images? In our Italian sample, in chronological order, we start with a lacuna, as Minardi (Treves, 1901) does not illustrate the scene. The omission is astonishing, as the episode is among the favourites of almost all the illustrators. The first image is that by Rossi (Nerbini, 1906–7) (Figure  10.4 a). His Eunice, seen from behind standing on a klismos chair, wears a sleeveless tunic and a darker overgarment. Her hair is loose and, with both arms extended, she holds her hands around the neck of the statue. Hermes/Petronius is shown in a frontal view: he wears a winged petasos and a chlamys clasped on his right shoulder; a caduceus is in his left hand. All is very chaste, as there is no bodily contact between woman and sculpture. It is interesting to compare the illustrations made by the two Polish painters for earlier editions of the novel. For Stachiewicz (c.1895) (Figure 10.4 b), the main elements are the same (interior setting, klismos chair, tightly folded tunic), but Eunice’s lips are undoubtedly on the lips of the statue, which is of a different, more slender, and juvenile type, and fully visible as the slave is positioned on its left side. Styka (1900), however, did not miss the erotic potential of the scene, which he sets in a peristyle (Figure 10.4 c). Eunice, on a stool and seen from behind, is completely nude; her breast is in full contact with that of the statue, which she hugs tightly. Hermes/Petronius displays a massive body structure, and a certain resemblance to the Louvre statue (same contrapposto, but with the position of the arms inverted). For now, let us put the Treves ‘edizione cinematografica’ (1913) aside. Mastroianni sets the scene in a monumental interior, open onto the city of Rome (Figure 10.5 a). The couple are on the left of the composition, in profile. 56  The portrait head joined to the body, belonging to the Hermes Ludovisi type, has been variously attributed, mostly to Germanicus, Augustus, and Marcellus. See Balty 1977; de Kersauson 1986: 46–7, no. 18; Maderna 1988: 223. As for its collecting history, an overview is in Haskell and Penny 1981: 219–20, no. 42, fig. 114. 57  Images at https://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/statue-de-marcellus (accessed 31 December 2018).

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188  Raffaele De Berti and Elisabetta Gagetti

Fig. 10.4  Eunice’s kiss: (a) by Giuseppe Rossi; (b) by Piotr Stachiewicz; (c) by Jan Styka. Source: all from authors’ collection.

Fig. 10.5  Eunice’s kiss: (a) by Domenico Mastroianni; (b) by Fabio Fabbi. Source: both from authors’ collection.

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Illustrating Quo vadis in Italy ( 1900–1925 )   189 Eunice’s right foot rests on the plinth of the statue, while her left foot touches a stool with the tips of her toes. Her tunic is open on the left shoulder, leaving her breast—that clings to the chest of the sculpture—partially uncovered. Her hair flows along her back, while her arms embrace the neck of the statue. She is about to kiss its marble lips, as her head, gently tilted to the side, is still at some small distance from them. The Hermes type is similar to that in Styka’s illustration of the scene (Figure 10.4 c). As we might expect, the ‘Gloriosa’ edition is the most bold. Fabbi, setting the scene in a peristyle, parallels the mutual positions of Eunice and the statue seen in the postcard by Mastroianni, though in reverse (Figure  10.5 b). Eunice, however, is completely nude except for a form of narrow ribbon around her chest that highlights more than it covers her right breast. Her long hair ends in an almost abstract motif, like an odalisque’s veil, and reaches the base of the statue. The sculpture is the closest to the Louvre Hermes as to the position of the head and the left arm holding the caduceus in its hand; but the contrapposto is inverted, probably because we see the couple from such an angle that the statue’s relaxed left leg fits the whole composition better. Eunice’s pudenda are now in contact with those of the statue, and the embrace has thus become highly sexualized. Notwithstanding any concession to the tastes of an audience eager for strong emotions and sexual arousal, Fabbi here reveals himself as the cultivated and international painter he really was.58 Finally, the two films of 1913 and 1925 and the ‘edizione cinematografica’ by Treves. Of the two silent screen adaptations of the novel, Guazzoni’s film is undoubtedly more attentive to the reconstruction of Roman architecture, furnishings, and costumes. Yet the scene described in the novel takes an unexpected turn in the film sequence and its reproduction in the illustrated edition. The action is set in an interior that looks like a tablinum. Eunice, fully covered by a tunic, standing on her tiptoes on a stool, ‘cast her arms suddenly around [the] neck’ of the sculpture, but here a subtle (over)interpretation has been given of the verbal account. In order—we suppose—to avoid showing in live action a woman embracing a nude male statue, ‘the statue representing Petronius as Hermes’ becomes a herm of Petronius, in complete disregard of the requirement that a sculpture, ‘with a staff in his hand’, had to be a full-length statue. And this is the frame that illustrates the scene of displaced love in the ‘edizione cinematografica’ published by Treves (Figure  10.6 a). The 1925 Quo vadis repeats the whole situation in close-up: Eunice, dressed but wearing a much less modest 58 Sensuous mythological scenes also appear in Fabbi’s work: see, e.g., Ninfe, Diana al bagno, Fanciulla con satiro (Fiori 2000: 113–15).

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190  Raffaele De Berti and Elisabetta Gagetti

Fig. 10.6  Eunice’s kiss: (a) from Quo vadis? (Guazzoni, 1913); (b) from Quo vadis? (D’Annunzio and Jacoby, 1924). Source: both © Fondazione Cineteca Italiana, Milan.

costume, embraces and kisses a more than life-size herm of Petronius that, in this case, is a good likeness of the film actor who plays the role (Figure 10.6 b).

Conclusion The main findings that have emerged from our inquiry suggest that in each Italian paratext illustrating Quo vadis we can hear the voice of the reader who has responded to the original Polish novel and, more faintly, the voice of the viewer who is witness to that response.59 We have also seen that between 1901 and 1925 the paratexts of Quo vadis change according to their medium and to the demands of different audiences—different as to social class, education, and taste. A pivotal role was played by Guazzoni’s film of 1913. It resumed and replayed a pre-existing imagery of Roman antiquity in general, and of Quo vadis in particular (descended mainly from illustrated editions of the novel and historical painting), in a moment when cinema had become an entertainment shared by a socially diverse audience. The most cultivated people could appreciate the accurate reconstructions, due to the work on the set designs by 59  The icastic idiom ‘voce dello spettatore’ is used in Quaresima 2004: 30 (relating to novelizations).

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Illustrating Quo vadis in Italy ( 1900–1925 )   191 the painter Camillo Innocenti (1871–1961).60 The lower classes could enjoy love affairs and spectacular scenes, like the long sequence with the lions in the arena. The pious could be edified by the final triumph of the Christians, after so many tortures inflicted on them by the pagans.61 This outcome could be interpreted on a political level by those so disposed as a victory of the workers over the establishment. The 1925 film, however, made no claims to education, high art, spiritual uplift, or social purpose. Modelling itself on the American cinema of that time, and translating into Italian visual culture DeMille’s formula of ‘sex + blood + religion’, it aimed to achieve the same sort of commercial success. Except for those paratexts directly engaged with marketing the film (such as posters, brochures, or postcards), the Quo vadis of D’Annunzio and Jacoby seems to have had no influence at all on con­tem­por­ ary or subsequent visual reworkings of Sienkiewicz’s novel, largely because its story departs so far from the original.

60  Camillo Innocenti was a painter and member of the ‘Secessione romana’, who, from the 1910s, worked mainly as a set designer for cinema (Carrera 2017: 112). 61  It is noteworthy that the stage adaptation of Quo vadis was considered a play suitable for students from Catholic seminars: in 1901 it was seen by Angelo Roncalli, later Pope John XXIII (Hebblethwaite 2000: 16).

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11 Horror amid Sweetness Kitsch and the Intertextual Strategies of Quo vadis Postcards Ewa Górecka

Quo vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz is one of those books that quickly become bestsellers (Kosko  1960: 29–37). Uncommonly widely read, re-edited mul­ tiple times, and frequently translated, the novel’s popularity is absolutely indisputable. As is the aptness of its author’s artistic choices, despite the various objections they have raised ever since. Originally written to be published in newspaper instalments, the ‘novel in images’ (Bujnicki 1991: 152–60) skilfully combined several thematic concerns that were abundantly addressed not only in literature but also in painting at the end of the nineteenth century. Notable among them was the decline of the Roman Empire, a subject that preoccupied historians, featured in works by numerous writers, and inspired a host of painters and draughtsmen who practised the artistic conventions of academicism, rooted in eighteenth-century art traditions (Poprzęcka  1998: 217–19). Later, the theme engrossed artists working with other media as well. In his aspiration to fashion an image of the clash between Roman decadence and nascent Christianity, Sienkiewicz also resorted to the poetics of academicism as he inscribed his vision of history into a cyclical framework, presenting the events from the viewpoint of his contemporaneous value and knowledge systems (Poprzęcka 1978: 165), and depicted his novel’s world in a vivid and multisensory manner. Constructed in this way, the historical novel encouraged intersemiotic translation, which ushered it into different sign systems (fine arts, theatre, film, vaudeville, pantomime) and thus into other cultural circuits. Popular culture, frequently deriving inspiration from high culture, revelled in themes such as love and religious experience woven into the knotted texture of ­history, themes that were appreciated by a public often endowed with little cultural competence to understand their context. Such motifs were plentiful Ewa Górecka, Horror amid Sweetness: Kitsch and the Intertextual Strategies of Quo vadis Postcards In: The Novel of Neronian Rome and its Multimedial Transformations: Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis. Edited by: Monika Woz´niak and Maria Wyke, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198867531.003.0011

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194  Ewa Górecka in Quo vadis (by critical consensus a ‘melodrama of triumph’)1 and thus came to permeate various intersemiotic transcriptions of the novel, including postcard illustrations. This new, and initially not entirely welcome, manner of sending and keeping correspondence2 soon gained considerable popularity, which precipitated a series of metamorphoses in its form, shape, and graphic design.3 As early as the 1890s, postcards were decorated with artistic images (Banaś 2005: 17; Baranowska 2003: 17–19)4 that often featured reproductions of paintings and drawings referring to popular literary texts (Banaś 2005: 289; Tańczuk 2004: 171–4). As both occasional and artistic postcards had to cater to a variety of tastes, they did not shun kitschy illustrations. Below, I examine kitsch in the intersemiotic transcription5 of scenes of horror from Quo vadis to postcards produced across various European cultural contexts. I also investigate their transtextuality, their univocal allusiveness (or allégation)6 and the ways they transmute seriousness into parody.7 Importantly, kitsch is both a subsystem within the system of arts (Broch  1969: 63–4) and a social phenomenon, which is how it will be addressed in this chapter. In postcard transcriptions of the novel, images of the martyrdom of the early Christians appear as horror kitsch (which falls within the ‘sour’ kitsch category that is contrasted with ‘sweet’ kitsch by Moles 1978: 74). In the novel, the episodes where the worshippers of Christ are tortured and put to death in Nero’s circus or in the streets of Rome are pictured in very vivid colours and charged with strong feelings. Since flamboyance and emotionality are among the primary attributes of kitsch (Broch  1969: 65; Kulka 2013: 32–3, 35–7), such depictions promote kitsch as the main axis of visual interpretations of the book. ‘Sour’ kitsch is notably less frequent in 1  The distinction between the ‘melodrama of triumph’ and the ‘melodrama of defeat’ was introduced by James Smith 1973. See Jankowiak 1991: 138. 2  One of the reasons for that reluctance involved worries about the public availability of the novel, Banaś 2005: 9–10. 3  Interestingly, Sienkiewicz coined the Polish term for the postcard (pocztówka), which won the nationwide contest announced at a postcard exhibition held in 1899 by the Towarzystwo Dobroczynności (Society for Charity). 4 The first postcards of this kind appeared in St. Gallen in 1892 (illustrated by Emil Hansen [Nolde]). They came to Poland around 1900. 5  In using the term, I follow Michał Głowiński’s definition of transcription as ‘the transfer from one sign system to the sign systems of other arts’. See Głowiński 1998: 142. 6  Allégation is a category in the typology of intertextual devices proposed by Gisèlle MatthieuCastelani, which I use in my argument as adapted by Michał Głowiński. In Głowiński’s definition allégation denotes ‘all textual references which do not engage with the element of dialogism, ones in which a quotation or an allusion does not become a factor in polyvocality but, on the contrary, reasserts and consolidates univocity’ (2000: 23). 7  I am very grateful to the private collector of such postcards who gave me permission to utilize some of them as illustrations for this chapter. For information on the collection of the Museum Tomatorum, see https://myvimu.com/exhibit/15693817.

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Horror amid Sweetness  195 Western culture than ‘sweet’, which is a more readily appreciable kitsch as it evokes pleasurable emotions. There are episodes in the plot of Sienkiewicz’s novel that themselves verge on kitsch. The realistically presented love theme and the religious rapture have been and are still intelligible to readers, while the emotions they trigger are easily appreciated. According to Tomáš Kulka, such a communicative relationship is characteristic of kitsch (Kulka 2013: 31, 35), which is also fostered by rigorous fidelity to representational conventions (Kulka 2013: 38). On closer scrutiny, the plot of Quo vadis turns out to be a testament to Sienkiewicz’s outstanding skill at mingling moments of horror with episodes of ‘sweetness’ and, in this way, manipulating and balancing readers’ emotions. Intriguingly, the postcard images of the persecutions that the Christians suffer are dominated by religious kitsch interwoven with its apparent opposite, that is erotic kitsch. Reverberations of erotic kitsch (which is mostly a category of sweet kitsch) appear across a range of cultural settings. Such blends are to be found both in transcriptions that tie themselves closely to the novel (allégation) and in those that open up connections with other texts (transtextuality).8 To begin with, let us focus on the postcards that are pervaded by horror kitsch and have little recourse to eroticism. They involve, first and foremost, visual interpretations of the novel’s outdoor martyrdom scenes. Such a focus does not depart from the novel itself but clearly indicates that the intimate, indoor episodes (such as the meeting of Vinicius and Lygia at the prison, her illness, and the group prayers of the jailed Christians) held less dramatic appeal. Although they might be easily comprehensible to viewers familiar with the novel, such scenes would likely have been rather cryptic to those who were not. Collective martyrdom tableaux dominated the imagery of lesser known and lesser talented artists, such as D. Mastroianni, F. Giambaldi, T. Aguiari, J. Aubert, G. G. Bruno, F. Rumpler, R. Ranft, O. Peter, F. Rösler, M.  Lambert, J.  Styka, G.  Mantegazza, T.  Korpal, A.  Setkowicz, and P.  de Laubadère. Many of their works exhibit similar artistic strategies. The artists’ interpretations of the novel exemplify allégation; that is, they endorse Sienkiewicz’s aesthetic vision. Their references to Quo vadis are devoid of dialogism and, instead, embody what has been labelled approbatory stylization (Balbus  1996).9 Whatever their artistic skills, the illustrators adhere to 8  Gérard Genette defines transtextuality as ‘all that sets the text in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts’ (1997: 1). 9  In his discussion of stylization as an interpretation of tradition, Balbus  1996: 381–432 distinguishes between three varieties of stylization: approbatory, polemical (parodistic), and quasi-polemical (oxymoronic).

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196  Ewa Górecka the pathos of the original text and seek to enhance it visually, which inevitably entails overstating the emotions evoked by the novel and, as a result, em­bra­ cing kitsch. Such an approach can be regarded both as a symptom of in­ter­ pret­ive naïvety and as a distinctive trait of the culture in which the novel and its intersemiotic translations operated. Interestingly, the aim of stirring very strong feelings in viewers of the postcards is accomplished by strategies similar to those utilized in rhetoric. One of these strategies is the device of addition or per adiectionem. It consists not so much in introducing new elements to the visualization of the novel’s scenes as in multiplying or hyperbolizing those already there. This is what happens in the postcard illustrations designed by the Polish painter Jan Styka, which repeatedly revisit the episode at Nero’s circus. Appreciated for his panoramic paintings,10 Styka tended to amplify the circus in his visualizations. The rendering of Nero’s amphitheatre in Sienkiewicz’s novel is known to have deviated considerably from historical fact. The writer, though perfectly acquainted with ancient Rome and its history, exaggerated the dimension of the arena (Kosman 2000: 136) to magnify the suffering of the Christians and the cruelty of the emperor and the Roman spectators. The postcards bearing Styka’s designs, in fact, display details of his 1899 panorama painting entitled The Martyrdom of Christians in Nero’s Circus. The edifice appears in them as an immense structure that dwarfs the victims and strips them of any individuality (Figure 11.1). Whichever moment is represented in the illustrations, the overdrawn stands of the amphitheatre symbolize the power of Rome and also, paradoxically, the power of the new faith whose believers are capable of opposing evil with fierce moral conviction. Given this, Styka’s interpretation is not surprising, as his departures from the novel are associated with the patriotic vein in which the book was read by Poles (a nation whom the partitions had robbed of sovereign statehood).11 For Polish readers and viewers, the early Christians operate as a metaphor for their oppressed nation (Żabski 2002: xxiv–xxxiii). The somewhat kitschy buoyancy of Styka’s pictorial representations is thus linked to the historical vicissitudes experienced by his native Poland. Contrast is another stylistic strategy that serves to evoke strong emotions. The postcards printed with Styka’s plates and a postcard designed by Richard Ranft indicate that spatial relationships—especially the division between the 10 In collaboration with Wojciech Kossak, Styka painted The Racławice Panorama (1894), The Transylvania Panorama (1896), The Crucifixion (1896), and The Martyrdom of Christians in Nero’s Circus (1899). 11  See Axer in this volume.

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Horror amid Sweetness  197

Fig. 11.1  Detail on a postcard from a panorama painting, The Martyrdom of Christians in Nero’s Circus (1899), by the Polish artist Jan Styka (1858–1925). https://myvimu.com/exhibit/15693817.

foreground and the background—are axiologically invested, following the traditions of European art history. In Styka’s illustrations, the victims are clearly situated in the foreground, while the perpetrators are relegated to the background; such an arrangement is used in his images both of the Christians being crucified and of them being thrown to wild beasts. The same episode is envisioned differently in a postcard printed with a design by Ranft, a Swiss painter and illustrator and a student of Courbet and Dumont, who gives preeminence to Nero (Figure  11.2). While Nero’s appearance and his horsedrawn carriage are rendered in considerable detail, the burning Christians are only sketched in vaguely in the background. The difference between detail and its lack expresses another reading of this episode by an artist from a different cultural background, for whom the character of the morally depraved emperor is part of a broader picture of the epoch where tyrants are of greater interest than their victims. Kitsch is channelled here by contrastive renderings of the foreground and background elements, which result in an incoherence characteristic of this aesthetic category. As a consequence, an impression is produced that the two planes are juxtaposed somewhat artificially, and attentive readers of Quo vadis may even consider them to jar with the meaning the episode has in the novel, where the victims of persecution are the key figures.

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198  Ewa Górecka

Fig. 11.2  Postcard displaying a design of Nero parading before the burning Christians by the Swiss illustrator Richard Ranft (1862–1931). https://myvimu. com/exhibit/15693817.

The interpretive strategies of addition and contrast, which are recognizable only to the readers of Sienkiewicz’s book, are also characteristic devices of parody comprehended as a variety of comic paraphrase.12 Corresponding to rhetorical figures, the consciously applied parody of addition (per adiectionem) and of transposition (per transmutationem) serve to concentrate the features of the model and/or to mock it. However, the postcard transcriptions mentioned above were not driven by such intentions. While their designers wanted to preserve the gravity of their source text, they relied on another sign system and inadvertently recast the novel in ways necessitated by the cultural context in which the postcards were supposed to function. Their proximity to kitsch resulted thus from rules of communication and the competence level of the target audience. The users of the postcards who had only heard of but not read Quo vadis would not have noticed kitsch and would have approached the postcards themselves as practical objects that could trigger aesthetic ex­peri­ences but not critical reflection.

12  Examining parody in relation to the literary model, Jerzy Ziomek 1980: 368 discusses parody within Hjelmslev’s framework of the content substance and the expression substance. The parodied text belongs to the former, while the parody itself to the latter.

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Horror amid Sweetness  199

Fig. 11.3  Nero gazes upon the crucified Crispus; postcard design by the Italian illustrator Garibaldi Giuseppe Bruno (1864–1922). https://myvimu.com/ exhibit/15693817.

Subtracting is a stylistic strategy employed by postcard designers in op­pos­ition to addition and contrast. When applied to Sienkiewicz’s novel and its Christian martyrdom scenes, this strategy takes an interesting form. Specifically, many artists employed the device of shrinking the space of Christian torment and depicting their characters naked or scantily dressed. When the crucifixion of the Christians is described in Quo vadis and, in particular, the martyrdom of Crispus (who is a secondary character in the novel), the text mentions the number of the crosses and the proximity of their outer row to Nero’s amphitheatre box (Sienkiewicz 2002: 490–1). Yet artists such as Garibaldi Giuseppe Bruno and Tadeusz Korpal reduce the distance between them even further. Although produced in two different cultural contexts (respectively Italian and Polish), both these representations diminish the gap between the emperor and his victims. The two artists probably ‘subtracted’ the amphitheatre’s space in an effort to make the most of the layout available in their pictorial designs, with the arena corresponding to the entire postcard surface in the case of Bruno (Figure  11.3).13 This manoeuvre, 13  The plates are designed so as to leave some room for writing within the illustrations themselves. Most frequently, such a possibility is provided by the labels bearing the title of the novel.

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200  Ewa Górecka however, did not prove particularly successful in artistic terms, because the extreme condensation of the arena’s space might shock viewers familiar with Sienkiewicz’s novel. The radical contraction of the distance between victims and perpetrator seems quite absurd in view of both the literary model and historical real­ities. This strategy of subtraction undermines the gravity of the execution scene and invites examination of how far the comic might encroach on such visual interpretations. Although he was an amateur artist who took to the art of illustration as a hobby, Bruno was a reasonably skilled draughtsman and the author of a graphic history of Rome (Paglia 2018). His postcard representation, therefore, may be less a random slip and more an outcome of his deliberate reading of the Quo vadis episode, especially given that Bruno’s illustrations to Pinocchio in Africa by Eugenio Cherubini (1903) feature clothes and maps purposefully designed to stimulate patriotism in the book’s young Italian readership (Truglio 2018: 84). The spatial reduction can also serve to intensify the horror of the scene and vividly to set two value systems against each other. Those effects can only be grasped if, familiar with Sienkiewicz’s work, the user of Bruno’s postcard does not stop simply at noticing the surprising ‘subtraction’ of space. Choosing to illustrate the novel in this manner, the artist seems to have taken a gamble, because it could invite highly divergent responses (ran­ging from sadness to laughter), while his strategy of subtraction might create a ­parodistic effect for attentive readers capable of discerning unintentional a­ rtistic outcomes. Thus, approval of the original (allégation) can prompt the artist who performs an intersemiotic translation to establish transtextual ­relations14 that involve condensation and, in doing so, inadvertently to approach parody. Similar stylistic strategies are used in postcard renderings of the Christian martyrdom scenes where ‘sour’ and ‘sweet’ kitsch coalesce. Broch (1969: 65) observes that such blends have had a long history in culture. In his view, the mixing of blood and saccharine embodies a ‘schizoid rift’ that is explicitly personified in Nero, who craved sweet kitsch but lived in a blood-drenched reality. A similar duality pervades Sienkiewicz’s novel, in which episodes of bodily outrage and cruelty alternate with almost impressionistic images of sensual and spiritual beauty.15 The artists whose illustrations are used in postcards neither criticize such a construction of the novel’s Roman world nor 14  In Genette’s classification (1997: 5), transtextuality consists of hypertextual relationships, defined as ‘any relationship uniting a text B (hypertext) to an earlier text A (hypotext), upon which it is grafted in a manner that is not a commentary’. 15  Importantly, the author emphasized a symmetry between Nero’s inordinate ruthlessness and the Christians’ extraordinary yearning for martyrdom, Sienkiewicz 2002: 429.

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Horror amid Sweetness  201 fully adhere to it. Many postcards present these scenes in ways that stray from their literary source. The difference usually involves portraying beautiful nude bodies that in Quo vadis, in compliance with the historical record, are actually described as dressed in animal skins. While, for Sienkiewicz, the prospective victims of the spectacle at Nero’s circus are covered in or ‘sewn into’ the hides of wild animals (Sienkiewicz 2002: 456), many artists abandon this important historical detail even though it appears in, for example, Tacitus Annals 15.44 (Tacyt  1957: 460–1). The painter, engraver, and Larousse illustrator Paul de Laubadère (The Arena, 1896)16 and Styka (The Bloody Arena, 1902) only partially abided by Sienkiewicz’s original vision as, in their renderings, the Christians’ grotesque apparel is merely hinted at and only, moreover, in the background. In other illustrations, Peter and Rösler ignored the writer’s account altogether and painted the victims unclothed. Part of a broader strategy of ‘subtraction’, the device of nudity is rather controversial in relation to the novel. By including the animal ‘garments’ in his descriptions, Sienkiewicz aimed not only to convey the historical context of the events reliably but also to underline the difference between the emperor’s brutality and the dignified and inspired posture of the Christians that transcended their undignified costuming (Sienkiewicz 2002: 468–9). However, most artists of German descent tended to give precedence to aesthetic appeal (with Rösler’s single exception in just one postcard, where he depicts the garments mentioned by the Polish writer).17 Their illustrations highlight the beauty of the body, which was admittedly valued in antiquity, yet is foregrounded in Sienkiewicz’s novel only in order to emphasize the cult of artificiality intrinsic to the decadence of Romans. On the postcards, female bodies are arranged so as to accentuate their enticing shapes, while male bodies (especially the genitals) are draped in fabrics. Such a manner of picturing corporeal beauty (as in Peter’s design, Figure 11.4) is geared to enchanting viewers by curtailing horror. The artists present Nero’s victims in almost sensual poses and tend to simplify the detail of their faces and facial expressions. Always vividly expressed in human faces, suffering evokes strong emotions in audiences of visual arts. As Umberto Eco observes, martyrs’ faces, disfigured by pain and fear, have been pictured with decreasing vividness since the Renaissance as the aesthetic aspect of the body became the focus of religious representations in anthropocentric culture. 16  The painting was exhibited at the Salon of 1896. See Lafenestre 1896: 918. 17  The artist hailed from a Rome-based German family. Reputed for his renderings of Rome, he was a painter and a postcard maker who signed his postcards in German, while using the Italianate version of his name, Ettore Franz Roesler, on other occasions. See http://www.tibursuperbum.it/ita/ storia/personaggi/EttoreRFranz.htm (accessed 6 April 2018).

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202  Ewa Górecka

Fig. 11.4  The rendition of female martyrs as nudes; postcard design by Otto Peter (b.1864). https://myvimu.com/ exhibit/15693817.

People sacrificing themselves for their faith were envisaged in less drastic ways, falling short of the expressive representations of Christ’s passion (Eco 2012: 56–61). This tendency to shift attention away from the faces to the suffering bodies of martyrs is observable both in Quo vadis and in the postcard illustrations and, in the latter case, dovetails with the artists’ inclination to simplify the facial expressions of Nero’s victims. Sienkiewicz explains that the faces of the Christians do not show their suffering because their faith bolsters their strength and endurance. The illustrators render the martyrs’ faces blank, even though, as experienced painters, they were in all probability familiar with Theodor Piderit’s Mimik und Physiognomik (Facial Expressions and Physiognomy, 1867), a study explaining how emotions and the operation of the facial muscles were related and ­containing a lexicon of facial expressions.18 As a result, while Sienkiewicz

18  The artists were educated at university. Piderit’s study could be a source of theoretical knowledge for painters, as it contained advice concerning facial expressions intended specifically for artists. Cf. Skorupa 2013: 137–44.

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Horror amid Sweetness  203 outlines rather than portrays the martyrs,19 the painters and graphic artists overlook their emotional expression altogether and dwell instead on the sensuality of their bodies. The dead or suffering corpus in the postcard bears witness to Western principles of communication at the end of the nineteenth century, when art was becoming a mass phenomenon. The ‘sweetly’ kitschy illustrations of the novel’s Christian martyrs prove indispensable as a counterbalance to the horror of their torture. The utter simplification and the naïve expressiveness of these representations (as, respectively, in the designs of Peter and Styka) are coupled with the gory ostentatiousness of bodily outrage. Styka, for example, shows blood, mangled bodies, and even a lion with a human arm and hand in its mouth. Nevertheless, these postcard illustrations remain testimony to the novel’s popularity. The postcard renderings of the scenes at Nero’s circus may also have been attractive to people who had not read the book, since the amalgamation of diverse types of kitsch, paired with the removal of details from the novel, helps to evoke strong emotions. One such emotion is, importantly, empathy for the victims, which is founded on a sense of spiritual community rather than on any shared experience of physical suffering. If approached in this way, the postcard interpretations of the novel may be construed as vehicles of religious kitsch, which emerges from a simplified theological reading rather than from the distortions of a different aesthetic system (Pawek 1978: 150–2). In these illustrations, the martyrdom of the Christians is conveyed in stylistically divergent but religiously quite uniform ways, because their target audience tended to embrace folk religiosity, in which social and sensual investment overrode dogmatic knowledge (Czarnowski  1956: 88–107). This variant of kitsch is most conspicuous on a postcard bearing an image designed by Styka. The Polish painter was preoccupied with suffering and expressed it in an extremely sensual way, which should come as no surprise given that popular religiosity in its Polish iteration distinctively combined the devotional with the national. Quo vadis itself tended to be read metaphorically, with the persecuted Christians standing for the Poles, who had been stripped of independent statehood.20 In nineteenth-century Polish culture, Ursus’s fight with

19  A literary portrait consists of ethopoeia (description of morality) and prosopography (description of appearance), Todorov 2008: 200–1. 20  As observed by Banaś 2005: 305, postcards with religious motifs were not very popular in Polish culture. They were underrepresented in publishers’ offers for at least three reasons: the tradition of gifting ‘holy pictures’ by direct contact rather than through the post, a wariness about such images among the quite numerous Protestant population inhabiting Polish territories back then, and the frequent inclusion of religious motifs in patriotic postcards.

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204  Ewa Górecka the German aurochs and the Christians’ victimization in the arena bred a wealth of symbolic meanings.21 Another stylistic strategy used in intersemiotic translations of the arena execution scenes is the combination of ‘subtracting’ horror and ‘substituting’ sweetness, corresponding to the category of parody per immutationem (Ziomek  1980: 372–4). In many of the pictorial representations above, im­port­ant elements of the novel’s imagery were already eliminated, and what resulted was an interweaving of the ‘sweet’ and ‘sour’ species of kitsch. Yet there are also postcards in which ‘sweet’ kitsch prevails entirely. Sparse as they are, such postcards were produced in Romance cultural settings and, strikingly, they do not include straightforward information about their relationship to Sienkiewicz’s novel. Consequently, they should not be viewed as straightforward interpretations of Quo vadis but rather as tropes of ideas about antiquity that were common currency at the turn of the nineteenth century. In illustrations by Henri Courcelles-Dumont (a painter and draughtsman)22 and Giacomo Mantegazza (a painter, illustrator, fresco artist, and etcher),23 the focus is almost exclusively on the beauty of female bodies (see Figure  11.5). Even if they are not connected directly to Sienkiewicz’s account, they exemplify a frequent, albeit variously rendered, theme that was highly valued in academicism, where classical antiquity held a prominent position. In British painting, the theme of antique female beauty was chiefly framed in classicizing and aestheticizing ways (Moor, Watts, Alma-Tadema, and Leighton); in German-speaking cultural settings, it received an i­ dealizing and erudite or expressive treatment (Feuerbach and Böcklin, ­respectively), with the latter also widely applied in French art (de Chavannes and Lehmann).24 Although, historically speaking, Christian women were exposed to torture and death, in the images by Mantegazza and Courcelles-Dumont they are pictured without any manifestations of suffering, and the impending threat is merely implied by the setting and the lions. The kitschy portraits of visually captivating women, their postures and shaded colouring typical of this aesthetic (as in the work of Courcelles-Dumont), were designed to cater to the tastes of relatively unsophisticated viewers. In this historical and, in­dir­ect­ly,

21  See Axer in this volume. 22  The postcard was issued by the Société des Artistes Français. The year of publication is not provided. The painting it presents was put on display at the Salon of 1912. 23  The woodcut featured in the postcard was made in 1880. The postcard was published in Milan (Uff Rev Stampa Milano); the date is not given. 24  For the theme’s history, see Poprzęcka 1978: 171–8.

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Horror amid Sweetness  205

Fig. 11.5  Female martyrdom as kitsch in postcard design by the French painter Henri CourcellesDumont (1856–1918). https:// myvimu.com/exhibit/15693817.

literary context, the ‘subtraction’ of horror and the ‘substitution’ of sweetness bring these representations closer to parody. As historical truth is discarded and the beauty of the body is foregrounded, the events of Nero’s reign come across as less serious, and the emotion evoked by the visual representations is reduced only to admiration. The works by Mantegazza and, in particular, by Courcelles-Dumont belong to a typical inventory of popular culture and cannot be regarded as transtextual references in the strict sense, because the artists did not seek to engage in dialogue either with Sienkiewicz’s novel or with traditional images of martyrdom and the passion of Christ. What these postcards do, instead, is gesture at the visions of antiquity formed in culture more broadly, whose endorsement led not only to kitsch but also (for viewers able to exercise critical reflection) to parody. Closely linked to artists’ styles and their preferred techniques is their application in detail of the basic forms of a kitsch aesthetics. Moles counts among them abundant curves, a surfeit of embellishments, and a special selection of colours and materials (1978: 58–66), all of which help execute the u ­ nderlying principles of kitsch, such as incompatibility, accumulation, synaesthetic

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206  Ewa Górecka perception, and comfort (1978: 76–80). Many of the artists who produced illustrations inspired by Quo vadis were recognized painters and draughtsmen. However, as the popularity of the novel soared and interest in antiquity spread widely, their works had to cater to the tastes of a mass audience. One consequence was that their postcard designs begin to gravitate towards the aesthetics of kitsch, with its distinctive accumulation, mediocrity, and palette of complementary colours (Moles 1978: 62–3): such as shades of white in Bruno, Lambert, Ranft, and Courcelles-Dumont; colours adjacent on the spectrum, such as orange, red, and pink, in F. R. and Styka; beige tints c­ oupled with fleshy pink in Peter; or washed green juxtaposed with pink and gold in Styka.25 The accumulation of emotions (admiration and horror) and ­aesthetic impressions (delight and disgust) synaesthetically engages several senses at once, as the images aim to evoke simultaneously aural, olfactory, tactile, and other sensations. Efforts to trigger such varied and multiple ­experiences in users of the postcards could not but generate kitschy effects— and parodistic outcomes for those who were also readers of the novel. Astonishment and smirks are among the likely responses activated in those users by the inept pictorial renderings of, for example, the scene in which the Christians are burned alive: incompetently painted by Peter, the human ‘torches’ resemble huge cocoons with torsos inside them; postures and facial expressions are arranged by F.  R.  in a way that suggests that, while being burned alive, Glaucus is having a friendly chat with Chilo; and in Lambert’s illustration, the flames blaze like an exploding bomb. The lofty and highbrow mood of that episode in the novel is inadvertently cancelled out by this type of intertextual translation, which visually degrades the rich literary style of its model. All the more interestingly, the postcard depictions of Nero’s death are also saturated as a rule with ‘sweet’ kitsch. The Polish author frames Nero’s death as an inevitable event intrinsically inscribed in the transience-ridden order of the world (‘So ended Nero, passing like a windstorm, a typhoon, a fire, a war and a plague,’ Sienkiewicz  2002: 579). He gives the tyrant’s last moments strongly ironic undertones, using a high style to fashion a tragicomic death scene (as in the account of Suetonius), in which the grand suicidal gesture ends in dismal failure, while the prior agony is naturalistically framed. Sienkiewicz also deliberately contrasts the beauty of the garden in bloom

25  In his novels, Sienkiewicz consciously manipulated colour; see Skwara in this volume. When writing about antiquity, he largely relied on the visual conventions of academicism, while he used light linguistically like an impressionist; Mocarska-Tycowa 2005: 155.

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Horror amid Sweetness  207 which serves as the setting for Nero’s death with the revolting black blood that ‘gushes’ from his fat neck (Sienkiewicz 2002: 579). On the postcards, however, the natural and architectural beauty of the garden and the imperial garments disproportionately outshines the image of dead Nero. Styka and F. R. merely suggest the textually important blood, thereby ‘subtracting’ horror from their portrayal for the sake of the delightful and the ‘sweet’. The writer’s idea is  retained by Mastroianni, an Italian sculptor and designer of postcards

Fig. 11.6  The death of Nero; postcard design by Italian sculptor Domenico Mastroianni (1876–1962). https:// myvimu.com/exhibit/15693817.

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208  Ewa Górecka illustrating The Divine Comedy.26 In his plates, blood (although not black blood) encircles the emperor’s torment-haunted face, pointing to an act of allégation (Figure 11.6). The postcard illustrations of the episodes of Christian martyrdom and Nero’s death in Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis are an interesting example of intersemiotic transcription that ushers the literary work, reputed both as a masterpiece and as a bestseller, into popular culture. Numerous paintings and, then, postcards crossed the boundaries of sign systems in their interpretation of the work’s historical and religious themes, and garnered as much popularity as their literary model. These pictorial interpretations, which on the one hand are pervaded by allégation and on the other take the tastes of their mass audience into account, aimed to be attractive and to popularize the text rather than to inspire critical insight. The artistic visions displayed on the postcards were unlikely to stir questions about the value of mortal suffering or to invite reflection on religious faith—the novel’s author was actually quite sceptical about faith but fully appreciated it as a crucial aspect of Europe’s cultural heri­ tage (Gloger  2010: 170–3).27 The practice of transcending the boundaries between arts is ubiquitous in modern art (Adorno  1990: 32–41) and can expand freedom of expression and augment interpretive frameworks, yet most of the artists addressed in this chapter did not take advantage of these possibilities. Lurid exaggeration, conventionality and typification (which Sienkiewicz himself just about managed to avoid; Żabski 1979:170) are rampant in the postcard illustrations of Christian martyrdom. The sweetness of these representations paired with their horror to promote kitsch aesthetics, not because their artists lacked talent but because they took up very particular themes. As we have seen, popular cultural images of devotional subjects tend to invite aesthetic satisfaction rather than spiritual reflection; consequently, their designers are almost doomed to slip into kitsch (Sztabiński  2016: 29). While the artists who produced postcard illustrations of Quo vadis were ­serious and respectful of the novel, the results of their efforts sometimes verge on parody. Though unwitting, such parodistic renderings seem to prove the sad truth that, where pathos and solemnity are hyperbolized, laughter too ­easily ensues.

26 http://www.fondazionemastroianni.it/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=45:do menico-mastroianni&catid=17:i-mastroianni&Itemid=252 (accessed 15 April 2018). 27  See the Introduction to this volume.

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PART III

QU O VA DI S A F T E R T HE SE C ON D WOR LD WA R

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12 ‘A more permanent world’ Quo vadis (1951), Runaway Production, and the Internationalization of Hollywood Jonathan Stubbs

In July 2015 the film magazine Variety published an article under the headline ‘Hollywood on the Tiber Puts Rome Back to Work’ (Vivarelli 2015: 77). The text described how a new system of tax breaks in Italy had brought Hollywood producers back to Rome and the Cinecittà studio, most notably to shoot a remake of Ben-Hur (2016) for Paramount. The article proceeded to link the contemporary expansion of US film production in Rome to an older wave of ‘runaway productions’ from the 1950s and 1960s, films which abandoned Hollywood’s traditional production base in Los Angeles in pursuit of lower labour costs, more authentic locations, and financial incentives put in place by struggling European governments. This first wave of international run­ away productions came of age in 1951 with MGM’s colossal production of Quo Vadis. Indeed, the term ‘Hollywood on the Tiber’ was originally used in reference to Quo Vadis, appearing in the headline of a Time article from 1950 (26 June 1950, p. 92). American coverage of Hollywood film-making in Rome from 2015 was thus framed through references to American coverage of Hollywood film-making in Rome sixty-five years earlier. The 2015 article also invoked the economic impact of the 1950s runaway films, as well as the enthusiastic participation of the Italian government, by quoting Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti’s assertion that ‘Quo Vadis did more for Italy than the Marshall Plan’.1 In this way, the production of Quo Vadis was positioned as a form of economic foreign aid, a stimulus for Italy’s post-war film industry by one of America’s most powerful and prosperous corporations. 1  The quotation seems to originate from an interview that Andreotti gave in the documentary film Giulio Andreotti: Il cinema visto da vicino (dir. Tatti Sanguineti, 2014). See ‘Nuovo lungometraggio su Andreotti’, Cinecittà News, 29 May 2008 http://news.cinecitta.com/IT/it-it/news/53/38031/16-35nuovo-lungometraggio-su-andreotti.aspx, accessed 29 October 2018). Jonathan Stubbs, ‘A more permanent world’: Quo vadis (1951), Runaway Production, and the Internationalization of Hollywood In: The Novel of Neronian Rome and its Multimedial Transformations: Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis. Edited by: Monika Woz´niak and Maria Wyke, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198867531.003.0012

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212  Jonathan Stubbs This reference to the Marshall Plan or ‘European Recovery Program’ also calls attention to the broader ideological dimensions of Quo Vadis’s trans­ nation­al production, linking the reconstruction of European industry with the expansion of American foreign policy and economic influence in post-war Europe. As Victoria de Grazia has suggested, it was partly through cinema that American culture became rooted in European civil society during this period, securing the influence of what she calls ‘open frontier imperialism’ (1989: 85). With this relationship between America and Europe in mind, this chapter will examine the long production history of the MGM Quo Vadis in America and in Italy, including a brief detour to Britain. I will also consider the social and political effects that arise from the relocation of Hollywood film production beyond American borders. As the other authors in this collection demonstrate, the transmedial Quo vadis phenomenon can be approached from a wide var­ iety of disciplinary perspectives. From a film-history standpoint, however, I  would argue that the nineteenth-century Polish novel Quo vadis made its greatest impact by providing the American film industry with a prototype for the outsourcing of big-budget film-making and the internationalization of film production labour in the post-war era. And when it did so, in the early 1950s, the story had reached a point in its cultural dissemination where its Polish origins had long been forgotten. In this discussion, Quo Vadis has been reshaped as part of a strategy for the post-war Americanization of Europe and as a driver of significant change in Hollywood film-making practices.

Before the Epic Like many Hollywood projects of the studio era, the making of Quo Vadis spanned several decades and involved many writers and producers whose input ultimately became invisible. By looking at draft versions of the screen­ play and articles from trade newspapers, it is possible to identify four stages in the film’s stop–start production. First, several treatments of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel were written at MGM between 1934 and 1939, and tenta­ tive announcements were made in the press. Second, between May 1942 and July 1943 MGM made more tangible plans to produce the film in America under wartime restrictions, before abandoning the project due to its high cost. Third, between April 1948 and April 1949 the project was revived at MGM as a European project, before being postponed due to production difficulties. And finally, the project recommenced in Italy in January 1950 with a new director, a new producer, and a revised screenplay. Principal pho­tog­raphy was

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‘ A more permanent world ’   213 completed in November the same year, and the film arrived in cin­emas in the autumn of 1951. The first two stages in this production history can be dealt with fairly briefly. The Margaret Herrick film archive in Los Angeles holds several synop­ ses of the Sienkiewicz novel written by the MGM story department in 1934 and 1935, as well as a preliminary script outline from November 1936 and a full screenplay from September 1939.2 Sienkiewicz’s novel was relatively familiar in America during this period, having been widely disseminated in an English-language translation and in stage and screen adaptations. As these adaptations and translations circulated and took root in a predominantly Anglo-Saxon Protestant context, the Polish Catholic tenor of the original text dissipated and a broader religious significance emerged in its place. As Margaret Malamud has suggested of ‘toga plays’ more generally, ‘identifica­ tion with early pre-sectarian Christianity in the fictional world of literature and drama provided a satisfying vision of a community united by religious faith amidst the lived reality of a nation fractured by religious, class, and eco­ nomic divisions’ (2008: 159). Studio interest in Quo vadis also coincided with a public relations campaign, orchestrated by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, to improve the American film industry’s reputa­ tion and ward off the threat of external regulation. With its literary pedigree and overtly Christian content, a Quo vadis adaptation was well suited to these wider objectives. Press reports from the mid-1930s endeavoured to generate interest in the nascent Quo Vadis project by revealing that Marlene Dietrich might be cast as Poppaea, with Wallace Beery as Nero (‘Quo Vadis’ 2018).3 The timing of these announcements suggests that MGM developed the film in response to the success of several high-budget depictions of ancient Rome at rival studios. Most notably, Paramount had released Cecil B. DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross (1932), which paralleled various aspects of the Quo vadis narrative. By this point the cinematic conventions for representing ancient Rome were familiar enough to audiences in America that they could be burlesqued in the timetravel musical comedy Roman Scandals (1933). One year later, DeMille directed Cleopatra (1934), which proved to be Paramount’s most successful release of the year. In 1935, however, The Last Days of Pompeii lost money for 2  This screenplay material is part of the Turner/MGM script collection; Margaret Herrick Library, Center for Motion Picture Study, Los Angeles. 3  All references to ‘Quo Vadis’ 2018 refer to the press reports cited in the American Film Institute Catalog of Feature Films accessed in 2018. The AFI catalog has been cited where it was not possible to track down the details of the underlying publications.

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214  Jonathan Stubbs RKO, and this may have been a factor in the eventual stalling of the Quo vadis project (Jewell 1994). In any case, MGM did not commission a full screenplay until 1939. A later news story also reported that Benito Mussolini attempted to buy the rights to Quo vadis from MGM in 1938 for $75,000 in order to produce another Italian adaptation, presumably in the Cinecittà studio, which he personally inaugurated in 1937 in hopes of fortifying the Italian film industry against Hollywood competition (J. D. Spiro, ‘Now it’s for Sure’, New York Times, 7 May 1950). Development began again in 1942. The producer Arthur Hornblow Jr selected Quo vadis as his first project after joining MGM from Paramount, and engaged the screenwriter S. N. Behrman—who was best known for his work on the MGM adaptations of A Tale of Two Cities and Anna Karenina (both 1935)—to prepare a new script. The film was originally due to begin shooting in early 1943 with a rumoured cast including Orson Welles or Charles Laughton as Nero, and Lana Turner as Lygia. An MGM press release, which was relayed in the trade papers, also announced that the film would be shot in Technicolor, which was still very rare in the early 1940s, and that it would feature 176 speaking parts (‘Quo Vadis’ 2018). These decisions indicate that MGM envisaged a large and expensive production. MGM’s publicity team pitched Quo Vadis to the media on the basis of its Christian content. Similar articles in The New York Times and Variety connected the film to what they called ‘a new spiritual resurgence in Hollywood’, explaining that the film industry was responding to the Second World War with movies depicting miracles and religious faith (Fred Stanley, ‘A New Spiritual Resurgence in Hollywood’, New York Times, 7 March 1943; ‘New Film Cycle May be Religious’, Variety, 24 March 1943). Interestingly, rival studio RKO began developing The Robe—another Christian/Roman epic adapted from a popular novel—in the same year. However, wartime economic conditions made it very difficult for Hollywood studios to produce films on this scale. Timber and other ma­ter­ials needed for set building were redirected into the war effort, and the pool of labour for construction and crowd scenes was reduced for the same reason. Some reports suggested that MGM sought to preserve the epic scale of Quo Vadis by relocating production to Mexico, where manpower and materials were more easily and cheaply available (‘Quo Vadis’ 2018). More importantly, the war meant that studios were losing access to vital export markets in Europe, meaning that films had to recoup the majority of their costs in North America alone. And so in July 1943 Quo Vadis was put in hia­ tus again. According to a brief notice in Variety it was a victim of ‘wartime expense’ (‘Production Notices’, Variety, 7 July 1943). Development of The

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‘ A more permanent world ’   215 Robe at RKO was suspended around the same time; the film was eventually released by 20th Century Fox in 1953.

Romans on the Run Work on Quo Vadis, as we might recognize it today, began in April 1948. The project was reannounced under the same producer, Arthur Hornblow Jr, with a new draft of Behrman’s script by veteran screenwriter Sonya Levien. The end of the war also made it possible for MGM to negotiate an extension to the screen rights for Sienkiewicz’s novel from his heirs in Poland (J.  D.  Spiro, ‘Now it’s for Sure’, New York Times, 7 May 1950). Crucially, Quo Vadis became part of the Hollywood studios’ post-war reorientation towards Europe-based production and European export markets. MGM committed to produce Quo Vadis in part or in full in Italy, and in late 1948 and early 1949 various pro­ duction staff travelled to Rome to search for locations (‘Hornblow to Review Italo Prod. Problems’, Variety, 24 November 1948; ‘London’, Variety, 16 February 1949). There were several motives behind the turn towards overseas production. The reason which the studios were most eager to publicize was their apparent pursuit of geographic realism. As the fashion in Hollywood turned towards narratives set in the ancient past, and as new imaging tech­ nologies placed greater emphasis on visual spectacle, it was often argued that shooting in overseas locations was necessary to make films plausible for audi­ ences (Luckinbeal 2006: 339). Creative considerations such as these, however, were largely eclipsed by the economic benefits offered by overseas production. Firstly, as Hollywood’s domestic market began to contract in the late 1940s and early 1950s, foreign markets became ever more essential to the American film industry’s financial survival. Weekly attendance figures in America declined from a peak of 84 million during the war to just 49 million in 1951 (Krämer  2000: 197). Conversely, many European markets were expanding at a rate that allowed Hollywood producers to compensate for this decline. As Peter Krämer has noted, the Hollywood films most successful in individual Western European markets were usually those that had some national connection to them (2017: 263). Within Europe, Italy had the fastest growing theatrical market, with weekly attendance rising from 8 million in 1946 to 15 million in 1953 (Krämer  2000: 197). Almost all European markets had been closed to Hollywood during the war; their sudden reopening to American imports, combined with the weakened state of domestic film production and the

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216  Jonathan Stubbs removal of protectionist barriers, allowed a backlog of Hollywood films to flood European cinemas. In Italy, a remarkable 570 American films were released on average each year between 1945 and 1949 (Guback 1985: 475). As European markets began to provide a larger share of the profits for Hollywood studios, it made sense that they would seek to orientate their films towards European audiences. Relocating production to Europe was one means to develop closer links to European markets, but it also had the benefit of lowering certain production costs. Depending on the dollar exchange rate, production in Britain, Spain, West Germany, or Italy offered considerable savings over production in Los Angeles, where unions exerted a stronger influence over wages. Of course, these savings were offset by transportation costs and the difficulties of working with inexperienced crews. But the biggest factor making overseas production attractive to Hollywood studios was the opportunity to access ‘blocked’ or ‘frozen’ money in Italy. To simplify a fairly complicated process, European governments, including Britain, France, and Italy, responded to the delicate state of their post-war economies by placing a limit on the amount of money that American film companies could repatriate (Stubbs 2008: 337–41). In Italy this limit was 15 per cent (Treveri Gennari 008: 58). As a result, when Hollywood films earned money at the Italian box office, they were obliged to leave the bulk of this revenue in Italy for a temporary period. The money still belonged to the film companies that earned it, but it could not be converted into dollars and removed from the Italian economy. These restrictions were unpopular with the American studios, but they had little choice but to accept them if they wanted to remain active in Italy and other European markets. Apart from simply leaving the money until the embargoes were lifted, the main option available to American producers was to spend their blocked revenues in Italy itself. Indeed, the desire to secure American investment was part of the motivation for blocking the money in the first place. Some American film companies invested the money by purchasing Italian cinemas and distribution businesses, but much of it was used to produce films (Treveri Gennari 2008: 58). If the money could not be returned to America directly, it could be converted into films, and these films could then be exported to America and made to earn back their investment. Spending blocked money on European production was a neat solution to these eco­ nomic embargoes, and it was certainly the prime reason behind MGM’s decision to base the production of Quo Vadis in Italy. In a sense, the epic film became a tool for the extraction of millions of dollars of corporate revenue that had become stuck in Italy.

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‘ A more permanent world ’   217 Quo Vadis was thus at the forefront of the ‘runaway production’ wave that reshaped the American film industry in the 1950s and 1960s. The relocation of film production was nothing new. In a sense, the first wave of runaway production occurred within America itself: in the 1910s film companies left New York en masse to set up operations in Los Angeles. But once they arrived there, film-makers tended to remain loyal to California as a production base. MGM had more experience than most studios in shooting overseas. Indeed, their decision to shoot Ben-Hur (1925) in Italy in 1923 and 1924 highlighted the perils of working in Europe: poor supervision and limited communication between Rome and Los Angeles led to enormous budget overruns. Costs rose further when MGM decided to abandon the Italian footage in order to reshoot it on their backlot in Los Angeles. Ben-Hur proved to be hugely popu­ lar, but the return on MGM’s $3.9 million investment was limited (Neale and Hall 2010: 54–6). MGM later established a production base in London and produced several high-profile films in British studios, but operations came to a halt in 1939 following the outbreak of war (Glancy  1998). The industrywide relocation of production to Europe from the late 1940s onward, how­ ever, was unprecedented in its scale. Between 1949 and 1957 over a hundred Hollywood films were produced in Britain, with a further thirty being made in Italy (Bernstein  1957: 54–5). The economic impact of this move was felt most severely by film crews in Los Angeles, who were accustomed to regular employment. In effect, American film companies exported thousands of jobs to Europe in exchange for financial incentives and savings facilitated by European governments. High-paid workers—the stars, directors, pro­ du­ cers—were much less affected as their labour was harder to replace. In fact, the most highly paid film workers were able to benefit from working abroad during this period as it reduced their exposure to American income tax.

Shooting in Rome MGM initially planned to split the production of Quo Vadis between locations in Rome and studios in Britain (‘Hollywood on a Global Kick’, Variety, 5 January 1949; Thomas Brady, ‘Leo Genn to Play Role in Quo Vadis’, New York Times, 16 May 1949). The decision to work in Britain was made largely because MGM already owned facilities there, having bought the Borehamwood studio north of London in 1944. Indeed, MGM had recently completed filming of the mid-budget drama Edward My Son (1949), starring Deborah Kerr and Spencer Tracy, at Borehamwood. MGM’s infrastructure in Britain was

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218  Jonathan Stubbs therefore much more developed than their facilities in Italy at this point. In addition, the division of production between Rome and London allowed MGM to spend revenues that were blocked in Britain as well as in Italy. It is also worth noting that the practice of outsourcing production from Britain to Italy was well established in the British film industry at this point. As Steve Chibnall has shown, British producers used Italian locations and studios in no fewer than twenty-eight films between 1946 and 1954, including nine in 1949 alone (2013: 235, 250). Although the Italian studio facilities were in bad condition and local crews were unfamiliar with British practices, re­loca­tion to Italy was incentivized by lower costs and weather more favourable to exterior work. As Chibnall notes, the potential for ‘well financed productions made in Italy was quickly appreciated by Hollywood’ (2013: 261). In this way, MGM’s experience working in Britain during the 1940s alerted them to the feasibility of relocating films further afield to Italy. Work on Quo Vadis was scheduled to begin in July 1949, with Gregory Peck cast in the lead role and John Huston as director. However, these plans unravelled very quickly after Gregory Peck developed an eye infection (Grobel 1989: 339). The production was postponed, and because this meant that the Italian summer weather was lost, it could not be restarted for almost a year. In the meantime, John Huston and Arthur Hornblow Jr, who had acted as the film’s producer since 1943, resigned from the project (Thomas Brady, ‘Hornblow Drops Quo Vadis Movie’, New York Times, 8 December 1949). They may have departed simply because they did not want to wait another year for filming to begin, but there is some evidence of creative conflict between Huston and Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM. Huston had rewritten Sonya Levien’s script with the British historian Hugh Gray, emphasizing what he perceived to be parallels between Nero’s treatment of the Christians and the Nazi genocide of Jews in Europe. Mayer, on the other hand, was less interested in political alle­ gory and wished to produce a family-friendly film that would protect his investment (Grobel  1989: 339). Huston and Hornblow were replaced by director Mervyn LeRoy and producer Sam Zimbalist, and Robert Taylor was cast in the lead role. All three were veteran MGM employees, safe and amen­ able choices who might ensure that the film would be finished on time. The screenplay was revised again, this time by John Lee Mahin. The final writing credit was given to Mahin, plus Behrman and Levien, making it a composite of work done in three different phases of development. It was at this point that MGM decided to base the production of Quo Vadis entirely in Italy, using exterior locations plus the Cinecittà studio, which MGM had taken on lease. A state-owned facility featuring eleven sound

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‘ A more permanent world ’   219 stages, the studio had been used as a barrack for German soldiers during the war, at which time it was stripped of all electrical equipment and wiring. After the Allied liberation of Rome in 1944, Cinecittà became a camp for refugees, including survivors of concentration camps. In fact, a number of refugees remained at Cinecittà for several months after Quo Vadis began production (Steimatsky  2009: 48). Quo Vadis was not the first American film to use Cinecittà after the war—it was preceded by the 20th Century Fox swashbuck­ ler Prince of Foxes (1949), which was filmed in late 1948. But Quo Vadis was a far more demanding project than Prince of Foxes, and the Cinecittà facilities needed considerable work done to them beforehand to make them suitable for production. To this end, an estimated 250 tons of lighting and other elec­ trical equipment were transported from Los Angeles (Surtees  1951b: 473). Power was a particular problem due to the high level of lighting demanded by the Technicolor process. Additional generators were sent from Los Angeles and from MGM’s studio in London, and the Italian government provided a power supply from a decommissioned battleship (‘Hollywood on the Tiber’, Time, 26 June 1950; Frayling  2000: 65). In two articles for the American Cinematographer magazine, cinematographer Robert Surtees wrote at length about the technical challenges of making Cinecittà suitable for production. Among other things, the walls were too weak to hold lighting equipment, some of the sound stages did not have roofs, and the facilities were not airconditioned (1951a: 417). Further complications arose from MGM’s decision to record sound directly on the set, a process that was standard in Hollywood but much less common in Italy, where post-production dubbing was pre­ ferred (Gray  1956: 350). In addition, Surtees added, ‘one American crew member is worth more to a production than all the inexperienced help recruited in the country where the picture is made’ (1951b: 473). Although production was no longer scheduled in London, MGM’s British subsidiary remained closely involved in the film. After each day of shooting, the footage was flown to London for printing and processing before being sent back to Cinecittà (Halsey Raines, ‘From Rome to Broadway’, New York Times, 14 October 1951). More importantly, Quo Vadis was almost entirely cast with British actors. Robert Taylor was very much American, but Deborah Kerr, Peter Ustinov, and almost all of the other actors in speaking roles were British. British workers were also employed behind the camera, including the designer Peter Ellenshaw, whose matte paintings were responsible for many of the film’s extraordinary backgrounds, and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of London, who performed Miklós Rózsa’s score. The principal reason for this, of course, was that MGM was eager to use revenues that were

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220  Jonathan Stubbs blocked in Britain. The salaries of the cast and other British personnel were thus paid using MGM funds accounted from Britain rather than Italy. One news story claimed that MGM was able to dispose of a million dollars of money blocked in Britain in this way (‘Hollywood on the Tiber’, Time, 26 June 1950). These casting decisions may have had a long-term impact. Quo Vadis played a significant role in entrenching the ‘aural paradigm’ in which highranking Romans are performed with English accents, although Charles Laughton’s performance as Nero in Sign of the Cross is an important precedent (Wyke 1997: 71, 113). This sociolinguistic shorthand has endured almost as well as Barthes’s ‘Roman fringe’,4 so it is interesting that the proliferation of English actors in Quo Vadis can be explained by short-term financial oppor­ tunities rather than an ideological attempt to link imperial Rome with the crumbling British Empire. MGM did employ thousands of Italian workers on the production of Quo Vadis, but almost entirely in low-paid roles, particularly in costume manufac­ ture and as extras in crowd scenes. The reluctance of the studio to employ skilled workers from the Italian film industry caused some consternation in Rome (Forgacs and Gundle  2007: 139). Among the speaking roles, Marina Berti, who played the slave Eunice, was promoted in the American press as an emerging Italian star, but she was in fact born in London and was almost cer­ tainly paid from the same pot as the other British actors. The fact that the Italian film industry was under-regulated and under-unionized in compari­ son to Hollywood offered further savings for MGM. The costume department sent garment work out to local contractors, who then subcontracted it to women working at home, a practice which one reporter described as ‘a sweat­ shop method of production no longer tolerated in America’ (Catherine Casey, ‘Nero, Regardless of Film Experience’, Daily Mail, 8 July 1950). The numerous extras required for the crowd scenes (some 14,000 in total) were similarly organized on a casual basis using subcontracted labour. MGM hired union­ ized extras and made them responsible for recruiting and managing teams of thirty additional extras. The union extras were paid $4 a day, but they were also made responsible for distributing a wage of $1.25 to the non-union extras working under them (Surtees 1951b: 475; Morgan Hudgins, ‘Cameras Roll on Quo Vadis, 6,000 Miles Apart’, New York Times, 9 July 1950). It is hard to imagine that MGM did not see the potential for corruption in this system. In fact, Italian extras cast in the earlier Prince of Foxes were paid using a Hollywood scale, but this apparently led to protests among Italian film 4  For the ubiquity of the ‘Roman fringe’ in Hollywood’s Roman epics, see Barthes 1993: 26.

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‘ A more permanent world ’   221 producers who feared that wages in their industry would be inflated as a result (Casey 1950). Evidently, the process of relocating production to a less indus­ trialized economy allowed producers to take advantage of under-regulated labour markets and exploit workers more extensively than would have been permitted in America itself. The production was nevertheless interrupted by industrial action, with newspapers in Rome reporting that local carpenters, painters, and grips went out on strike in a disagreement over wages (‘Rome Unions Reported in Hassle’, Variety, 28 June 1950). However, MGM’s pub­li­ city department endeavoured to play down these disputes. According to Hugh Gray, who worked on set as a historical advisor, one such strike by local extras was quickly dispersed, and ‘the only malice they showed thereafter was in their countenances, as the part required from good actors asked to vent their fury on the Christians in the arena. What simple pride they have in their work!’ (1956: 353)

Legacy MGM’s final cost for Quo Vadis was $7.6 million (Eddie Mannix Ledger). This was a record-breaking figure at the time and it was widely publicized as a kind of guarantee of the film’s scale and spectacle. The bulk of this sum was paid using MGM’s blocked Italian revenues, plus additional funds from Britain. The Italian government also gave MGM permission to use more money than it had in balance, allowing them to invest Italian revenues that they had not yet earned (Forgacs 2001: 33). Upon release, the film also made almost half of its revenue from the overseas market, supporting the idea that runaway pro­ duction would boost MGM’s international box-office performance, although much of this money would in turn have become blocked. MGM’s overall profit after six years was $5.4 million: a strong return on their investment (Eddie Mannix Ledger), but less impressive than comparable films such as The Robe (1953) and The Ten Commandments (1956). More importantly, I think, the production of Quo Vadis stood at the vanguard of an expansionist trend in Hollywood, pushing the American film industry further into European markets as they recovered from wartime privations. An advert from the trade newspaper Motion Picture Daily points to an ideological dimension in this overseas growth (Figure 12.1). The production of Quo Vadis in Italy, as well as other MGM films around the world, demonstrate that ‘The Sun Never Sets on Leo the MGM Lion’, a phrase originally used to describe the global extent of the British Empire. In this way, runaway production brought a

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222  Jonathan Stubbs

Fig. 12.1  Advertisement in the Motion Picture Daily, 31 October 1950.

degree of authenticity to Quo Vadis and saved money for MGM, but it also emphasized the entrenchment of American capital and American consumer culture on the world stage. Quo Vadis was marketed in a manner which emphasized the largesse of American corporations in Europe, as Wyke has suggested: the expense and

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‘ A more permanent world ’   223 spectacle of production ‘became images of the Hollywood industry’s g­ enerosity to Italy’s dispossessed and its contribution to an economic program designed to keep Communism at bay in Europe’ (1997: 145). Wyke notes that the mar­ keting campaign created for Quo Vadis went somewhat further than the film itself in drawing specific parallels with America’s Cold War. One piece of advertising copy stated that, ‘in the dark days that seem to be threatening us’,  the film ‘cries out a creed of non-violence, a just resistance to a godless ­aggression’ (1997: 143). This political context is nevertheless acknowledged in the film’s penultimate scene, following the death of Nero and the accession of  Galba. Departing Rome as Galba arrives, Marcus asks, ‘Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Rome – what follows?’ His companion Nerva replies, ‘a more ­permanent world, I hope. Or a more permanent faith.’ These references to the deterioration of imperial Rome and the ephemerality of political power pro­ vide an example of what Tom Brown calls the ‘historical gaze’—a rhetorical trope common to classical-era historical film in which characters ‘seem endowed with a clairvoyance through which they appear to recognize events to come’ and as such allow the film to ‘address the historical knowledge of the spectator’ (2008: 163–4). In this way, Marcus and Nerva’s dialogue f­ oreshadows not only the fall of Rome but also the emergence of America as a post-war superpower: a new Christian republic destined to reshape the world in its image. As Marshall Plan aid went to work in the ravaged economies of Western Europe, not least Italy, this, surely, was the ‘more permanent world’ that Nerva had prophesied. The short-term impact of Quo Vadis can be seen in the wave of Hollywood films that were produced in Italy in the years which followed, each one either using blocked revenue or benefiting from the favourable conditions that the Italian state had created. In Quo Vadis, MGM demonstrated the viability of Rome as a production base for large-scale, complex film-making, proving that American technical and managerial processes could be transplanted overseas. Against all odds and despite its protracted development, the film was com­ pleted on schedule (Gray 1956: 348). Other studios followed MGM to Rome: Paramount had considerable success with Roman Holiday (1953), 20th Century Fox produced Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), and United Artists released The Barefoot Contessa (1954). All three films used the Cinecittà stu­ dio, which had been refitted to Hollywood specifications during the produc­ tion of Quo Vadis. It is worth noting, however, that the majority of the ancient world epics that followed in the wake of Quo Vadis were not, in fact, filmed in Italy. The Robe (1953), Julius Caesar (1953), and Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954) were all shot in California, while Alexander the Great (1956) was out­ sourced to Spain. Helen of Troy (1956) used the Cinecittà studio and Land of

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224  Jonathan Stubbs the Pharaohs (1955) was filmed at the nearby Titanus Appia facility, but it was not until Ben-Hur in 1959 that another major Hollywood depiction of ancient Rome was filmed in Italy. Due to its much more extensive use of Italian loca­ tions, however, the visual style of Ben-Hur is markedly different from the largely studio-bound Quo Vadis. This impact of Quo Vadis was also felt in the Italian film industry. The pro­ duction and commercial success of Quo Vadis brought investment and stimu­ lated employment, but it also underlined the ultimate victory of American film production over its erstwhile competitors in Europe. MGM’s occupation of the state-owned Cinecittà complex carried a particular symbolic weight: a studio which had been built to challenge Hollywood’s cultural dominance was in fact turned to the American film industry’s advantage. Indeed, David Forgacs notes that Italy’s Christian Democrat government ‘bent over back­ wards to create favourable conditions for MGM’. To this end, they permitted the company to refuse employment to communist-affiliated union members, gave them privileged access to blocked revenues, and allowed the finished film to play in local cinemas outside the exhibition quota designed to protect domestic films (2001: 33). More broadly, as Forgacs and Stephen Gundle argue, the rapid influx of Hollywood production finance in the period following Quo Vadis coincided with the three trends in post-war Italian film culture: industrial expansion, depoliticization, and Americanization (2007: 133). In the process, the Italian film industry became increasingly concentrated in Rome and Italian producers turned towards more commercial forms of cinema (Forgacs 2001: 33). Partly as a result, the rate of production and the number of screens rose during the 1950s (Corsi  2017: 86). Cultural and economic ties between Italy and America also deepened, a process highlighted by the in­aug­ur­ation of the first regular passenger air service between the two nations in 1951 (Shiel  2009: 113). Nevertheless, Italo-American exchange remained highly asymmetrical: in 1953, for example, the Italian film industry exported 28 films to America but imported 220 films in the other direction (Corsi 2017: 89). In the longer term, runaway production and overseas shooting was estab­ lished as a dominant business practice in the American film industry. The accounting arrangements used to fund Quo Vadis were succeeded by a range of new financial inducements, mainly government subsidies and tax breaks, that allowed nations to compete against each other for Hollywood invest­ ment. Today, footloose film crews follow the flow of American production capital to nations such as Britain, New Zealand, Canada, and Spain, depend­ ing on the exchange rate and the subsidies on offer. In modern Italy, for ex­ample, the Ministry of Culture introduced incentives which allow foreign

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‘ A more permanent world ’   225 production companies to claim a tax rebate of up to $10 million on money spent in the country (Jim Yardley, ‘Hollywood Takes a Roman Holiday . . . Again’, New York Times, 6 April 2015). Such measures are necessary if Rome is to compete with other global film locations for American film and television projects. However, the return on investment for what is ef­fect­ive­ly a state sub­ sidy of foreign production remains unclear.5 And although the physical pro­ duction of films has effectively been dispersed around the world, Hollywood’s industrial power remains firmly centred in Los Angeles. Indeed, the glo­bal­ iza­tion of American film production, a process in which Quo Vadis played such an influential role, has arguably made the American film industry more dominant than ever. Modern American popular culture is thus sustained by a global audience, global systems of state subsidy, and a globally dispersed sys­ tem of production, but its distribution is closely controlled by a shrinking cluster of media corporations based in America. In the process, the hege­ mon­ic ‘permanent world’ that was foreseen in Quo Vadis expands further into the future.

5  For a critical analysis of contemporary film incentive programmes and their impact within America, see Thom 2018.

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13 MGM’s Quo vadis from Historical Fiction to Screen Spectacle Martin M. Winkler

On 10 December 1905, Henryk Sienkiewicz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his historical novels. The award presentation speech emphasized, among other virtues, Sienkiewicz’s feeling for history (af Wirsén 1969: 38): ‘All of these descriptions are distinguished by great historical truthfulness. Because of Sienkiewicz’ extensive researches and his sense of history, his characters speak and act in the style of the period. It is significant that among the many persons who suggested Henryk Sienkiewicz for the Nobel Prize there were eminent historians.’ These words refer to Sienkiewicz’s trilogy about seventeenth-century Poland—With Fire and Sword (1884), The Deluge (1886–7), and Pan Michael (1888–9)—but apply to his other works as well, especially Quo vadis (1895–6). The novel was a huge international success and eclipsed all of Sienkiewicz’s other writings except in Poland.1 It also came to be regarded as the chief reason why he received the Prize. Modern historians are unlikely to agree with those adduced in 1905. The plot of Quo vadis is not primarily concerned with what scholars expect from writings about the past, although they generally agree that Sienkiewicz succeeded in doing justice to Roman material culture at the time of Nero. Creative minds turn history into legend and myth. Since its birth in the same year in which Quo vadis began to appear, the cinema has been a decisive ­factor in this process. Quo vadis was just right for the new medium, which has always prized elevating, edifying, and visually astonishing tales of distant times and exotic places. The novel has been adapted five times to the screen (Scodel and Bettenworth 2009). The 1951 version of Sienkiewicz’s novel is the most famous today: Quo Vadis (without question mark), produced by MGM, filmed in and 1  See further the Introduction to this volume.

Martin M. Winkler, MGM’s Quo vadis: from Historical Fiction to Screen Spectacle In: The Novel of Neronian Rome and its Multimedial Transformations: Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis. Edited by: Monika Woźniak and Maria Wyke, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198867531.003.0013

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228  Martin M. Winkler

Fig. 13.1  MGM poster for Quo Vadis. © The Jerry Murbach Collection.

around Rome, and directed by Mervyn LeRoy. MGM’s advertising department announced their new epic with the phrase THIS IS THE BIG ONE! (Figure 13.1) The studio went so far as to proclaim: ‘The story has in it the stuff of immortality. In filming it as the most lavish of all productions in the annals of the screen, M-G-M feels that it has been privileged to add something permanent to the cultural treasure-house of civilization.’2 This chapter examines a few striking examples of thematic or narrative similarities between Quo Vadis and other films, while also addressing some key aspects in the production of ‘The Big One’ and the latter’s continuing presence in popular culture, not least as a standard for epic film-making about the past. In the process, both Sienkiewicz’s novel and Nero’s Rome have 2  Quoted from ‘MGM presents QUO VADIS’ (unpaginated ‘souvenir book’), p. 9.

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MGM ’ s Quo Vadis  229

Fig. 13.2  Peter Ustinov as Nero the artist. Frame enlargement.

received new leases of life. The parallels or analogies dealt with below may be intentional or accidental. In either case they are revealing, for they indicate the wide ramifications of the novel as a staple of popular culture. I proceed by force of example, following only a few strands.3

Nero: Qualis artifex! ‘Sing for us, divinity! Sing for us!’ With flattering insincerity, some of the guests urge Nero to perform at his banquet in MGM’s Quo Vadis. Nero does not need much persuading (Figure 13.2). Suetonius, the imperial biographer, reports about the historical Nero: When a boy he took up almost all the liberal arts . . . . Turning . . . to poetry, he wrote verses with eagerness and without labour, and did not, as some think, publish the works of others as his own. I have had in my possession

3  I omit aspects of the film I have examined previously: Winkler 2001: 55–62; 2009: 141–9; 2016; 2017a: 77–8; 2017b: passim.

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230  Martin M. Winkler note-books and papers with some well-known verses of his, written with his own hand and in such wise that it was perfectly evident that they were not copied or taken down from dictation, but worked out exactly as one writes when thinking and creating.4

Nero may have been a better poet than he has generally been credited with being. His famous last words—’What an artist dies with me!’—thus acquire at least a measure of truth: Qualis artifex pereo! (Suetonius, Nero 49.1). Sienkiewicz’s Petronius makes the case against Nero’s artistry with the vividness that characterizes him throughout the novel: As to verses, they have disgusted me, since Nero is writing an epic. Vitelius [sic], when he wishes to relieve himself, uses ivory fingers to thrust down his throat; others serve themselves with flamingo feathers steeped in olive oil or in a decoction of wild thyme. I read Nero’s poetry, and the result is immediate. Straightway I am able to praise it, if not with a clear conscience, at least with a clear stomach.  (Sienkiewicz 2016 [1896]: 19)5

Petronius later adopts a more nuanced view of Nero’s poetry: ‘These verses are not worse than others . . . . But as to what I said touching Nero’s verses, that I use them after feasting as Vitelius does flamingo feathers, is not true. At times they are eloquent . . . . Nero was able to find happy expressions,—for this reason, perhaps, that he gives birth to every verse in torment.’ (Sienkiewicz 2016 [1896]: 311). Shortly after, the omniscient narrator tells us about one of Nero’s recitals: ‘That day he was in voice, and felt that his music really cap­tiv­ ated those present. That feeling added such power to the sounds produced and roused his own soul so much that he seemed inspired. At last he grew pale from genuine emotions.’ (Sienkiewicz 2016 [1896]: 314). At the end, however, when he is about to commit suicide, Petronius will coldly denounce Nero as an unbearable artist and poetaster. By contrast, the film dispenses 4 Suetonius, Nero 52. The translation is from Rolfe 1914: 181 and 183. Contrast the damning verdict of Tacitus, Annals 14.16.1. Griffin 1984: 150–2 and 275–6 examines Nero’s poetry and per­form­ ances. Fantham 2013 gives a summary assessment. See further Beacham 1999: 197–254 and 272–8. The ancient sources, with comments, are collected in Barrett, Fantham, and Yardley 2016: 231–64. A few of Nero’s verses survive in fragments; these and ancient testimonies are conveniently collected in Blänsdorf 2011: 323–8, with references to basic scholarship on Nero as poet. See further Sullivan 1985: 100–4 on the possibility and indeed likelihood (pace Blänsdorf) that the first satire of Persius quotes some lines of Nero’s. 5  Although the archaic English of this translation is likely to impede modern readers’ enjoyment of the novel, I quote from it (in the Popular Edition of 1897, unchanged) because the most recent translation (Sienkiewicz 1993) is unreliable—and often pedestrian.

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MGM ’ s Quo Vadis  231 with the novel’s more nuanced evaluation of Nero’s poetry and adheres only to the familiar view that he was nothing but a bad poet. The film’s Petronius has this to say about Nero’s poetic aspirations: ‘one thing I cannot forgive: the boredom of having to listen to your verses, your second-rate songs, your mediocre performances. Adhere to your special gifts, Nero: murder and arson, betrayal and terror. Mutilate your subjects, if you must. But with my last breath I beg you, do not mutilate the arts. Farewell, but compose no more music.’6 Nero’s recitals in the film are largely on the subject of fire. This foreshadows his eventual destruction of Rome, over which he again sings and plays his lyre. Nero’s responsibility for the Great Fire of ad 64 and his infamous fiddling while Rome burns remain unquestioned in the film, just as they had been in Sienkiewicz’s novel, in the writings of Christian apologists since antiquity, and in the popular imagination ever after. Today, ‘modern scholarship has generally absolved the emperor’ from being responsible for the burning of Rome.7 But the film gives Nero’s poetic and musical performance during his banquet a clever twist. Since almost none of Nero’s poetry survives, something had to be invented—or better, imported from an attested source. As a result, Nero plays on his lyre an adaptation of the Greek Seikilos inscription, an epitaph possibly dating to the second century ad.8 Composer Miklós Rózsa, who conducted extensive research into ancient music, deserves credit for this choice. He reports in an essay written shortly after completion of his score: Greek civilization and religion dominated Roman life and Nero himself preferred to speak Greek rather than Latin . . . the music of the Romans cannot be separated from its Greek models and ideas. It was, therefore, not incorrect to reconstruct this music from Greek examples. . . . The Skolion of Sikilos, which is perhaps the oldest known musical relic with a definite melody in our modern sense, became the basic idea from which I developed Nero’s first song, ‘The Burning of Troy’.9 6  Cf. Sienkiewicz 2016 [1896]: 533–4. 7  Champlin 2003: 183, and see further the appendix to this chapter. 8  Pöhlmann and West 2001: 88–91 no. 23 give a transcription and commentary, with numerous references. The inscription has been variously dated; the date here cited is that of Pöhlmann and West. See further Solomon 1986. 9  Rózsa 1951, quoted from its reprint in Cooke  2010: 165–71, at 168–9. The spelling ‘Sikilos’ is unobjectionable. Rózsa also mentions other Greek and early Christian sources. His misspelling ‘sitientos’ (169) in the Gregorian Omnes sitientes venite ad aquas has been variously repeated. Also ‘Aeterna Conditor’ (170) should be corrected to Aeterne rerum conditor (the title of an Ambrosian hymn) and ‘Libera me domie’ (171) to Libera me domine (Gregorian). See further Rózsa 1988: 163–71;

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232  Martin M. Winkler A skolion is a musical performance at a banquet. The inscription’s short text is an exhortation to enjoy life, hence it is sometimes referred to as a skolion. The epitaph reads, in somewhat free translation: As long as you live, shine. Do not wholly yield to grief. Life exists only for a short while. Time demands an end.

But these are not the words Nero sings. Actor Peter Ustinov was given the following lyrics instead: O-O, O lambent flame! O-O, O force divine! O omnivorous power, hail! None is there swifter to bring destruction, Yet carefree as a child thou, with wild breezes playing. The old Troy shall be no more because of thee, thou harvester, that strips the soil for man to sow new crops. O-O, O lambent flame! O-O, O force divine! O omnivorous power, hail!

The poet here is British-born Hugh Gray, who received credit for ‘lyrical compositions’ and as historical adviser. Gray was a polymath with a strong interest in the cinema.10 Rózsa, who worked closely with Gray on Quo Vadis, had only praise for him: ‘Hugh Gray . . . displayed great feeling for the style and character . . . of antiquity.’11 And of Nero, at least of the Nero familiar at his time. His lyrics for the Seikilos melody are wholly convincing as verse. They are both elegantly archaic in their wording (for example, ‘thou harvester’) and Palmer 1990: 212–16; Meyer 2015: 74–95 and 245–7, with ‘O lambent flames’ (cf. below) and misspelling ‘Seikolos’ throughout. On Rózsa in general see Palmer 1975. 10 On Gray see Hawkins, Young, and Goodman  1985. Gray contributed to the screenplays of Ulysses and Helen of Troy, but was not the sole writer. Gray also worked on the ill-fated Loves of Three Queens (1954). One of these is Helen of Troy, played by Hedy Lamarr. 11  Rózsa 1951 in Cooke 2010: 170.

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MGM ’ s Quo Vadis  233 alien to modern sensibilities, as through the absence of rhyme. But they are also, and doubtless intentionally, overwrought (for example, ‘carefree as a child thou’) and will have struck the ears of most audiences at the time as bordering on the absurd. In other words, they are just right for this kind of Nero. Equally, Ustinov was just right for Rózsa’s Nero, for he was ‘a man with an encyclopedic knowledge . . . . I arranged for him to be coached in Nero’s songs, and also to have lessons with a harpist, so that he would be able to strum his lyre convincingly’ (Rózsa 1988: 167). During filming, Ustinov writes in his memoirs, ‘I was sent to the Rome Opera House for three singing lessons, in the belief that such a crash course might make of me another Mario Lanza as I sang my lament to the burning city.’ The advice Ustinov received from his music professor (‘breathe with the forehead’; ‘think with the diaphragm’; ‘sing . . . with the eye’—the ellipsis is for emphasis; Ustinov 1977: 244–5) makes it look like a miracle that Ustinov actually succeeded. What he remembers about his fiddling and singing while Rome was burning is equally vivid (Ustinov 1977: 245–6): The heat was absolutely tremendous . . . . To add to the heat of the sun, braziers were burning all around us, shedding black ash on our togas, and the [stage] lights bored into us from above. A gallant lady harpist from the American Academy in Rome sat, drenched in perspiration, on a podium, waiting to accompany my hand movements on the lyre with her daintier sounds . . . thin green rivers began snaking their way down my face from my laurel wreath, which was made of inferior metal, with a horrible ferrous odor. It was utter misery in this creative cauldron, and I feared for the health of the older actors . . . . A miniature of Rome caught fire to add to the inferno, and a back-projection screen came alive with visual pyrotechnics behind us. At last we were ready to shoot. I recalled the words of my crazed song . . . and cleared what throat I could still sense . . . . Then the balcony began to shake, indicating that someone was scaling it. Mervyn’s head appeared over the battlements, cigar gripped between his teeth . . . . Waving his Havana at the burning city, he said quietly, ‘Don’t forget, you’re responsible for all this’.

Ustinov, master raconteur that he was, exhibits Petronius’s own spirit and wit. ‘Life deserves laughter, hence people laugh at it,’ Sienkiewicz’s Petronius had observed (Sienkiewicz 2016 [1896]: 22). If Quo Vadis is today best known for Ustinov, who was nominated for an Academy Award as best supporting actor, then it is likely that Rózsa and Gray

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234  Martin M. Winkler contributed greatly to the lasting appeal of his characterization of Rome’s most infamous emperor. Besides being an artist with a serious inferiority complex toward his predecessors in the history of epic composition since Homer, this Nero is by turns infantile and petulant, cruel and cowardly, and as predictable in his insecurities as he is unpredictable in his sadistic delight in the pain and suffering of others. Nero’s phrase ‘spectacle of terror’, about what he intends to unleash on the hapless Christian victims to divert suspicion after the Fire aptly characterizes himself. Ustinov further reports that, when tested for the part by writer-director John Huston, who had been set to direct the film before LeRoy was assigned, ‘I threw everything I knew into this test, and to my surprise John Huston did little to restrain me, encouraging me in confidential whispers to be even madder’ (Ustinov 1977: 241). The excess of epic Hollywood cinema easily lends itself to mockery, being anything but spoof-proof. As Ustinov himself put it: ‘I’ve always thought that only the Americans can do Ancient Rome pictures. Both cultures have the same kind of relaxed, rangy pomp. Both have exactly the same kind of bad taste.’12 American bad taste about the Romans comes in quite a variety. Here is one example, which is also a comic homage to Ustinov’s Nero. Mel Brooks’s History of the World, Part I (1981) is an episodic parody of history films. In ‘The Roman Empire’, its longest segment, Brooks tried his hand at an outrageous Quo Vadis travesty. His emperor is unnamed except in the film’s final credits (‘Emperor Nero’). To anyone who remembers Quo Vadis, it is immediately evident that Brooks modelled him on Ustinov’s portrayal. Parodying the man-eating Poppaea of Quo Vadis, this empress is simply and straightforwardly called Nympho. ‘It’s lonely to be an emperor,’ wails Ustinov’s Nero at one point, while Brooks’s emperor offers this variation: ‘It’s so lonely at the top of Olympus.’ Chubby comic Dom DeLuise is suitably effeminate and tasteless. This emperor also has a poetic fixation: ‘The Muse is upon me!’ His obsequious major-domo announces: ‘All be quiet! His Divine Immortality has consented to favor us with a new poem. Speak, o glorious Caesar!’ Caesar commands: ‘Bring me a small lyre!’ Two huge soldiers now come into the hall carrying a tiny man, who immediately and vigorously protests his innocence: ‘I didn’t do it! I didn’t do it! I wasn’t even there. I was at a friend’s house. The check is in the mail.’ The lyre turns out to be a liar. The emperor makes sure that benighted viewers who might not immediately get the joke are not left in

12  Quoted from Elley 1984: vi. Elley’s source appears to be Ustinov 1977, which is not in his bibliography; if so, his citation is incorrect.

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MGM ’ s Quo Vadis  235 the dark: ‘Not that kind of liar!’ The wordplay is anything but subtle, but the joke is effective. One particular tribute to Ustinov’s Nero, as charming as it is surprising, is right on the mark. It comes from Spanish director José Ramón Larraz, who has acquired a small cult following for his unique horror and erotic ex­ploit­ ation films. In an interview Larraz once explained the power of cinema on viewers’ emotions by taking himself as an example: When I go to the cinema or I watch television, I become Manicheist, I become cruel, I become everything! That is the miracle of the film, that you participate in things that you never [actually] participate [in]. I become voyeur, Peeping Tom, everything I am not, or maybe I am and I don’t know that I am. The other day I was watching Quo Vadis. Well. When I watch Quo Vadis—I am not believer, I am not Christian, I am nothing of this kind. But immediately I took part for the Christian[s] because—Deborah Kerr, beautiful; Robert Taylor—and I hated the nasty Romans, except that Nero, because Peter Ustinov was adorable. [Chuckles.] It’s impossible to hate Nero when you watch that film.13

Larraz had just the right ‘take’ on Ustinov’s Nero.

Lygia: Spectacle ‘More and more the people need diversion. . . . They demand a spectacle,’ observes Nero early in MGM’s Quo Vadis. So they do. Romans had gladia­tor­ ial combat and chariot races; we have the cinema, one of our chief sources for vicarious violence staged and edited so convincingly that it is sometimes impossible to tell fakery from reality. We willingly suspend our disbelief, but we know that nobody dies on screen. We also know that no camera could have recorded anything set in a distant past, even if it looks completely real. The most thrilling part of Sienkiewicz’s story is Lygia’s fate in the arena. It is worth considering as an illustration of the nature of storytelling. A novel tells; a film shows. Authors can easily describe any kind of action without having to make it happen; film-makers, at least in the age before digital effects, must put something real before their cameras, although they can resort to various 13  My quotation is from Larraz Speaks! An Interview with the Director of The Coming of Sin (2000), available on a British DVD release (‘A Pagan Presentation’) of his film The Coming of Sin.

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236  Martin M. Winkler kinds of trickery. Here is the description of Lygia and Ursus, her protector, in Sienkiewicz: into the arena rushed . . . an enormous German aurochs, bearing on his head the naked body of a woman . . . in the arena something uncommon . . . happened. That Lygian [Ursus], obedient and ready to die, when he saw his queen on the horns of the wild beast, sprang up . . . and bending forward he ran at the raging animal….The Lygian fell on the raging bull in a twinkle, and seized him by the horns. . . . The man’s feet sank in the sand to his ankles, his back was bent like a drawn bow, his head was hidden between his shoulders, on his arms the muscles came out so that the skin almost burst from their pressure; but he had stopped the bull in his tracks . . . . But in that apparent repose there was a tremendous exertion of two struggling forces. The bull sank his feet as well as did the man in the sand, and his dark, shaggy body was curved so that it seemed a gigantic ball . . . the man and the beast continued on in their monstrous exertion. . . . the enormous head of the bull began to turn in the iron hands of the barbarian. The face, neck, and arms of the Lygian grew purple; his back bent still more. It was clear that he was rally­ing the remnant of his superhuman strength, but that he could not last long. Duller and duller, hoarser and hoarser, more and more painful grew the groan of the bull as it mingled with the whistling breath from the breast of the giant. The head of the beast turned more and more, and from his jaws crept forth a long, foaming tongue. A moment more, and to the ears of spectators sitting nearer came as it were the crack of breaking bones; then the beast rolled on the earth with his neck twisted in death. The giant removed in a twinkle the ropes from the horns of the bull and, raising the maiden, began to breathe hurriedly.  (Sienkiewicz 2016 [1896]: 497–9)14

Such a spectacular action sequence, featuring a huge and ferocious animal, a Herculean strongman, and a pure damsel in extremis is irresistible as spec­ tacle. Accordingly, countless images, such as cover illustrations of new editions of the novel, film posters, and other advertisements displayed Ursus 14  Just such an animal may be described by Calpurnius Siculus, Eclogues 7.61–3. The arena in which it appears is either the wooden amphitheatre built by Nero or the Colosseum built later. On this scene see also Skwara in this volume.

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MGM ’ s Quo Vadis  237 heroically struggling with the animal to whet readers’ or filmgoers’ a­ ppetites.15 But how could it be put on screen? Sienkiewicz prepared his readers well before they were to encounter the beast. When Ursus happens to mention one, Vinicius remembers: ‘He had seen in circuses the terrible urus, brought from wildernesses of the north, against which the most daring bestiarii went with dread, and which yielded only to elephants in size and strength’ (Sienkiewicz 2016 [1896]: 214). The 1913 film of the novel, directed by Enrico Guazzoni, shows us only a few seconds’ worth of footage. Since the aurochs (or urus, bos primigenius) is long extinct, a large but familiar kind of bull comes bouncing, not raging, into the arena. On its back, not between its horns, it carries a fully dressed dummy. The 1925 version, co-directed by Gabriellino D’Annunzio and Georg Jacoby, is comparable. The two films’ advertising posters are far more dramatic than their screen images, even though they do not move.16 The 2001 Polish version directed by Jerzy Kawalerowicz presents a strong contrast.17 The actress playing Lygia is tied diagonally across a bull’s back. For this reason the animal cannot be raging. Lygia is not unconscious. When ne­ces­sary, the actress keeps her balance by lifting up her head and shoulders a little. This is most noticeable near the end, when Ursus forces the bull down to the ground. Lygia is naked except for a kind of garland of leaves and blossoms around her middle; this modest change from the novel is appropriate and fully acceptable. Parts of her chest are visible in side views or high-angle shots. Her nipples are covered by strands of her long blonde hair. These are never dislodged, not even when the bull throws its weight around or falls on its side. All the other locks of her hair move realistically. The contrast destroys the realism of the staging. Kawalerowicz disguises the fakery involved by resorting to jerky camera movements and rapid editing. In less than three minutes the scene is over. This time includes cutaway shots on Petronius and Vinicius and on Nero. By contrast, LeRoy’s was and is the most suspenseful cinematic staging of Ursus’s fight with the bull. He and his screenwriters carefully prepared their audiences. Poppaea inspects a bull and observes in anticipation, ‘It will be like a fresco from Crete, the maiden sacrificed to the Minotaur. It will be a

15  On the lasting appeal of Ursus see Dall’Asta and Faccioli in this volume. 16  Compare Mayer in this volume on the difficulty of staging the confrontation between Ursus and the aurochs. 17  It exists as a theatrical release that is almost three hours long and as a television version of four and a half hours. Their differences do not pertain to my argument here. See further Ostrowska in this volume.

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238  Martin M. Winkler spec­tacle worthy of the eyes of the emperor.’ She then addresses the animal: ‘I  promise you a rare playmate for your lonely horns, to fondle and caress.’ Viewers have not been given any clue about what this may mean, and their expectations are heightened accordingly. Since audiences were no longer satisfied with silent-film limitations, but long before digital effects made the impossible possible, LeRoy and his writers approached their spectacular set piece in a spirit of compromise, as it might be called. Tying a film star to a wild animal was out of the question; tying a dummy to the bull or dressing a stuntwoman—if any could be found—as Lygia would risk appearing bogus to discerning viewers. So audiences get something new. Lygia is not tied to her bull but to a wooden stake. And of course she is not naked. She wears a thin but unrevealing dress. Ursus’s fight with the bull takes up about two and a half minutes; as usual, reaction shots are intercut. The yells and cheers of the crowd, cranked up on the soundtrack, and an introductory fanfare played on brass instruments enhance the all-round excitement. LeRoy cleverly films and edits Ursus and the bull in such a way that he pre-empts any disappointment among those of his viewers who may remember Lygia’s original ordeal from the novel. The bull, on first emerging, seems unsure of what to do; he stops and looks around as if wondering why he is even there. Rather than raging, the bull is attacked, as it were, by Ursus, who advances into an extreme close-up from the bull’s point of view. Such a shot is highly unusual for the classic style of Hollywood film-making. It is followed by an extreme close-up on the bull’s head, whose black hide reinforces the animal’s menace. In another close-up Ursus cautiously draws closer; the bull still hesitates. Close-ups on Lygia are intercut to rack up viewers’ emotional involvement, even though the bull has shown no interest in her. And why should he? What, we might ask LeRoy and his writers, is a bull to do with a maiden in her situation? Herein lies a dramatic illogicality, but one that no viewer is apt to notice in all the excitement. LeRoy’s version thus begins with a dramatic handicap. But he, and especially his editor, overcome it splendidly. The massive frame of heavyweight boxing champion Buddy Baer, who played Ursus, also helped focus viewers’ attention (Figure 13.3). In long shot we see Ursus close to the animal, which runs toward him. Their fight is on. Ursus grabs it by the horns, is whirled around, and then thrown into the dust. He rallies. Careful inspection of the footage reveals that LeRoy’s editor repeats the same action already shown, filmed from a different perspective. It is only sensible that an action sequence like this should be covered from several angles. Then Ursus hangs onto the bull’s horns and, in tight close-up, wrestles

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MGM ’ s Quo Vadis  239

Fig. 13.3  Bodybuilder Buddy Baer as Ursus, with Lygia in the background. © The Jerry Murbach Collection.

with the animal. In long shot he throws it to the ground and breaks its neck. The sound of breaking bone is clearly audible. In his memoir (LeRoy 1974), Mervyn LeRoy recalls amusing details about the Christians and the lions but nothing about Ursus and the bull. Ustinov was not so reticent. A ‘fighting bull’ appeared at the beginning of the sequence but proved rather too high-spirited (Ustinov 1977: 247 and 248): ‘Out of prudence, the idea of a bull . . . was rejected . . . . Consequently a chloroformed cow was selected, placed in such a way that the udders were invisible. Unfortunately every time that Buddy Baer twisted its neck, this had the effect of bringing the poor animal to, and everytime [sic] Buddy stood in triumph with his foot on its carcass, the cow looked up at him and mooed pathetically.’ Small wonder that the most gigantic adaptation of Sienkiewicz’s epic novel should become the most famous. In spite of changes, it manages to reproduce the spirit of Sienkiewicz’s invention. Ustinov as Nero finds the whole spectacle terrific: ‘Superb, Poppaea! Magnificent!’ Ustinov as chronicler sees the humour in the laborious process of getting it to have that effect on audiences.

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240  Martin M. Winkler The sequence with Ursus and the bull in the Italian television adaptation of 1985, directed by Franco Rossi and about six hours long, follows primarily LeRoy’s set-up. Rossi had nothing like LeRoy’s budget, so everything is on a smaller scale. The arena appears almost claustrophobic, not least because Lygia’s ordeal occurs after dark.18 A row of torches barely lights the scene. Lygia is tied to the base of a massive column, with her arms pulled far back. The bull, when first seen, is standing still. It then slowly approaches Ursus, who seizes it by the horns. Their struggle is largely stationary and takes up about two minutes. The sequence is unique among film versions for the time of day at which it is set, and it is effective enough. But its grip on our emotions is only limited. LeRoy’s version remains superior to all others. Sienkiewicz gave his strongman an appropriate name. Ursus is Latin for ‘bear’. Serendipitously, the actual surname of the actor who played Ursus in LeRoy’s film is the German noun for ‘bear’ (Bär, with ae a possible substitute for ä). Ursus, who first appeared on screen in 1913, became father to similar screen heroes, culminating in the Hercules of Steve Reeves (Hercules, 1958; Hercules Unchained or Hercules and the Queen of Lydia, 1959).19 These films were made in Italy and eventually flooded the European and American markets. A series of nine films about Ursus began in 1961 with Mighty Ursus (later retitled, counter-mythologically, Ursus, Son of Hercules) and ended in 1964 with Three Avengers. In The Rebel Gladiators (or Ursus, the Rebel Gladiator, 1962), Ursus was played by American muscleman Dan Vadis. The first of the Ursus films also places its hero in familiar circumstances. An evil queen orders virgins to be sacrificed to a bull god in the arena. Ursus to the rescue! He frees one such innocent, who is tied to the arena wall, and then leads a revolt against the queen and her henchmen. This is less a homage to Quo Vadis than a rip-off. Ursus’s fight against a mighty black bull follows the pattern established by Baer’s Ursus. The later version is impressive because Ursus gets thrown around a lot. But the staging and editing are otherwise perfunctory. At least the actor who played this Ursus, bodybuilder Ed Fury, has a suitably heroic name. In 1996 Fury was prehistoric caveman Ur-so in the American Dinosaur Valley Girls. But there is no bull. Another fictive son of Hercules takes a rhinoceros by the horns in Anthar l’invincibile (‘Anthar the Invincible’; English-language release title The Slave Merchants, 1964). This is just the tip of the iceberg. 18  It is unclear why Scodel and Bettenworth 2009: 106 should maintain that it is ‘set during the day’. Sienkiewicz set his scene in the evening, although presumably not this late (1896: 493). The other films and their advertising materials as well as other paintings and drawings understandably favour broad daylight. 19  On these interchangeable strongmen see Casadio 2007 and Dall’Asta and Faccioli in this volume.

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MGM ’ s Quo Vadis  241

God: Quo vadis, Domine? The Latin title of Sienkiewicz’s novel has become a household phrase. The expression occurs in early Christian literature about the martyrdom of St Peter.20 Sienkiewicz’s adaptation of Christ’s epiphany to St Peter outside Rome quotes both Peter and the divine voice and adheres to the common understanding of the moment. Peter: ‘Quo vadis, Domine?’ The Lord: ‘If thou desert [sic, for ‘desertest’] my people, I am going to Rome to be crucified a second time.’ Sienkiewicz returns to the fateful encounter of God and man at the conclusion of his novel: ‘Near the ancient Porta Capena stands to this day a little chapel with the inscription, somewhat worn: Quo vadis, Domine?’ (Sienkiewicz 2016 [1896]: 515 and 541). Sienkiewicz saw the chapel and the inscription himself. LeRoy’s version expands on the novel. Peter sees a supernatural light, recognizes the presence of his Lord, and asks, first in Latin and then in English translation for the benefit of Latinless viewers: ‘What is wrong, o Lord? What should I do? I’m weary. How should I follow Thee now?’ Then, in medium close-up: ‘Quo vadis, Domine? Wither goest Thou, Lord?’ For greater realism and presumably to avoid disbelief or ridicule from the insufficiently devout in the audience, it is Peter’s companion, the boy Nazarius, who answers him, speaking for God. Since Nazarius is close to Nazarenus (‘Nazarene’), the change was inspired (Figure 13.4). At the end of this scene, as at the end of the film, a choir of men and women sings ‘Quo vadis, domine?’ The latter is a long reprise, presumably as an equivalence for Sienkiewicz’s mention of the chapel. The choir functions as representative of mankind. The question, it is implied, could be everybody’s; all could and should heed the divine response. In the final voice-over, male and female voices quote Jesus: ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life’ (John 14:6). The god of Christianity has found universal acceptance. In a concluding remark, the co-translator of a recent German edition of the novel characterized the addressee of its titular question as replaceable.21 Scodel and Bettenworth (2009: 226n. 4) interpret his comment as meaning that ‘Jesus could be cut from the eponymous Quo Vadis scene’ and conclude, ‘such an omission . . . would render the entire scene obsolete or bizarre’. But the comment only indicates, quite correctly, that the question, by itself, is 20 References, with quotations of all texts and commentary on all passages, appear in Zwierlein 2010: 82–92. 21  Erb 1994: 622: ‘Daß Sienkiewicz’s Roman noch immer den Leser fasziniert, mag auch mit dem (durchaus ersetzbaren) Adressaten seiner Titelfrage zusammenhängen: Quo vadis, . . .?’.

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242  Martin M. Winkler

Fig. 13.4  The divine epiphany in Quo Vadis. Frame enlargement.

universally applicable. It is one of the chief reasons why the novel continues to fascinate a century later, as do the films named after it. This becomes evident from the fact that the words quo vadis today recur in any context from pol­it­ ical journalism to the names of travel agencies. God and religion do not play any part. Two films illustrate this point. Upon its release in 1972, Bernardo Bertolucci’s French–Italian production Last Tango in Paris was considered to be shocking because it includes several explicit scenes of casual sex and even rape. The affair of expatriate American Paul and Parisian Jeanne begins with sexual violence and ends with his death at her hands. Both are emotionally vulnerable and unstable. At one point Jeanne intends to leave Paul—among other things, she mutters ‘I’m never coming back’—and walks toward the door. Paul, who has not heard her, approaches and asks, ‘Quo vadis, baby?’ This phrase inspired Italian novelist and playwright Grazia Verasani’s neo-noir thriller Quo vadis, baby? of 2004. It was adapted to the screen in Gabriele Salvatores’s thriller Quo vadis, Baby? (2005), co-written by Verasani and himself. The titular expression is heard twice; its second appearance is a direct homage to Bertolucci’s film: ‘I’ll never come back. You’ll never see me again.’—‘Quo vadis, baby?’

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MGM ’ s Quo Vadis  243

4.  Return of The Big One Like its source, MGM’s Quo Vadis has proven popular and enduring over ­several decades. The most recent homage to it appears in Joel and Ethan Coen’s Hail, Caesar! (2016), a comedy that is too gentle and affectionate to suit the often dark and outrageously antic spirit of its makers. In their film, set in 1951, the producer of a Roman epic is previewing some of its footage. This fictional producer is modelled on Eddie Mannix, a long-time power behind the scenes at MGM, who reported from Rome on the progress of Quo Vadis to the studio boss in Hollywood.22 In the Coens’ film, Mannix’s (invented) spectacle is called, intentionally incongruously, Hail Caesar! A Tale of the Christ. We see Mannix watching the rushes of the prologue, which is modelled on those of LeRoy’s Quo Vadis and, to a smaller extent, on Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960). Quo Vadis, an earnest and serious epic intended for its audience’s edification, has the most elaborate prologue of all of Hollywood’s films set in the Roman Empire.23 The noticeably briefer prologue to Hail Caesar! A Tale of the Christ riffs on it. The actual narrator in LeRoy’s film of 1951 told us, over shots of the actual Appian Way, ‘On this road march her conquering legions. Imperial Rome . . . is undisputed master of the world.’ The fictive narrator of the 1951 film in production within the Coen brothers’ film states that ‘Rome’s legions are masters of the world’. The Appian Way, however, looks suspiciously like southern California. (It is.) In Quo Vadis we were informed: ‘There is no escape from the whip and the sword.’ At the same time we saw a legionary whip prisoners of war. The narrator of Hail Caesar! A Tale of the Christ follows suit: ‘oppressed people everywhere writhe under the Roman lash.’ The proof is again put before our eyes. The earlier narrator soared to heights of alliterative rhetoric about Rome (‘this pyramid of power and corruption’); so does the later: ‘that edifice wrought of brick and blood’. The clincher comes when Vinicius, the leader of the legion, calls out to his second in command in Quo Vadis: ‘Well, there it stands—Rome’, and is echoed by his reincarnation sixty-five years later: ‘There she is, Gracchus—ah, what a beauty! . . . To Rome!’ Both look at the city from a hilltop. Their films’ viewers see comparable matte paintings of Rome in extreme long shot, with an eagle circling above. The two films corroborate, wholly unintentionally, Karl Marx’s bon mot about history repeating itself. Nero’s history is repeated first as melodramatic tragedy of

22  On Mannix, see Fleming 2005.

23  On this, see Winkler 2008: 63–6.

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244  Martin M. Winkler sorts in Quo Vadis, then as farce in Hail, Caesar! A Tale of the Christ. The Coen brothers, as clever as they are irreverent, pay homage to the Hollywood studio system in a manner that both witty and affectionate. Tellingly if not surprisingly, ‘The Big One’ from MGM returns to the big screen as a kind of epitome of golden-age film-making. Sienkiewicz, who set all this in motion, might have been surprised, but it is unlikely that he would be displeased. In other words: Well, there it stands—Quo Vadis!

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14 ‘O omnivorous powers, hail!’ Film Dialogue in Quo vadis (1951) Monika Woźniak

Dialogue in Historical Films Dialogue is arguably the weakest element of the so-called ‘historical authenticity’ that historical film productions which engage ambitiously with the past (Stubbs 2013: 41) crave to achieve.1 There are two main reasons why it is so arduous to emulate in a film the way people used to talk long ago. Firstly, we do not know how people really spoke in the distant past. As Marguerite Yourcenar once commented astutely (Yourcenar 1990: 34), ‘although we possess an enormous mass of written documents, and also visual documents, from the past, nothing is left to us of voices before the first nasal-sounding phonograph records of the nineteenth century. What is more, as far as the representation of speech is concerned, nothing, or virtually nothing, was achieved before certain great novelists or dramatists of the nineteenth ­century.’ While the author of Memoirs of Hadrian was referring to historical fiction, the problem appears even more clearly in film productions: written dialogue does not impose itself on the reader with the same immediacy as the spoken word pronounced by the actor pretending to be a historical figure. Verbal communication in historical productions is therefore largely based on the suspension of disbelief, as the audience must gloss over the traces of an Australian accent in the voice of Robin Hood when played by Russell Crowe (2010) or Al Pacino’s Brooklyn accent when he pretends to be a hero of the American Revolutionary War in Revolution (1985). Secondly, the emulation of dialogue from the distant past cannot involve a very extensive archaic language for purely practical reasons: it has to be comprehensible to modern audiences. 1 This chapter has been written as a part of Research Project 2bH 15 0136 83//0136/NPRH4/ H2b/83/2016.

Monika Woz´niak, ‘O omnivorous powers, hail!’: Film Dialogue in Quo vadis (1951) In: The Novel of Neronian Rome and its Multimedial Transformations: Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis. Edited by: Monika Woz´niak and Maria Wyke, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198867531.003.0014

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246  Monika Woźniak The stylistic strategies used in literature to render historical dialogue plaus­ible may vary slightly in different countries and cultures, but the most common and widely applied is so-called ‘hybridization’.2 The result is always an impression rather than a recreation of the language of a past age, based on the introduction of some linguistic elements that create an aura of historicity without compromising the intelligibility of the text. Literary texts sometimes venture into a more extensive imitation of historical speech but, as Stocker mentions, that ‘is only possible in those eras or countries close enough to us culturally and linguistically that a phrase book is not required’ (2012: 312). At any rate, that strategy is not advisable for historical film dialogue which must be immediately accessible and comprehensible to viewers, occasionally also helping them to understand the meaning of the unfamiliar visual elements present on the screen (Hołobut, Woźniak 2017). The language used in such productions tends, therefore, to be relatively realistic in narratives about the recent past, but makes only minimal concessions to archaic forms in films that are set in a more distant era. However, nowhere is the artificiality of cinema’s historical dialogue laid bare more evidently than in films set in antiquity which require the viewer to embrace the complete fiction of a language claiming to be another: in the case of representations of ancient Rome, Latin transformed into standard modern English. Perhaps it was this clamorous incongruity between the detailed visual reconstruction of ancient splendour and the ‘Good Morning’ pronounced by a Roman patrician which made the peplums produced in Hollywood in the 1950s so hateful to critics, even if their resounding success at the box office indicates that their audience tended to be more forgiving (Richards 2008: 54). The revival of interest in big epic productions about classical antiquity, rekindled by Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000), brought back the problem of plausible dialogue, especially in the new cultural and political context of the twenty-first century, when much more attention is paid to issues of polycentric linguistic realities and their implications. Quo vadis appears to be dream material for a study of the linguistic strat­ egies used to create ‘ancient Roman’ dialogue. Originally a hugely successful novel by Henryk Sienkiewicz, which aided him in winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1905, it has been adapted to both big and small screen several times, in different languages and for different audiences. Obviously, the silent-era 2  Stocker 2012: 314–16 distinguishes between three techniques that may be employed in recreating historical speech in literature: ‘immersion’, ‘hybridization’, and ‘reader guidance’. In immersion, vocabulary, sentence structure, and spelling are all faithfully reproduced, and the reader must adapt himself or herself to the language of another age. Hybridization is a style of writing that is inaccurate but plausible and ‘adapted to today’s reader’. Reader guidance may include a glossary of those terms with which the reader is likely to be unfamiliar or an author’s note in the front of the book in which such terms are explained.

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‘ O omnivorous powers, hail! ’   247 film adaptations directed by Guazzoni (1913) and Jacoby and D’Annunzio (1925) may be only of very limited interest as far as dialogue is concerned.3 However, three post-war productions—LeRoy’s Hollywood epic from 1951, the Italian TV series broadcast in 1985, and the Polish film of 2001 directed by Jerzy Kawalerowicz—give a fascinating insight into the varied approaches taken to the original literary model and the stylistic strategies adopted in three separate linguistic, temporal, and cultural contexts. In this chapter, I shall focus on the Quo Vadis directed by Mervyn LeRoy (1951), as it is by far the most widely known and influential of these screen adaptations, and because it is highly representative of the strategies elaborated by screenwriters for mainstream American epics on classical antiquity to create an ‘English’ Latin. In the final part of the chapter, I shall comment briefly on the Italian and Polish adaptations for comparison. The inevitable travesty resulting from modern English that pretends to be Latin does not undermine the need to make their dialogue perform specific functions in films that are set in ancient Rome: to signal the diachronic distance of the world presented on the screen, to highlight its cultural and social specificity, and to help spectators orient themselves in a reality that is not known to them by immediate experience. The simplest solution might seem to be the archaization of the language used: indeed, this strategy can be found in the intertitles of many historical films of the silent period such as Intolerance (1916, dir. D. W. Griffith), but also in the English language version of the film adaptation of Quo vadis? of 1925 (dir. G. Jacoby and G. D’Annunzio), in which one of the titles, for example, describes Nero asking, ‘What thinkest thou of thy Caesar?’ In this case, the intertitles were probably inspired by the archaic style used in the first—and the most popular—American translation of Quo vadis by Jeremiah Curtin (1896). The ‘talkies’, however, mainly for the prac­tical reasons mentioned above, were always resistant to the use of archaic language. In the case of films set in ancient Rome, moreover, the use of archaic ­vocabulary would have added a further fiction to the replacement of ‘­authentic’ Latin with English: forms like ‘thou’ or ‘thinkest’ in fact linguistically evoke ­medieval or Renaissance England, certainly not the Rome of the Caesars. Basing their historical dialogue then on standard modern English, most sound films established an aura of alterity through the use of formal or literary style (and the situation has not substantially changed to this day, despite the occasional linguistic experimentation such as Mel Gibson’s Passion of Christ, 2004), a style dotted with the occasional lexical and semantic archaism that usually referred to the specific elements of material culture typical of the 3  See Dagna, Wyke, and de Berti and Gagetti in this volume.

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248  Monika Woźniak historical era in which a given film was set. In a few cases, however, a ­completely different strategy was used, namely to make historical figures speak colloquial, blatantly anachronistic, English. This kind of linguistic choice served, on the one hand, to create an empathic link between the spectator and the protagonist but, on the other, to build a mental parallel between the historical period reconstructed on screen and the modern world.

Hollywood on the Tiber: Quo Vadis, AD 1951 Curiously, the dialogue in LeRoy’s Quo Vadis does not follow a coherent ­linguistic strategy. Different stylistic registers overlap, and even the same character does not always talk in the same way. Aurally, the film follows the conventional ‘linguistic paradigm’, entrusting the parts of the Roman patricians to British actors. The notable exception, however, is Marcus Vinicius, played by Robert Taylor with a blatant American accent that was promptly noted and ridiculed by critics. Taylor not only has the accent of a ‘cowboy from Nebraska’, but even talks like one, pronouncing in all seriousness lines like ‘Don’t be modest, general’ or ‘You must visit us in Sicily, with Drusilla and the children’ which would be far more appropriate in a film set in 1950s America. The first reviews were ruthless: journalists mocked the lines of the dialogue as ‘so artificial in tone and phrase as to be farcical’ (Knight 1951),4 or ‘harmful to health’ (Winnington 1952), and claimed that the public reacted to the film’s dialogue with general hilarity (Burch  1951). A disgusted Italian critic declared that: [Quo Vadis] leaves the Italian public disturbed and perplexed. We have studied Rome and the Romans in school, and every day along our streets we meet their memories in stone. It cannot give us pleasure to see them camouflaged as clowns, or, to put the best light on it, as cowboys.  (in QV Pardner, 1953)

Interestingly, nowadays in the context of anglophone studies positive opinions on the screenplay prevail; it is considered intelligent and well structured (Richards  2008: 59), and ‘a judicious adaptation of the novel infused with ­historically correct dialogue, producing a series of extraordinary roles that set a high standard for the representation of character in later films of the epic genre’ (Cyrino 2005: 20). Italian and Polish critics, however, often continue to consider the film ‘pompous and boring’ (Giacovelli  2006: 141) or ‘a pious ­simplification’ of the novel (Filler 2001: 180). 4  In spite of his critical take on the film and the dialogue, Knight regarded the script as ‘one of the film’s greatest strengths’.

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‘ O omnivorous powers, hail! ’   249 It is possible that incongruities in the style of the film’s dialogue are ­partially due to external circumstances. Indeed, as often happens with big Hollywood productions, the screenplay went through several stages of composition and was the result of the collaboration of several authors, mainly the trio John Lee Mahin, S. N. Behrman, and Sonya Levien.5 Nevertheless, one might suspect that the screenwriters had actually decided to use a variety of stylistic codes as a way of dealing with the complex polyfunctional role the dialogue had to fulfil in the film. From this perspective, the apparently perplexing decision to transform the protagonist, noble Marcus Vinicius, into a kind of ‘all-American guy’ is perfectly understandable and well motivated. Although Vinicius is a Roman patrician who, at the beginning of the film, appears arrogant and without moral scruple, within the film’s narrative arc he is a character with whom spectators are expected to sympathize. They witness his gradual transformation into a man who, thanks to love and his conversion to Christianity, frees himself of his Roman vices and becomes the leader of a revolt against the tyranny and arrogance of the emperor Nero. So Vinicius, in terms of the  plot, is a good Roman and therefore needs to embody con­tem­por­ary American values—playing out in the classical past the overthrow of modern dictators and the defeat of German Nazism and Russian communism.6 The strategy of presentism prevails in most of the dialogue of Quo Vadis. It not only steers clear of using any Latin expression (‘the only use of Latin in the film is in the title’, noted one scholar),7 but also avoids any specific ter­min­ ology linked to the material culture of Neronian Rome. This reticence appears especially conspicuous when compared to the abundance of Latin expressions and culturally specific terms used in the novel: where Sienkiewicz makes Acte speak of ‘a broad dress called synthesis’ and a ‘peplum’, the film mentions ‘beaded cloth from Persia’ and ‘the strand of fine gold at the waist’; Petronius’s ‘insula’8 becomes simply ‘Petronius’s house’, and the ‘lute called delta’ just ‘the lyre’, and so on. Only a very attentive reading of the screenplay reveals a few concessions to classical names: ‘Macedonian phalanx’, ‘Tribune’, and the expressions ‘what in the name of Jupiter’ or ‘by the body of Juno’.

5  See all Stubbs in this volume. 6  Before the part went to Robert Taylor, Vinicius was to be played by another American actor, Gregory Peck, so the idea of introducing an ‘American’ protagonist was obviously already present in the screenplay. 7 Briggs 2008: 195. To be precise, the film introduces one utterance in Latin: when Saint Peter meets Christ on the Via Appia, he asks first in English, ‘Where are you going, Lord?’, then in Latin, ‘Quo vadis, domine?’. 8  In fact, Sienkiewicz, who called Petronius’s luxurious villa ‘insula’, had made a mistake, confusing ‘insula’, that is a multistorey building that housed poor people, with ‘domus’, the name reserved for the urban private home. See Skwara in this volume.

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250  Monika Woźniak Interaction between individuals is shaped by a series of rules dictated by the social structure of a given culture, and both these rules and the way they are communicated linguistically change with time, reflecting the evolution of a given society. The linguistic question, then, that invariably creates problems in all historical films is the pragmatic dimension of dialogue—above all, honorifics and forms of address. In the case of Quo Vadis (and all other films about ancient Rome), however, the need is not only to reconstruct hierarchies and interactions typical of a culture located in a remote era, but also to express them in a language (English) that is ruled by a system of polite forms totally incompatible with the Latin system. In fact, when dealing with honorifics and forms of address, the screenwriters decided to ‘Americanize’ not only the Latin language but also the Roman society presented on the screen. The strategy of domestication is noticeable above all in the use of military ranks. Marcus Vinicius is addressed as ‘general’ or alternatively ‘commander’. Both honorifics are clearly anachronistic. ‘General’, in its meaning of military rank, dates back to the late sixteenth century: it is an abbreviation of the French rank capitaine général. ‘Commander’, also of old French origin (comandeor), entered into use in the first half of the fourteenth century. Fabius Nerva, Marcus’s friend and subordinate, is identified with the correct Latin military term of ‘tribune’, but the Praetorian Guard seems to be headed by ‘captains’ undoubtedly transported directly back by a time machine from the late sixteenth century.9 Equally anachronistically, the patricians when talking to each other use typical English forms of address, with recurring nominal forms such as ‘gentlemen’, ‘my lord’, ‘lady’, and ‘sir’. Table  14.1 provides further ex­amples of such domestication in modes of address. Nominal forms which are part of the English address system may seem ‘invisible’ to an English-speaking spectator, but combined in the dialogue with anachronistic honorifics and colloquial language they can give the surreal impression that you are watching a film in which modern characters have dressed, on some bizarre whim, in Roman togas. Such is the case, for ex­ample, in the scene where Marcus Vinicius demands an audience with the Emperor (Figure 14.1). Marcus Vinicius paces nervously back and forth in the v­ estibule, waiting to be admitted into the presence of the emperor, while the praetorian receptionist, positioned behind the check-in counter (covered with documents) 9  Interestingly, some translations, among them the Italian dubbing, rectify linguistic anachronisms in the original dialogue, replacing forms that are too modern or too ‘English’ with the appropriate historical honorifics. The Italian translator replaced ‘commander’ with ‘noble’ Marcus Vinicius, ‘captain’ with ‘centurion’, and, trying to avoid the awkward ‘general’, ended up promoting Marcus Vinicius to the rank of consul. Recent Italian dubbings have slipped from this point of view and, for example, in the Italian dubbing of Gladiator the protagonist is called ‘general’ as in the original version.

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‘ O omnivorous powers, hail! ’   251 Table 14.1  Examples of forms of address in Quo Vadis (1951) (a) The military salute in the opening scene of the film Flavius: Hail, in the name of the divine Nero, prince emperor and supreme pontiff. Vinicius: Hail. Flavius: Captain Flavius, Praetorian Guard, salutes you. The news of your brilliant victories has preceded you to Rome. Vinicius: We’re rather anxious to be there. Lead us in. Flavius: I’m sorry, commander. I have orders. (b) Plautius welcoming Vinicius and Fabius into his home Plautius: I bid you welcome, Marcus Vinicius. Vinicius: I salute the general. (. . .) Plautius: My wife, the Lady Pomponia. Pomponia: Our house is honored to have you as a guest. Vinicius: My tribune, Fabius Nerva. (c) Plautius introducing the Apostle Paul to his guests Plautius: Gentlemen, our friend Paul of Tarsus. (d) Eunice begging her master not to give her away to Vinicius Eunice: Don’t give me away, my lord. Whip me, beat me, but don’t send me from here. (e) The reunion of Petronius and Vinicius at Nero’s palace Petronius: My dear commander, what a proletarian remark. (f) Vinicius waiting to begin his triumph Vinicius: Captain, what’s the delay here? Pretorian: You will hear the trumpets, commander.

takes advantage of the opportunity to seek information on the returning hero’s military accomplishments. Vinicius: Commander Marcus Vinicius. I request an audience with the emperor. Soldier: I will report immediately, commander. Commander, sir, if I might presume, sir . . . there’s been much discussion of your unsurpassed victories. Did you fight the Britons with a mass . . .? Vinicius: We fought with our bowels. Try it sometime. Soldier: Yes, commander.

The colloquial register that dominates in the English dialogue of Quo Vadis is punctuated, however, with occasional intrusions of poetic or archaic styles. They may seem somehow artificial and incongruent at first glance, but in fact they follow a certain logic, being linked to particular characters or situations. A solemn and poetic tone is introduced for all of St Peter’s appearances, above all in the scene at Ostrianum where the Apostle (played by the Scottish actor Finlay Currie) preaches to the Christians and tells them about his encounter with Christ. Examples are laid out in Table 14.2.

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252  Monika Woźniak

Fig. 14.1  Marcus Vinicius demands an audience at Nero’s palace.

Peter uses a rhetorical style and complex syntax in his sermon at Ostrianum, with emphatic repetitions such as ‘Who but the Son of God’, accentuated by the use of archaic forms in direct quotations from the Bible: ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this rock, I will build my church’ (Matthew 16:18); ‘Peter, this night, before the cock crows thou shalt deny me thrice’ (Matthew 26:34). Here the film dialogue follows the strategy Sienkiewicz used in his novel, although the  Polish writer delegated Peter’s sermon mainly to indirect speech.10 The archaic forms ‘goest’, ‘thee’, and ‘thou’ appear also in the famous scene in which Peter meets Christ on the Via Appia when fleeing from Rome (in the film Christ’s words are put in the mouth of the boy Nazarius, who is ac­com­pany­ing the Apostle). The static linguistic register associated with St Peter in the film is compatible with the hagiographic frame in which it places his character. The quotations from the Gospels are sustained visually by a series of pic­tor­ ial allusions, from the tableau vivant evoking Leonardo’s famous Last Supper, or the scene at the Sea of Galilee inspired by Tintoretto (Scodel and Bettenworth 2009: 169), to the Caravaggiesque use of lights in the representation of the dinner at Emmaus and the Crucifixion, while the physical appearance of the Apostle seems inspired by the features that had been attributed to him in the paintings of Rubens. In contrast, the Apostle Paul, who is also one of 10  See Axer in this volume.

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‘ O omnivorous powers, hail! ’   253 Table 14.2  Examples of St Peter’s utterances in Quo Vadis (1951) (a) Peter’s sermon in Ostrianum Unworthy though I am, Jesus said to me: ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.’ . . . He looked at my wonderment and said: ‘Do not be afraid. From henceforth, you shall be a fisher of men.’ He told me to follow him, and I did. I and my brothers, James and John. Throughout the length and breadth of the land, we followed him. Others joined us until besides himself, we were twelve. To the hungry and thirsty, he gave food and drink. To those who were sick and worn and weary, he gave hope and peace. Who but the Son of God could have brought such gifts to man? Who but the Son of God could have commanded the storm to be calm? Who but he could have raised Lazarus of Bethany from the dead and given peace to the heart of Mary Magdalene? And yet, I lived to deny this man. He himself foretold that I would on the night of our last supper. ‘Lord,’ I had said, ‘I am willing to follow you both to prison and to death.’ But he answered: ‘Peter, this night, before the cock crows thou shalt deny me thrice.’ And I did. Three times outside the house of his judges. When they accused me of being with him, I said: ‘I know not the man.’ (b) Peter’s encounter with Christ on the Via Appia (Quo vadis, domine?) How should I follow thee now? Whither goest thou, Lord? (c) Peter praying for the Christians dying in the arena Take thy children, Lord. Numb their wounds, soften their pains. Give them strength, O Savior.

the characters present in the novel and in the film, has been given a less prominent symbolic status and therefore uses ‘normal’, if slightly elevated or metaphorical, language with no inclusion of quotations from the Gospels. Table 14.3 provides some examples of St Paul’s utterances in the film. Literary language also appears in the film’s love scenes and, obviously, in the verses composed by Nero, although in the latter case it is more of a caricature of poetic style. Table 14.4 includes examples of poetry and pseudo-poetry in scenes from Quo Vadis. The archaizing strategy of these utterances can be explained by the type of emotion they are designed to express: Vinicius, when he first encounters Lygia, so falls for her that he forgets his American ways of speaking and greets the unknown girl with phrases inspired by Ovid’s poetry (Scodel and Bettenworth 2009: 54); while the slave Eunice, whose dignified and romantic nature can be deduced from the scene in which she kisses the marble bust of her master,11 recites a quasi-poem to declare the love for him which she does not dare to confess openly. The verses composed by Nero have been invented by the screenwriters.12 In the novel, Sienkiewicz prefers to talk about Nero’s poetry indirectly, mostly from Petronius’s disdainful perspective. The style is 11  On the frequent illustrations made of this scene in Sienkiewicz’s novel, see De Berti and Gagetti in this volume. 12  For the poetry recited by Nero in the film, see Winkler in this volume.

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254  Monika Woźniak Table 14.3  Examples of St Paul’s utterances in Quo Vadis (1951) (a) In Aulus Plautius’s house I saw results of seeds Peter has planted. Green shoots are sprouting. There will be a good harvest. Everywhere, strangers approached and drew the sign of the fish before me. And we spoke of the great work ahead. (b) At Ostrianum I know there are some here who still hold back in doubt. A few who have not accepted baptism. Our Lord Jesus understood that, and he welcomed questions, as is the right of free men. (c) Arguing with Marcus Vinicius I’m glad to see you on your feet again. Last night and this morning, you had us quite concerned. . . . Well, you own slaves, do you not? . . . Jesus wishes no man to be in bondage. You should set them free. . . . you can’t buy human beings, Marcus. Faith in Christ is based on love. He asks all people to love one another.

Table 14.4  Poetry and pseudo-poetry in Quo Vadis (1951) (a) The first encounter of Vinicius and Lygia Vinicius: Behold, she stands with her gown hung loose. Framed is her face in golden tresses, reflecting the milk-white beauty of her shoulders. So it was that Venus stood before Mars, welcoming her lover. (b) Eunice confessing her love for Petronius Eunice: Anon shall Venus rise from out the violet Roman sea and bear two lovers in her arms towards eternity. (c) Nero practising his new song (his first appearance in the film) Nero: O-O-O lambent flames, O-O-O force divine, O omnivorous powers, hail . . .. Omnivorous? Omnipotent. Yes. Omnipotent power, hail. . . . (d) Nero watching Rome burn Nero: Be still, ye hurtling stars. Open wide-vaulted skies above me. Now, at last, lo, I see Olympus. And a light from its summit doth illumine me. I am one with the gods, immortal. I am Nero, the artist who creates with fire, that the dreams of my life may come true. To the flames now I give the past, to the flames and soil Take thou this Rome. Oh, receive her now, ye flames Consume her as would a furnace. Burn on, O ancient Rome, burn on, burn on.

too ridiculous to be traced back to some original classical verses, but the use of archaic forms of English, such as ‘ye’, ‘doth’, and ‘thou’ still gives it the touch of pseudo-history. The Hollywood film Quo Vadis is an adaptation of a famous and acclaimed literary work by an author known for being a great stylist, who was able to

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‘ O omnivorous powers, hail! ’   255 create beguiling emulations of different historical periods in the Polish written word. It might seem logical, therefore, to expect the screenwriters to draw in some way from the dialogue of the novel. It must be kept in mind, though, that in the United States of America the novel was almost exclusively known in translation (the most widely read was the first and not necessarily the best, by Jeremiah Curtin), and it was not treated with the same respect as was reserved for great works of English literature. The scriptwriters, in spite of following the main plot relatively closely, felt free to adapt the novel’s dialogue to their needs. With one notable exception, however: that of the interactions between Petronius and Nero, which have been copied almost verbatim from Jeremiah Curtin’s translation of the novel. Table 14.5 compares words spoken by Petronius in the novel and the film (the translation of Sienkiewicz’s ori­ gin­al Polish is that of Curtin). Petronius, a cynical and refined aristocrat, the arbiter elegantiarum and adviser to Nero in matters of taste, is undoubtedly one of the most exciting characters in the novel. Unlike his nephew, Marcus Vinicius, the impetuous man of action, Petronius uses the weapon of his verbal skills, which reveal his great acumen and quick wit. In the film, from the point of view of its dialogue, it is as if there were two Petroniuses: the character created by Sienkiewicz and the Hollywoodian one. When he is in conversation with Vinicius, Petronius adapts himself to the ‘contemporary’ American style of the script and expresses himself in a direct and simple way: ‘You're gonna spend time with me before you go to your estates in Sicily?’ he asks. When Vinicius reveals his intention to take possession of Lygia, Petronius expresses his objections plainly: ‘But, Marcus, with Plautius regarding her as his daughter, I mean, is this ethical?’ When he is in the imperial palace, however, Petronius becomes the arbiter elegantiarum known from the novel, master of daring verbal manoeuvres that flatter Nero and at the same time mock him. Comparing scenes from the novel with the corresponding film dialogue, it appears that some lines have been taken verbatim from the book (example 1 in Table 14.5), or are just a little condensed (example 2), even if the film opts, predictably, for the forms of standard English, whereas Curtin’s translation resorts to archaization. Even when the dialogue between Petronius and Nero undergoes a more radical transformation, the link with the literary source is still evident. That link is noticeable in example 3, where the mocking farewell letter sent by Petronius to the emperor before committing suicide, although drastically reduced and simplified in comparison to the more flamboyant style of Sienkiewicz’s epistle, nevertheless maintains its rhetorical structure and pungent irony. Similarly, Petronius’s desperate (and failed) attempt to dissuade

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256  Monika Woźniak Table 14.5  Comparison between some lines uttered by Petronius in the translation of the novel by Curtin and in LeRoy’s film   Novel

Film

Petronius: I say that your verses are common and fit only for the fire they celebrate. Nero: What defect dost thou find in them? Nero: What defect do you find in them? Petronius: Thy verses would be worthy of Petronius: Well, your verses would be Virgil, of Ovid, even of Homer, but they are worthy of Ovid, of Virgil, even of Homer. not worthy of thee. Thou art not free to But they are not worthy of you. The write such. The conflagration described by conflagration you describe does not blaze thee does not blaze enough; thy fire is not enough. It is not all consuming. Had hot enough. Listen not to Lucan’s flatteries. Lucan here written these verses, I should Had he written those verses, I should acknowledge him a genius. But you can acknowledge him a genius, but thy case is create a work such as the world has never different. And knowest thou why? Thou art known. Therefore, I say this to your eyes. greater than they. From him who is gifted of Take greater pains. the gods as thou art, more is demanded. . . . Thou canst create a work such as the world has not heard of to this day; hence I tell thee to thy eyes, write better!’ Nero: The gods have given me a little Nero: The gods have given me a certain talent, . . . but they have given me something talent, but they’ve given me something greater, a true judge and friend, the only man greater. A true judge and friend. I thought able to speak the truth to my eyes. (QV XL) it sufficient to equal Homer.

1 Petronius: Common verses, fit for the fire.

2 Petronius: Array a rotten olive trunk in the peplus of a woman, and Vinicius will declare it beautiful. But on thy countenance, incomparable judge, I read her sentence already. . . . I have learned much in thy company, but even now I have not a perfect cast of the eye. But I am ready to lay a wager with Tullius Senecio concerning his mistress, that, although at a feast, when all are reclining, it is difficult to judge the whole form, thou hast said in thy mind already, ‘Too narrow in the hips.’ (QV VII)

Petronius: Put a dress on an olive stump and my poor, untutored nephew would call it beautiful. I know your incomparable judgment, Divinity. And I’ll wager you’ve already decided, even from here that she is too narrow in the hips.

3 Petronius: I know, O Cæsar, that thou art awaiting my arrival with impatience, that thy true heart of a friend is yearning day and night for me. . . . I have taken the most precious jewels from that treasure, but in life there are many things which I cannot endure any longer. Do not suppose, I pray, that I am offended because thou didst kill thy mother, thy wife, and thy brother; that thou didst burn Rome and send to Erebus all the honest men in thy dominions. . . . But to destroy one’s ear for whole years with thy poetry, to see thy belly of a Domitius on slim legs whirled about in Pyrrhic dance; to hear thy music, thy declamation, thy

Petronius: I know that my death will be a disappointment to you since you wished to render me this service yourself. To be born in your reign is a miscalculation but to die in it is a joy. I can forgive you for murdering your wife and your mother, for burning our beloved Rome, for befouling our fair country with the stench of your crimes. But one thing I cannot forgive: the boredom of having to listen to your verses . . . your second-rate songs, your mediocre performances. Adhere to your special gifts, Nero. Murder and arson, betrayal and terror. Mutilate

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‘ O omnivorous powers, hail! ’   257 doggerel verses, wretched poet of the suburbs—is a thing surpassing my power, and it has roused in me the wish to die. . . . Farewell, but make no music; commit murder, but write no verses; poison people, but dance not; be an incendiary, but play not on a cithara. This is the wish and the last friendly counsel sent thee by the—Arbiter Elegantiæ. (QV LXXIII)

your subjects, if you must. But with my last breath, I beg you, do not mutilate the arts. Farewell, but compose no more music. Brutalize the people but do not bore them as you have bored to death your friend the late Gaius Petronius.

4 Petronius: O Cæsar, thou hast threatened us with the sentence of coming ages; but think, those ages will utter judgment concerning thee also. By the divine Clio! Nero, ruler of the world, Nero, a god, burnt Rome, because he was as powerful on earth as Zeus on Olympus—Nero the poet loved poetry so much that he sacrificed to it his country! (. . .) We need not say that the burning of Rome was good, but it was colossal and uncommon. (QV XLVIII)

Petronius: Let future ages, looking back at this time regard Nero with wonder and amazement. Nero, the ruler of the world. Nero, a god, burned Rome because he was as powerful as Jupiter. He loved poetry so much that he sacrificed Rome for a song. History need not say that the burning of Rome was good but it must say that it was colossal, uncommon.

Nero from blaming the Christians for the Fire of Rome, which in the novel takes the form of a long and articulate speech of persuasion, in the film is reduced to a few lines that still retain the essence of the original appeal. Direct borrowings from the novel are limited to the interactions between Petronius and Nero. The latter is also shaped in the film mainly by utterances borrowed and elaborated from the novel. The most evident example of this literary borrowing is the monologue that represents a sort of spiritual revelation of the emperor’s twisted mind, as laid out in Table 14.6. Compared to Petronius, the cinematic Nero has more lines invented by the screenwriters to accommodate changes introduced to the plot of the novel, but unlike those of his arbiter elegantiarum, they maintain a stylistic coherence inspired by the novel’s literary style. It does not seem an exaggeration, therefore, to fix on the dialogue as a vital factor in the creation by Peter Ustinov of the most fascinating and unforgettable interpretation of Nero in the history of cinema. It appears significant that both for Leo Genn as Petronius and for Peter Ustinov as Nero the parts they played in Quo Vadis proved to be the most important and memorable in their entire film career, earning each of them an Oscar nomination as supporting actor.13

13  In his long and stellar career Peter Ustinov has been nominated for an Oscar in the category of best supporting actor three times, winning two (for Spartacus and Topkapi) but, ironically, it is his interpretation of Nero in Quo Vadis that most impressed spectators.

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258  Monika Woźniak Table 14.6  Nero’s monologue in the translation of the novel by Curtin and in the Hollywood film Novel

Film

This is a night of sincerity; hence I open my soul to thee as to a friend, and I will say more: dost thou consider that I am blind or deprived of reason? Dost thou think that I am ignorant of this, that people in Rome write insults on the walls against me, call me a matricide, a wife-murderer, hold me a monster and a tyrant, because Tigellinus obtained a few sentences of death against my enemies? . . . But they do not understand this, that a man’s deeds may be cruel at times while he himself is not cruel. Ah, no one will believe, and perhaps even thou, my dear, wilt not believe, that at moments when music caresses my soul I feel as kind as a child in the cradle . . .  I cannot live a common life. Music tells me that the uncommon exists, so I seek it with all the power of dominion which the gods have placed in my hands. At times it seems to me that to reach those Olympian worlds I must do something which no man has done hitherto—I must surpass the stature of man in good or evil. I know that people declare me mad. But I am not mad, I am only seeking. And if I am going mad, it is out of disgust and impatience that I cannot find. I am seeking! Dost understand me? And therefore I wish to be greater than man, for only in that way can I be the greatest as an artist. . . . Dost know that I condemned my mother and wife to death mainly because I wished to lay at the gate of an unknown world the greatest sacrifice that man could put there? I thought that afterward something would happen, that doors would be opened beyond which I should see something unknown. Let it be wonderful or awful, surpassing human conception, if only great and uncommon. But that sacrifice was not sufficient. To open the empyrean doors, it is evident that something greater is needed, and let it be given as the Fates desire. (QV XLI)

This is a day for sincerity. Let me open my soul to you. Do you think I do not know that there are people in Rome who call me a matricide, a wife killer? Hold me a monster? Tyrant? But there is something they do not realize. A man’s acts may be cruel while he himself is not cruel. And there are moments, my dear Petronius, when music caresses my soul. I feel as gentle as a child in a cradle. . . . Yet there are those who say that I am mad. I’m only seeking. The flatness and misery of common life depress me. I seek because I must exceed the stature of man in both good and evil. I seek because I must be greater than man for only then will I be the supreme artist. Do you know why I condemned both my wife and my mother to death? I did it in order to lay at the gates of an unknown world the greatest sacrifice a man can put there. Now, I thought, doors will open beyond which I shall catch a glimpse of the unknown. Let it be wonderful. Or let it be awful. So long as it is uncommon.

Third Cousin Once Removed: the Italian TV Series Quo vadis? (1985) The opening titles of the Italian TV series broadcast by RAI in 1985 claimed that it was based on Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel, but rather than an adaptation it should be regarded as a form of fan fiction. The Italian screenwriters, Ennio De Concini and Francesco Scardamaglia, and the director Franco Rossi, appropriated the protagonists of the novel; however, they changed the

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‘ O omnivorous powers, hail! ’   259 traits, motivations, and behaviours of the novel’s characters to the point of making them almost unrecognizable compared to their literary source. The Italian writers also made radical changes to the plot, retaining the most canonical scenes from the novel but putting them into a different context. Some new subplots were also added, such as Petronius playing detective in an investigation into the murder of Pedanius Secundus. Consequently, the television dialogue has no connection whatsoever with Sienkiewicz’s prose. The script was first written in Italian, but the series involved an international cast and, in post-production, was dubbed and released in Italian and English versions. It avoids the clamorous anachronisms present in the 1951 film (Marcus Vinicius is now denominated ‘tribune’), uses a discreet number of Latin words (such as augur, cubiculum, amphora, etc.), and insists on using the form of address ‘noble’ or ‘most noble’. The register is largely formal, with occasional colloquial lapses (‘wonna buy a mosaic?’). Many proper names are also mentioned, but curiously, some of them (‘Labrus Genedone’, ‘Glabus Initius’, ‘Matone’, ‘Fabulla’, or ‘Balbillus’, and others) sound truly bizarre. In historical films, proper names are usually employed to create a sense of authenticity for the distant temporal world shown on the big screen. It is therefore difficult to say whether the outrageously improbable names in the Italian series are due to the distraction of the screenwriters or have been proposed on purpose, to undermine the authenticity of the ‘Roman’ world put on the small screen. In fact, scholars have commented that ‘The 1985 miniseries offers an interesting mixture of realism and artistic distancing. The common people are shown in a mostly realistic environment, Nero and the court live in a highly artificial and Felliniesque world’ (Scodel and Bettenworth 2009: 48). Regardless of its potentially challenging aesthetic motivations, the dialogue is probably the weakest component of the Italian miniseries. The characters talk a lot, rather too much in fact (and there are numerous inclusions of voiceover narration as well), but they also all speak in the same way. The language is flat and uninspired, the conversations painfully dull, incorporating a lot of exposition (‘My name is Acte, I’m Greek. I was a slave. Caesar gave me my freedom’) and, in spite of using occasional lexical archaisms, they never convey an impression of a Roman conversation. Several are downright im­prob­ able in the context of Neronian Rome, such as Petronius discussing with his slave Eunice the literary merits of his works or carrying out an interrogation during the investigation into the death of Pedanius Secundus. Some moments are unintentionally comical, as when Lydia explains to Vinicius that Ursus is giving a street performance ‘for those who have no food and no place to sleep’, and he responds, ‘There’s public assistance for these cases.’ However, irony

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260  Monika Woźniak and humour are sorely lacking in the whole series. Even Petronius has been stripped of his wit and verbal brilliance, and while Ustinov’s Nero was terrifying, fascinating, and funny all at the same time, Klaus Maria Brandauer, despite all his efforts, manages only to make his character one-dimensionally repulsive.

An (Un)happy Return: the Polish Quo vadis (2001) If the Italian miniseries ignored Sienkiewicz’s dialogue completely, the Polish epic film (publicized as the biggest production in the history of Polish cinema) does the complete opposite, slavishly sticking to its literary source.14 It has been observed that ‘The 2001 Polish version is faithful to the novel precisely because it is a Polish version of a canonical work of Polish literature and stakes its claim to attention firmly on this national connection to the book’ (Scodel and Bettenworth 2009: 19). Both the film and the disastrous (and soon forgotten) TV miniseries derived from it draw directly on the literary text, and there is hardly a line in the dialogue of both which has not been taken directly from it. Since critics generally agree that Sienkiewicz managed to achieve the almost impossible goal of making the Polish language sound like Latin,15 one might think that such a direct transfer would only be to the benefit of the film, but that is not so. First of all, the speech of Sienkiewicz’s Roman characters was embedded in the Polish language of the nineteenth century. Today its linguistic mannerisms show through the ‘Latin’ stylization and give it a certain aura of ­old-fashionedness. Furthermore, the Polish screen dialogue is often somewhat cryptic, because it does not take into consideration that modern spectators are far less familiar with Roman culture than the readers of Sienkiewicz’s era and that the novel itself is not so widely read as it used to be. When, at the opening of the film, Vinicius greets Petronius with words taken from the first chapter of the novel, ‘May all the gods grant you success, but especially Asclepius and Kypris’, there is a small chance that spectators will identify Asclepius as the god of medicine, but it would be over-optimistic to expect that they would also know that ‘Kypris’ means Aphrodite. Even more puzzling may be the mention of ‘Bronzebeard’ shortly after, because it is highly unlikely that anyone in the audience would remember Nero’s ­cognomen—Ahenobarbus—and its literal meaning. 14  For further discussion of the Polish film, see Ostrowska in this volume. 15  See Axer 2002:59 and Axer in this volume.

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‘ O omnivorous powers, hail! ’   261 Nevertheless, two main problems concerning the dialogue in Kawalerowicz’s Quo vadis are not related to the words uttered by the characters but rather to the way they are pronounced and to the structure of the filmic narrative. The actors simply are not able to pronounce in a natural manner utterances that have complicated syntax. They stumble over unusual terms, and their pronunciation of Latin is outrageous. Above all, however, the dialogue does not work, because the whole script lacks continuity and dramatic tension. From this point of view, Kawalerowicz’s film bears an uncanny resemblance to Enrico Guazzoni’s silent epic from 1913, being not so much an independent film adaptation as a predominantly passive illustration of the novel. The scenes follow one after the other like beautiful postcards, leaving it to the viewer (today no longer in full grasp of the novel) to fill in the gaps in the film narrative. The dialogue, at this point, also feels ornamental, devoid of any real functionality, pure homage. In conclusion, it seems that to create a convincing imitation of ‘Latin’ on screen is an almost impossible task in any language, although it could be argued that the disappointing quality of the dialogue in the Italian and Polish adaptations of Sienkiewicz’s novel is due more to the poor skills of the screenwriters than to the linguistic resistance of the Latin language. For all its faults, the script of LeRoy’s Quo Vadis drew on its literary source in an intelligent way and skilfully adapted dialogue taken from the Polish novel, thus allowing Leo Genn and Peter Ustinov to create especially accessible and memorable characters in Petronius and Nero. However, the extremely polarized evaluations of the film and its performances (except perhaps for the almost unanimous condemnation of the ‘wooden’ Robert Taylor) are likely to be due in part to the stylistic heterogeneity of the script, which is experienced as a mixture of  formal and colloquial English punctuated by conspicuous linguistic ­anachronisms. On the whole, if various adaptations of Quo vadis do not give satisfying answers as to how to create a plausible emulation of ‘Latin’ on the screen, they certainly highlight the problems attached to different styl­is­tic strategies that arise independently of the language in which the script is written.  

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15 Ursus as a Serial Figure Monica Dall’Asta and Alessandro Faccioli

The figure of the strongman Ursus unquestionably occupies a central position among the enduring contributions of the Polish novel Quo vadis to the ­transnational popular culture of the twentieth century. Presented as Lygia’s faithful slave and bodyguard, and consistently paralleled throughout the novel to mythological heroes like Hercules, the Cyclops, and the Titans, Ursus is described by Sienkiewicz with words that emphasize the prodigious aspect and strength of his muscular body. A ‘barbarian’, whose breast is ‘as large as two shields joined together’, Ursus is said to be a ‘giant’ endowed with ­‘dreadful’, even ‘preterhuman strength’, able to ‘break gratings’ or ‘a bull's neck as easily as another might a poppy stalk’ and to ‘lift stones from the ground which four men could not stir’. Overall, he looks ‘more like a stone colossus than a man’, if not even ‘a demigod worthy of honor and statues’ (Sienkiewicz 2016 [1896]). With so many amazing attributes, it is no wonder that Ursus was about to perform as the author’s most successful creature, on its way to becoming a stock character in the transnational catalogue of twentieth-century popular culture. Adding to the numerous film and television adaptations that Sienkiewicz’s historical novel has spurred through more than a century, the suggestive figure of its good-hearted, Herculean saviour has been extensively imitated, under a host of different names, in a ridiculously large number of extremely popular Italian films that otherwise have no connection with Sienkiewicz’s novel. There is an obvious historical link between the huge popularity enjoyed by Sienkiewicz’s work in Italy at the dawn of the last century and the emergence of what was to be known as the ‘cinema dei forzuti’ or ‘athletic–acrobatic’ (pseudo-)genre, a specifically Italian occurrence featuring the strongman character type in a variety of versions and serial narrative forms. This cultural phenomenon—championed by heroes called Maciste, Hercules, Samson, Goliath, and many more—flourished in Italy in two consecutive waves: an early wave that had its peak during and after World War I, and a later, Monica Dall’Asta and Alessandro Faccioli, Ursus as a Serial Figure In: The Novel of Neronian Rome and its Multimedial Transformations: Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis. Edited by: Monika Woz´niak and Maria Wyke, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198867531.003.0015

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264  Monica Dall ’ Asta and Alessandro Faccioli mid-century ‘sword-and-sandal’ wave between the 1950s and 1960s.1 Together, they offer a perfect trajectory along which to investigate how a serial figure is historically created, replicated, and transformed in time through a transtextual play with their characteristic features across the products of media culture.2 In the modern popular imaginary, serial figures play a major role as ‘a type of stock character’ whose narration across media is affected by different media forms and, in turn, reflects their medial framings and reframings, thus causing ‘explicit variations or subtle revisions in the ­figures’ various stagings’ (Mayer and Denson 2018: 65). Although the serial reproduction of the Ursus character type and its adoption as the central figure of a distinctive film genre are a peculiarly Italian phenomenon, the surprisingly wide circulation that these low-budget films were able to gain abroad has contributed substantially to the extension of the transtextual legacy of Quo vadis through time and space.

Adapting Quo vadis for the Screen When, in 1913, the director Enrico Guazzoni chose Quo vadis as an in­spir­ation for what can reasonably be considered the first ‘kolossal’ in the history of world cinema (a big-budget, spectacular feature film), he engaged with a novel that had actually been a favourite of Italian readers since at least 1899, when an even earlier translation (which had appeared serially in Il Corriere di Napoli in 1897) was first published in book form. Like Mario Caserini and Eleuterio Rodolfi, who, also in 1913, made a film adaptation of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s historical novel The Last Days of Pompeii (1894), Guazzoni drew on the rich narrative and graphic descriptions in Sienkiewicz’s work to extend film’s duration beyond existing conventions, thus making a substantial contribution to the establishment of the multireel feature film as the standard transnational format of conventional cinema.3 As with the film adaptation The Last Days of Pompeii, Guazzoni’s Quo vadis? relied on lavish three-dimensional sets to create a vivid impression of ancient Rome, and made use of an even 1  A canonic work in scholarship about Italian strongmen films is Farassino and Sanguineti 1983. For a comprehensive approach to the cultural history of Italian strongmen films and their relation with the epic genre, see Cornelius  2011, Aziza  2009, and Di Chiara  2016. The early wave of silent strongmen films is extensively discussed by Reich 2015 and Dall’Asta 1992. The mid-century ‘swordand-sandal’ wave is discussed at length by Della Casa 2002. 2  The concept of transtextuality was proposed by Gérard Genette to refer to the ‘textual transcendence of the text’ (1992: 83–4). 3  On Guazzoni’s film, see Dagna and Wyke in this volume.

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Ursus as a Serial Figure  265 larger mass of extras (over 5,000) to increase its potential for spectacle. Matching the grandiosity of the sets, the role of Ursus was given to the imposing figure of Bruto Castellani, who was chosen by Guazzoni more because of his impressive muscles and body frame than his acting technique, which remained quite unrefined right through to the end of his career. Following the huge acclaim he received for his performance in Quo vadis?, Castellani appeared in about thirty other films. He was regularly hired to bring extra visual appeal in the form of his muscular male physique to such ambitious historical reconstructions as Marcantonio and Cleopatra (1913), Fabiola (1918), Ben-Hur (1925), The Last Days of Pompeii (1926), and another colossal adaptation of Quo vadis directed in 1925 by Georg Jacoby and the son of Gabriele D’Annunzio, Gabriellino, all of which were especially targeted at international markets. Sienkiewicz’s description of the scene of sacrifice in the circus arena (when the Christians are offered to the jaws of hungry wild beasts and Ursus fights a climactic battle with the aurochs to rescue his young protégée Lygia) provided Guazzoni with quite challenging material in terms of film representation: The Lygian held the wild beast by the horns. The man’s feet sank in the sand to his ankles, his back was bent like a drawn bow, his head was hidden between his shoulders, on his arms the muscles came out so that the skin almost burst from their pressure; but he had stopped the bull in his tracks. And the man and the beast remained so still that the spectators thought themselves looking at a picture showing a deed of Hercules or Theseus, or a group hewn from stone. . . .  A dull roar resembling a groan was heard from the arena, after which a brief shout was wrested from every breast, and again there was silence. People thought themselves dreaming till the enormous head of the bull began to turn in the iron hands of the barbarian. The face, neck, and arms of the Lygian grew purple; his back bent still more. It was clear that he was rallying the remnant of his superhuman strength, but that he could not last long. Duller and duller, hoarser and hoarser, more and more painful grew the groan of the bull as it mingled with the whistling breath from the breast of the giant. The head of the beast turned more and more, and from his jaws crept forth a long, foaming tongue. A moment more, and to the ears of spectators sitting nearer came as it were the crack of breaking bones; then the beast rolled on the earth with his neck twisted in death.  (Sienkiewicz, trans. J. Curtin 2016 [1896]: 389–90)

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266  Monica Dall ’ Asta and Alessandro Faccioli In this extremely graphic account, Sienkiewicz is both reworking the classical Hercules/Heracles myth (and specifically the bullfight trope in the seventh episode of the hero’s Twelve Labours, as referred to by Apollodorus and Isocrates) and building upon the growing fascination of his times with phys­ic­al culture. The description of Ursus’s body, ‘still as a statue’, ‘crimson with effort’, with his muscles swelling ‘until it seemed as if his skin would burst’, brings to mind the numerous photographs that, at about the same time as the composition of Quo vadis, Eugen Sandow was using carefully to promote his new discipline of bodybuilding across Europe and the United States. Sandow began publishing his own illustrated magazine, Physical Culture, in 1898. The magazine was lavishly illustrated and was a major site of development for the new practice of ‘physique photography’. At about the same time, while he was starting his American stage career as a performer in Florenz Ziegfeld’s company, Sandow also embraced the new medium of moving pictures. He was filmed by William  K.  L.  Dickson at Edison Studios in 1894, and the resulting images were promptly included in his exhibition programme as soon as Dickson had devised a solution for projecting Edison kinetoscope strips on screen.4 Such aestheticized images of the male body are now understood, in terms of their cultural meanings, as a stereotype of modernity.5 In developing his concept of physical culture as an art of posing where immobility was meant to express maximum physical effort, tension, and strength, Sandow was deeply influenced by the aesthetics of classical and neoclassical sculpture and painting.6 The same goes for Guazzoni, who in his film adaptation of Sienkiewicz’s circus scene referred widely to Jean-Léon Gérôme’s historical paintings as his primary model.7 The film director’s reconstruction of the circus scene, with its climax in a series of brief static shots that show Ursus resisting the bull’s impetus before bringing him crashing down (a sequence obtained using a poor beast that had obviously been drugged, and a fake bull’s head in the close-up shots), established the ‘strongman against animal’ confrontation as one of the genre’s great canonical feats, 4  See Musser 1997: 90–4. For more information on Sandow’s biography, see Chapman 1994. 5 As George Mosse in his seminal study The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (1996). 6  As Wyke observes, ‘the majority of photographs of Sandow’s routine show him posing in imitation of a classical statue rather than performing a feat of strength’ (1997b: 54). 7  As Beeny writes, ‘for his 1913 Quo Vadis? Enrico Guazzoni chose Ave Caesar!, Pollice Verso, and The Christian Martyrs’ Last Prayers—pictures with ready-made mass-cultural currency—as the anchors for a film that helped establish the Roman epic as a cinematic genre. Audiences are said to have erupted in applause each time they recognized these popular images on the screen’ (2010: 50). On Gérôme as a proto-film-maker, see also Gottlieb  2010 and Païni  2010: 333–6. Cf. Wyke in this volume.

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Ursus as a Serial Figure  267 regularly repeated, with an ever increasing attempt at realism, in all subsequent adaptations of the novel. A taste for the sensational, and even the scene’s potential for gore, takes over in the 1925 adaptation to screen, in which a much heavier and stiffer Castellani can be seen fighting a very real, but also very drugged, large bull. Buddy Baer’s performance in the Hollywood adaptation directed by Mervyn LeRoy in 1951 was made even more astonishing by a refined use of conventional film language and Technicolor.8 Steve Reeves, a leader in the second wave of screen strongmen, is seen fighting the Cretan bull with his bare hands (again with the help of editing tricks and props) in Pietro Francisci’s Hercules (1958), an exhilarating mash-up filled with low-budget special effects, in which classical antiquity’s Hercules and his seventh labour were transplanted into the universe of Jason and the Argonauts. Castellani adopted Ursus as a nickname in a few more films between 1918 and 1922, none of which seems to have had any points of connection with Sienkiewicz’s novel. Of these titles, all set in present time, only one is still extant today, and the paucity of contemporary sources about these Ursus films leaves us with scarcely any material to discuss. Castellano regularly played the part of the strongman who tries to rescue good from evil: in L’attentato (dir. Henrique Santos, 1918), he appears as an athlete performing on stage before stepping up to help a rich man against a cheat;9 in Un viaggio verso la morte (dir. Gino Zaccaria, 1920) he defends a child from attack by a couple of criminals all across the world. Made by very small production companies, none of these films seem to have done much to popularize the Ursus brand. Even the eponymous Ursus (aka Ursus, il leone del porto, dir. Pio Vanzi, 1922) passed practically unnoticed by both audiences and reviewers. The only extant print of the Castellani cycle, Il toro selvaggio (dir. Giuseppe Zaccaria, 1919), which is preserved at the Cineteca Italiana in Milan, is a ­typ­ical product of the Italian strongman film genre. Packed with some of the most obvious conventions of contemporary melodrama, it leads us through a carousel of adventurous exploits propelled by a dispute over an inheritance and involves kidnappings, disguises, interminable chases, and hand-to-hand fights. Partly set in an aristocratic environment and partly in a circus, where Ursus performs as one of its most acclaimed artists, the film exploits and even doubles the bullfight trope in two parallel scenes: the first during a circus performance; the second during a party at a patrician villa where the hosts have

8  See Winkler in this volume.

9  See on this film, Martinelli 1991:16.

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268  Monica Dall ’ Asta and Alessandro Faccioli invited the artists to reperform their tricks. Suddenly a raging bull breaks its chain and Castellani has one more opportunity to show off his strength and courage in a climactic fight against the animal.

From Ursus to Maciste & Co. Ursus was not the only fictional strongman to become a major attraction, and even a star, in Italian cinema before the outbreak of world war. Already in 1913, another popular strongman, Mario Guaita, had appeared onscreen in the role of Spartacus in another multireel feature production set this time in republican Rome and made in the typical style of Italian epic cinema. Previously known under the name of Ausonia, Guaita had acquired notoriety in earlier years in both Italy and France as a variety performer specializing in poses plastiques, a type of visual theatre in which semi-naked performers assumed highly stylized attitudes that were more or less loosely inspired by classical or neoclassical painting and sculpture, in a manner somewhat like ‘living statuary’ (Anae 2008: 112–30). The aesthetics of these performances, which were much appreciated around 1900, were very close to the visual style established by Sandow in his effort to enhance and promote the beauty of the male body, beginning with his famous reproduction of the pose of the Farnese Hercules in front of Henry Van der Weyde’s camera in London in 1889.10 Spartacus, Ivo Blom observes (2018: 146), ‘was arguably the first Italian feature to display Ausonia’s type of male physique’, that is as a supple athlete as well as a strongman, who ‘went on to refer to this male display in both his theatrical career and his subsequent epic and adventure films’. After another major historical role in Salambò (1914), Guaita returned to the name of Ausonia in a series of witty adventures, all written by his wife, Renée Deliot.11 While set in modern times, these films often included a number of inter- and extratextual allusions to Guaita’s own biography and career as a pose plastique model and performer. For example, in Dans les mansardes de Paris (1924) ‘he plays a young Parisian who drops out of medical school to seek fame and fortune, first in the circus and then through poses plastiques, clearly mimicking Myron’s Discobolus and Leone Leoni’s statue of Emperor 10  For more information on early physique photography, see Burns 2011: 440–51. 11  On the interesting screenwriting career of Renée Deliot—perhaps the only female professional screenwriter who was active in Italy during the silent period, and whose role in the creation of Ausonia’s screen personality is critical to the development of the genre as a whole—see Micaela Veronesi’s biographical entry in the Women Film Pioneers Project online portal (2018).

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Ursus as a Serial Figure  269 Charles V as Virtue Subduing Fury’.12 A similar self-reference is found at the beginning of L’atleta fantasma (1919), which first introduces Ausonia posing ‘in antique attire, leaning on a column, reminding us of his previous feats on and off the screen. The image transforms into Ausonia dressed as a gentleman in tails. Finally, we see him wearing a knitted hood over his ‘frac’ [a swallowtail coat] changing him into the “phantom athlete” from the film’s title’ (Blom 2018: 152). A third, and much more successful, internationally acclaimed screen strongman came into being in 1914 in one of the most ambitious antiquity films of all time, Cabiria, directed and produced in Turin by Giovanni Pastrone. In organizing this truly gigantic enterprise, Pastrone had made every effort to ensure the collaboration of Gabriele D’Annunzio, the renowned poet and novelist, who was involved in the preparation of the final film script.13 While the plot and the different characters of this innovative epic production— including the powerful figure of Maciste, a giant black slave—were already clearly delineated in the initial script drafted by Pastrone, D’Annunzio has been credited at least with authoring the elaborate, and quite pretentious, intertitles that punctuate the visual sequences. He was also responsible for giving Maciste his extraordinarily lucky name that, in Italian, sounds very much like the word ‘macigno’, a stone or a rock. More precisely, ‘macigno’ derives from the Latin machineus, which in turn derives from machĭna, meaning the stone used for grinding grains, that is a millstone. Pastrone chose for this role Bartolomeo Pagano, a docker at the harbour of Genoa, who went on to perform in dozens of films in the 1920s, becoming exemplary of the brand new strongman genre, and one of the greatest international male stars of his time.14 The scenes in which Maciste, captured by the Phoenicians, is enchained and forced to push a millstone round is only one clue among several of Cabiria’s debt to Quo vadis? We can observe a clear transtextual elaboration of this trope through various steps: at first, in Sienkiewicz’s novel, Ursus is simply one of the ‘slaves and hired labour working in [Demas’s] flour mill’, then, in Guazzoni’s film adaptation, we actually see him pushing the stone round in a brief medium shot that emphasizes his powerful build; finally, in Cabiria, after being caught by the Phoenicians during his quest to save the young Cabiria, the strongman Maciste (more unfortunate than Ursus) is condemned to be ‘chained to the millstone for life’. 12  As Blom again observes, ‘this trajectory parallels Ausonia’s real-life story’ (2018: 149). 13  A well-documented collection of scholarly studies on Cabiria’s production history is offered in Alovisio and Barbera 2006. 14  For an analysis of the characters of male stardom in Italian silent cinema, see Lotti 2016.

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270  Monica Dall ’ Asta and Alessandro Faccioli Cabiria exploits the trope to create one of its most memorable scenes in which Maciste is encouraged by his master Fulvio Axilla (who has finally found the place of his detention) to perform an extreme feat of strength: he breaks the iron chains that keep him attached to the mill. Immediately chosen as a key attraction to illustrate one of the sensational posters used to advertise the film, Maciste’s pose plastique in this scene was made much more visually appealing than anything previously seen in Quo vadis? by a bolder display of Pagano’s muscular build, covered just by a leopard skin around his genitals. There are more hints of Cabiria’s transtextual dialogue with Quo vadis? Like Ursus, Maciste is a slave, assigned by his master Axilla the task of de­liver­ing a young girl from her Phoenician kidnappers. Maciste too is consistently represented as both a good slave faithful to his master and a simple heart imbued with an inner innocence that contrasts sharply with the terrible power of his muscles. Also, just like Ursus, he serves his mistress/protégée with paternal care, never showing any kind of romantic interest towards her. However, the black-polish tint used all over Pagano’s face and body to feign African origins gives an additional visual appeal (both exotic and erotic) to the display of his muscles over that of Castellani’s. Although his African origins are no doubt a significant departure from the status of Ursus as a Christianized ‘barbarian’, Maciste’s different ethnicity still marks him as other, establishing the convention of the strongman as foreigner that would re­appear in the films of the sound period. Pastrone also drew on Ausonia to sketch the character of his strongman saviour. In particular, towards the end of the film, the scene in which Maciste proves his superhuman strength by bending the bars of the prison in which he is locked with Axilla repeats a similar feat already performed by Ausonia in Spartacus,15 thus incorporating it forever into the repertoire of the strongman’s screen performances. This same feat is again repeated at the beginning of Maciste, the 1915 production that launched Pagano’s hero in a new film series shot in modern settings. Maciste presents the viewer with one of the most ingenious metafilmic devices to be found possibly throughout the whole silent era, and perhaps beyond. The plot goes as follows: on the run to escape kidnapping from a criminal gang, a young woman takes refuge in a film the­ atre. Onscreen she sees Maciste as he performs the bar-bending feat in Cabiria and is transported with wonder at the sight of such an act of superhuman strength, executed to defend a damsel in distress. Back in reality outside the 15  ‘This bar-bending feat was so successful that Ausonia repeated it in his subsequent epic, Salambò (Domenico Gaido, 1914), released in 1915 and based on Flaubert’s novel,’ according to Blom 2018: 148.

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Ursus as a Serial Figure  271 cinema, she decides to look for the actor impersonating Maciste at the Itala studios in Turin, where Bartolomeo Pagano, by now an acclaimed film star in his own right, immediately agrees to defend her against the villains. Received with immense enthusiasm by both Italian and international audiences, this metafilmic sequel to Cabiria and its spin-off Maciste series soon came to epitomize the Italian strongman genre, establishing a model extensively imitated in subsequent years. After the modern turn impressed on the genre by Maciste, both Castellani and Guaita abandoned their surroundings in classical antiquity and had their fictional alter egos perform in con­tem­por­ary plots and settings. By 1920 the number of strongmen, and strongwomen, involved in the film industry had multiplied to include the likes of Luciano Albertini (Sansone), Giovanni Raicevich (a former professional Graeco-Roman wrestler, and world champion in 1907), Domenico Gambino (Saetta), Alfredo Boccolini (Galaor), Francesco Casaleggio (Fracassa), Astrea (a mys­teri­ous performer who featured in four films and was dubbed ‘the female Maciste’), and several more.16 While all these actors and actresses had their own individual features and performing styles, from a narrative angle they were all very similar, concentrating in their displayed muscles the ideal of the gentle giant who defends the harmless not for personal advantage but for the sole purpose of restoring just­ ice in a world that has been disrupted by evil forces. He is generous and loyal, but hopelessly naïve and not particularly clever. He ‘tends to be a legitimist’ with regard to established powers and institutions, ‘yet at the same time he represents a primitive anxiety about justice’ (Della Casa 2002: 31). Basically asexual despite his exhibitions of virility, the strongman type never represents a danger to female characters (unless, of course, they team up with the ­villains). As a (demi-)deus ex machina, the strongman intervenes at the most dramatic points of the plot to suspend the narrative and solve the current ­predicament thanks to the (sometimes motionless) action of his spectacular body. This provides the films with a characteristic paratactic pace of narration that reveals their essentially primitive, or ‘attractional’, style. All these aspects remain the basic traits of the strongman type throughout the second, midcentury wave of the genre. The term ‘cinema of attractions’ was coined to describe the visual style of early cinema by the so-called New Film History movement that emerged at the end of the 1970s. The term ‘attraction’ refers to the pure visual pleasure engendered by the display of the more or less bizarre curiosities that 16  For a short account in English of the first wave of strongman films, see Dall’Asta 2013: 195–202.

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272  Monica Dall ’ Asta and Alessandro Faccioli constitute privileged material for so many early films. In the absence of a fully developed editing style for its narratives, early cinema relied on a succession of sensational ‘tableaux’ to solicit viewers’ attention. The role of editing was mainly limited to the assembly of different attractions, in such a way as to shape a paratactic progression, where narrative action proper was often presented merely in the form of descriptive intertitles and where the spectacle consisted in large doses of extravagant visual experiences.17 More than fifty years later, the ‘sword-and-sandal’, or ‘historical–mythological’, films of Italian popular cinema maintained a similar paratactic pace, with the narrative essentially used as ‘padding’ between the muscular exhibitions of the leading characters. In one important respect, however, the serial strongmen of both the genre’s first and second waves emulated the Ursus of Quo vadis? rather more than the Maciste of Cabiria—in their display of whiteness. According to Jacqueline Reich, the ‘racial repositioning’ of Maciste from Cabiria to the spin-off series set in the present allowed the character to be recast in the model of a white national hero. The retrospective framing of ‘Maciste’s previous onscreen blackness in Cabiria as masquerade’ (Reich 2015: 52)18 put later versions of him in a detached, ironic, and therefore superior position to his earlier fictional identity. The move from antiquity to modernity occurred ‘within the context of rising Italian nationalism of the 1910s’ (Reich 2015: 53) and paralleled the move from a rhetoric based on ‘icon[s] of ancient glories’ to new ‘exemplary symbol[s] of modern and entertaining Italian heroism’ (Reich 2015: 80): Maciste’s racial transformation from slave in Cabiria to bourgeois citizen in Maciste necessitated a costume change from toga to dapper suit. The uniform he wears when he goes to war (Maciste Alpino) and assumes the role of emperor (Maciste imperatore) are markers, just like his muscles, of his nationalized virility. Equally important are the clothes he does not adorn; his naked torso, so frequently featured in all the films, reveals that no matter what role he plays, Maciste is all man and all Italian.  (Reich 2015: 20)

In fact, in their exhibition of gratuitous violence toward their enemies, the strongmen of the genre’s silent period are prone to farcical accents, and even

17  See Strauwen 2006. 18  The theme of Maciste’s ethnicity is also discussed at length in brilliant postcolonialist terms by Giuliani 2019: 65–76.

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Ursus as a Serial Figure  273 to an open taste for punishment that can easily be linked to the emergence of proto-fascistic structures of feeling. Despite many differences, the mode of address and narrative organization of the second, mid-century strongmen cycle are in continuity with that structure of feeling, according to Richard Dyer. His complex sociological ex­plan­ation addresses aspects like the Italian audience’s class composition (mainly formed, for these low-budget films, by recently urbanized peasants)19 in a period of ‘mass internal migration in Italy from the rural South to the industrialized North’; the transformation ‘from labour based on strength to one based on  skill with machines’ (Dyer  1997: 169); and a more or less unconscious assumption that ‘the interests of ordinary people are met, and are only able to be met, by the strongman’ (Dyer 1997: 176). Dyer (1997: 169) concludes that, while ‘the very emphasis on the simple display of muscle [is] an affirmation of the value of strength to an audience who was finding that it no longer has such value’, the mid-century strongmen are also forms of ‘divine characters played by US Americans. If they speak to the realities of their initial audiences and in many particulars seem to be of them, they are also above them.’ It is to the features of those Americanized strongmen and their relation to the originary Ursus that we now turn.

Ursus as Maciste, and Vice Versa The new wave of strongmen films began and developed as a low-budget ­imitation of the American historical epics that were shot in Cinecittà during the 1950s. The latter phenomenon began with Mervyn LeRoy’s Quo Vadis and continued throughout the decade with several superproductions such as Helen of Troy (dir. Robert Wise, 1956), Ben-Hur (dir. William Wyler, 1959), Cleopatra (dir. Joseph  L.  Mankiewicz, 1963), among others. Shot in Technicolor, the American Quo Vadis features in the role of Ursus the hulking Buddy Baer, the brother of the world heavyweight champion Max, who was famous for having defeated in 1934 Primo Carnera, another giant who was also to become a favourite of the silver screen during the 1930s and 1940s. His seminudity showcases his impressive build in the memorable sequence in the arena in which he defends Lygia (here tied to a pole) from the raging bull,

19  As shown by Spinazzola 1974, these films were intentionally made to circulate in second- and third-rate cinemas.

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274  Monica Dall ’ Asta and Alessandro Faccioli snapping its neck at the close of an exacting struggle.20 Yet the realism of the scene is created through masterful editing that alternates Baer’s image with that of a stunt double, Nuno Salvação Barreto, who specialized offscreen in a Portuguese variation of bullfighting. The (re)making of Quo Vadis in Cinecittà marked a turning point in the history of Italian cinema.21 The first American superproduction shot in Rome, it not only contributed financially to the revival of the Italian film industry but also encouraged Italian directors and producers to take up the ‘swordand-sandal’ genre as a popular cultural favourite. Unlike the first wave of muscular cinema, which soon shifted the settings of its stories from ancient to modern times, these mid-century productions were invariably set in a mytho­ logic­al past. Ursus is just one of the names that the strongman takes up in these films; other recurrent heroes are Hercules, Maciste, Goliath, and Samson. And yet, the paradoxical seriality that characterized the genre— based on hasty, low-budget productions that tried to replicate at artisanal scale Hollywood’s industrial methods of mass production—generated a situ­ ation in which viewers were encouraged to see all the different embodiments of the strongman as manifestations of one and the same hero. For example, of the nine films that have Ursus as lead hero, only three are interpreted by the same actor (Ed Fury); the other six feature actors who, in other productions, are cast as Maciste or Hercules (among them Reg Park, Joe Robinson, Dan Vadis, and Samson Burke). The same goes for all the other heroes. The cluster concerning Hercules (which, having been initiated by Pietro Francisci’s international hit Hercules in 1958, scored a total of nineteen films in around seven years) had up to twelve different actors perform the title role. The peculiar instability of this type of seriality was even augmented on the international market, where any particular hero could be presented under a different name in translation. For example, the English titles of many of the Maciste films regularly changed his name to Atlas, Samson, or Goliath—or, of course, Hercules or the Son of Hercules. Ursus was introduced to Englishspeaking audiences as ‘Maciste, the Son of Hercules’ in several instalments of a syndicated television show, broadcast in the United States in the 1960s and distributed by Embassy Pictures, that recycled thirteen strongmen films from Italy. Ursus, Maciste, Samson, Goliath, and Hercules are all the inter­change­able masks of one and the same hero, who is reduced to being no more than a ­narrative function, a sort of dummy, ready to don ever more numerous 20  See also Winkler in this volume for discussion of the scene in Quo Vadis (1951). 21  See Stubbs in this volume.

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Ursus as a Serial Figure  275 fictional identities as he experiences ever more stunning adventures in ever new settings. These settings were actually not so new. The artisanal, craft skills utilized in the Italian production model were largely based on a logic of recycling, which involved the frequent reuse of sets, costumes, and props from other more expensive productions. Francisci’s Hercules of 1958 is said to have recycled sets from Aida (dir. Claudio Fracassi, 1953), a boat from Ulysses (dir. Mario Camerini, 1954), and costumes from LeRoy’s Quo Vadis. The spurious origin of the materials employed in the films’ production is reflected at the semantic level in the miscellaneous catalogue of tropes that constitutes the diegetic worlds in which the adventures of Ursus and his other Herculean fellows take place. In other words, both the chronological and geographical coordinates of these worlds are as unstable and inconsistent as the strongman hero’s own characterization, resulting in his preposterous wandering across many cen­ tur­ies and distant lands, either real or purely fantastic. The plot of Ursus (the first in a cycle of nine films featuring the strongman under this name, shot in Spain in 1961 by Maciste specialist Carlo Campogalliani)22 is a case in point. The story is reminiscent of Sienkiewicz’s original in reinstating the conventional trope of the young virgin threatened by a raging bull in the circus arena, but the space-time coordinates of the diegetic world are totally confused—much like the hero who, we will discover, is in love with the wrong woman. All that we know about him at the beginning is that he is coming home from abroad after serving in a war, eager to reunite with his beloved fiancée, Attea. Learning that she has been kidnapped by the villain Setas, he leaves to rescue her in the company of a beautiful young girl, the (very blonde) slave Doreide. When they finally reach a ­mys­teri­ous island, they discover that Attea (a glacial brunette) has in fact gone over to the enemy and been crowned the queen of the evil realm. Ursus and Doreide obviously become the targets of her cruelty and once again end up in the arena. Here, after performing the chain-breaking feat first seen in Cabiria, Ursus engages in a difficult fight with the bull. The brutal realism of this new version of the bullfight scene is again augmented in comparison with previous adaptations of Quo vadis. The bull does not seem to be drugged, and the Spanish stuntman, Ray Pololo, who doubles for the (very blonde)

22 Several years earlier Campogalliani had directed Pagano in The Trilogy of Maciste, a series released in 1920 in three full-length episodes. He was also responsible for inaugurating the second Maciste cycle in 1960 with Son of Samson that had Mark Forest in the title role.

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276  Monica Dall ’ Asta and Alessandro Faccioli

Fig. 15.1  Ursus fights the bull; screenshot from Ursus (dir. C. Campogalliani, 1961). United Archives GmbH/Alamy Stock Photo.

Ed Fury is rammed and gored several times with great violence by the animal (Figure 15.1).23 Ursus (1961) illustrates the contradictory relationship of the strongman with women, as he prefers to pursue an idealized, romantic image of a woman who turns out to be villainous rather than recognize the love of the beautiful Doreide, who follows him submissively. In recent times, the problematic ­relationships of the second-wave strongmen have inspired some readings in terms of queer critique. Mauro Giori (2017: 90), for example, observes that ‘the peplum hero is not even a proper man, sexually speaking. He is too ­narcissistic and “reconciled with the dimension of desire” to be credibly interested in female partners.’24 Thus these strongmen have constantly encouraged ironic comments in the press about their substantial ‘weakness’ and ‘delicacy’, with explicit reference to the films’ homosexual subtext. 23  YouTube has an interview with Pololo in which he recalls how the scene was performed—an interesting document of the way in which these low-budget films were made in their time. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLmPFjJ3EQ4/ (accessed 10 January 2019). 24 Giori is quoting a phrase from Giacomo Manzoli  2012: 110. A similar point is made by Rushing 2016.

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Ursus as a Serial Figure  277 The mid-century version of Ursus also demonstrates the essentially fantastic character of the ‘sword-and-sandal’ imagination. In the subsequent Ursus and the Tartar Princess (dir. Remigio Del Grosso, 1961), a film set in the seven­teenth century that includes some impressive crowd scenes, Ursus is a Polish peasant without any apparent reference to Sienkiewicz’s novel where he originates from Lygia (identified as Poland’s ancient territory). This Ursus has escaped from a Siberian prison; at one point he is shown wielding his halberd ­successfully to hurl the entire cavalry of the blasphemous and destructive Tartars from a wooden bridge. In The Vengeance of Ursus (dir. Luigi Capuano, 1961), which takes place in antiquity, in an unknown country located in a fabulous Middle East, he works the land in the tradition of his father and alongside his younger brother, loathes a tyrant, and must face ordeals of deadly strength and skill, including a fight in which he is outnumbered by eleven men. In Ursus in the Valley of the Lions (dir. Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia, 1962), he is given a narrative backstory that sounds very much like that of Tarzan: ­abandoned by his mother as an infant in her desperate attempt to save him from the cruel Ayak (come with his hordes of barbarians ‘from the deserts and wild regions of the North’), Ursus is raised by lions. The spectacular finale showcases an impressive choreography created with animals trained by the famous Orfei circus family. Ursus the Rebel Gladiator (dir. Domenico Paolella, 1963) brings us back to the Roman era of Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, taking advantage of the widescreen technology of CinemaScope to portray some epic scenes of legions and cavalry deployed for battle. Son of Hercules in the Land of Fire (Ursus nella terra di fuoco, dir. Giorgio Simonelli, 1963) is an emblematic case in terms of recycling, offering some interesting examples of a common practice in this field of film-making—the reuse of pre-existing footage. Scenes showing earthquakes, eruptions, or rockslides were all borrowed from many, often unrecognizable, previous films. The hyperbolic feats of the muscular protagonist take place in an unspecified diegetic time where aspects of ancient Rome are mashed up with Germanic and medieval elements. The picturesque mountain landscapes where both the love and the battle scenes take place are unusual for Italian cinema and are some of the film’s most intriguing features. There are also impossible crossovers that bring the various heroes together, into a marvellous no man’s land that is home to the characters of a pseudo-historical society, such as in Samson and the Mighty Challenge (dir. Giorgio Capitani, 1965), originally distributed as Ercole, Sansone, Maciste e Ursus, gli invincibili. All these films widely exploit the trope of Ursus in chains pushing the mech­an­isms of a gigantic wheel in a circular motion.

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278  Monica Dall ’ Asta and Alessandro Faccioli The reasons behind the huge success of these films in Italy were certainly linked to the fast development of post-war society during the economic boom. As Gian Piero Brunetta argues (1993: 396): The imagination of a mythical past served as a means to escape by means of fantasy from everyday reality, offered to an audience who had just arrived on the threshold of the society of consumption, who still recognized itself in the values of a patriarchal society that was about to disappear. . . . A modern version of classic epic works, [these films] are fragments of an era in which a whole civilization, stepping forward toward the new industrial world, takes its leave of an idealized, ennobled past. Just at the moment when industrial production was dismissing the role of the individual as the fundamental unit with which to measure reality, these mythological films naïvely re­instated their anthropocentric thrust.

In this sense, the choice to conflate the role of the hero with the super-pumped physiques of American bodybuilders like Steve Reeves, Mark Forest, Reg Park, Gordon Scott, Ed Fury, and Dan Vadis, but also of such very Italian strongmen as Adriano Bellini and Sergio Cioni (respectively renamed Kirk Morris and Alan Steel) and many more, was an ingenuous way to negotiate symbolically the contradictions of this historical clash between two hugely contrasting social models. The second-wave strongmen in their physique embodied an idealized past, but in their national identity, real or imagined, they represented the present industrial world. Yet it is important to recall that the success of these serial strongmen films was not restricted within the borders of Italy. These truly transnational heroes were particularly popular in France and Spain, but they also circulated in many other European and American countries, often in hilarious translations that enhanced their absurdity and made them a perfect object for ‘camp’ processes of re-evaluation and re-semantization. The first Hercules films distributed in the United States by Joe Levine, for example, enjoyed a thorough and quite humorous restyling at the hands of its dubbing director, Mel Brooks (Della Casa 2000: 789).25 25  According to McKenna 2016: 48, the initiator of the phenomenon of the ‘peplum boom’ in the United States, Joseph E. Levine, used to argue that ‘it wouldn’t matter who played Hercules as long as it was a man with a tremendous body’. Indeed, Joe may have admired Reeves’s muscular frame, but he deemed his voice too high-pitched for the powerful man–god and so had it dubbed over by George Gonneau—an electrical engineer. ‘Stars, they’re not important. It’s the story and the title that count.’ The amusing story of how Levine designed the American promotional campaign for the Hercules films he previously acquired on the ‘Italian movie supermarket’ is also related in McKenna 2016.

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Ursus as a Serial Figure  279 This, then, is how Ursus became a serial figure in the course of the t­ wentieth century, operating as a gear in the always unfinished industrial processes that constantly reshape the materials of popular culture. Two more recent adaptations of Quo vadis (a miniseries produced by the Italian television network RAI in 1985 and a Polish superproduction directed in 2001 by Jerzy Kawalerowicz) have added little to the Ursus filmography, but a third wave of  epic films exploiting the visual appeal of robust, well-built male actors has  emerged since the turn of this century. American productions such as Gladiator (dir. Ridley Scott, 2000), 300 and its sequel 300: Rise of an Empire (dir. Zack Snyder, 2007 and 2014), Clash of the Titans (dir. Louis Leterrier, 2010), Immortals (dir. Tarsem Singh, 2011), Pompeii (dir. Paul W. S. Anderson, 2014), and, of course, Hercules (dir. Brett Ratner, 2014) and The Legend of Hercules (dir. Renny Harlin, 2014) have ‘set a new standard for physiques onscreen, blending the cuts of a comic-book superhero with the classical lines of Jacques-Louis David’s “Leonidas at Thermopylae”—all while looking ­dirtier, tougher, and more defined than either.’26 In the time of digital effects, plastic surgery, scientific nutrition, doping, and extreme training there is apparently no limit to the ability of the male body to contort itself according to the idealizations of a cartoonish aesthetic. The incessant rhythm at which the cultural industries of our time consume, revisit, and rework all the cultural assets that have been passed on to us from the past may suggest that, perhaps, not even Ursus can be deemed exempt from such a destiny in the near future.

26  This evocative phrase is extracted from an internet article published on the bodybuilding.com website (Nick Collias, ‘Fit For Battle: The New Bodies Of 300: Rise Of An Empire’, 9 March 2014), which includes an interview with Mark Twight, physical trainer on the sets of both 300 and 300: Rise of an Empire; https://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/fit-for-battle-the-new-bodies-of-300-rise-of-anempire.html (accessed 30 June 2019).

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16 The (In)discreet Charm of the Romans Quo vadis (dir. Jerzy Kawalerowicz, 2001) Elżbieta Ostrowska

What are we becoming? Romans? From Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960)

A close-up shot of black hands tenderly massaging a white body (Figure 16.1) initiates the narrative of Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s 2001 film adaptation of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis. The image follows the opening credits that are displayed against a prolonged circular tracking shot of the contemporary Roman Colosseum. The highly familiar landmark connotes the history and cultural heritage of Europe, whereas the sensuous corporeal imagery focused on racial difference evokes the contemptible and commonly condemned part of this heritage and tradition. Interestingly, what follows does not provide any ­ideo­logic­al ‘correction’ to the hegemonic imagery of the black body providing the white body with pleasure. Rather, the opposite occurs as the close-up shots are soon replaced by a medium two shot depicting a young black woman pampering a middle-aged white man, both taking up a frontal position towards the camera. When she moves behind him, the low-cut dress partially reveals her breasts to the viewer (Figure 16.2). The bodily pleasure offered is built up not only on racial but also gender difference. This blatant racialization and sexualization of the female body epitomizes colonial discourse developed within Western culture. Such imagery in a film made in postcolonial Europe,  even if it is about a precolonial past, may be somewhat surprising, especially given that it was produced in Poland, a country that was never directly implicated in colonialism. Certainly, the film does not evaluate slavery positively, as that would be entirely at odds with its Christian message; however, this initial image, even if peripheral to the narrative, discloses

Elzḃ ieta Ostrowska, The (In)discreet Charm of the Romans: Quo vadis (dir. Jerzy Kawalerowicz, 2001) In: The Novel of Neronian Rome and its Multimedial Transformations: Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis. Edited by: Monika Woz´niak and Maria Wyke, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198867531.003.0016

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282  Elżbieta Ostrowska

Fig. 16.1  An extreme close-up shot from the first scene of Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s film Quo vadis (2001).

Fig. 16.2  The sexualization of the female body, in the Polish film adaptation of Quo vadis (2001).

i­ deo­logic­al contradictions in Kawalerowicz’s Quo vadis and, by extension, in the Polish culture in and for which it was made. Modern culture pays tribute to or, more often, exploits its Roman legacy for various purposes. As the editors of the volume Imperial Projections. Ancient Rome in Modern Popular Culture remark, the heritage of Rome has been utilized for various ideological aims throughout history. For example, American and British public discourses referred to the traditions of Rome to articulate a cultural and political supremacy for their nations (Joshel et al. 2001: 2). This kind of appropriation of the Roman tradition is especially evident in epic films that, according to Derek Elley, recreate the achievements of the past for the purpose of present entertainment (1984: 13). In a similar vein, Maria Wyke, in her book Projecting the Past, claims that the representation of Roman history on film is a useful device for speaking about the present time while also being a discourse about the past (1997: 12, 13). As she further

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The ( In ) discreet Charm of the Romans  283 explains, a fictionalized return to the past can be motivated by various ­ideological agendas: it can be used to legitimize present political authority; to  deny it through a nostalgic return to the past; or, finally, to provide a ­myth­olo­gized genealogy for the present (p. 13). In her book, Wyke specifically examines how the legacy of Rome contributed to American and Italian national ideologies (p. 14). And, in general, she asks how the past on film speaks about the present. But how does the Roman past on film speak about the Polish present? The authors of the monograph on filmic adaptations of Quo vadis, Ruth Scodel and Anja Bettenworth, suggest that Kawalerowicz’s film adjusts the content of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel to respond to various ideological needs of post-communist Catholic Poland (2009: 80). In this chapter I shall push that brief observation further and argue that, through its  reconstruction of the Neronian Rome envisioned by Sienkiewicz, the 2001  Quo vadis reveals various frictions and tensions emerging in postcommunist Poland.

The Novels of Sienkiewicz, Polish ‘Heritage Cinema’ and Vernacular Colonial Fantasy Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Quo vadis belongs to both the subgenre of Roman epic films and a vernacular variant of ‘heritage cinema’ that emerged in Poland after 1989 (see Haltof 2007). Mostly consisting of adaptations of Polish literary classics, whose action takes place in a relatively distant past, these films feature protagonists who are preoccupied by matters such as love, honour, and patriotism, with the latter always being linked with Catholicism. Among the most significant examples of this subgenre are Pan Tadeusz: The Last Foray in Lithuania (Pan Tadeusz, dir. Andrzej Wajda, 1999); With Fire and Sword (Ogniem i mieczem, dir. Jerzy Hoffman, 1999); The Spring to Come (Przedwiośnie, dir. Filip Bajon, 2001), Revenge (Zemsta, dir. Andrzej Wajda; 2002); and Maiden Vows (Śluby panieńskie, dir. Filip Bajon, 2010). Ewa Mazierska considers this trend within post-1989 Polish cinema to be part of a ‘nostalgia business’ that ‘facilitate[s] and strengthen[s] nationalism, namely Catholicism, patriarchy, sexism, and elitism’ (2007: 89). As Quo vadis is the only film within Polish ‘heritage cinema’ that does not depict Poland’s national past, its nostalgic message is less evident than in other films belonging to this trend. Nevertheless, as I will demonstrate in this chapter, Kawalerowicz’s film  also condones regressive gender norms, a patriarchal ideology, and a

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284  Elżbieta Ostrowska hege­ mon­ ic discourse of Catholicism. Arguably, the film’s conservative ­ideological agenda stems predominantly from the novel itself, which ‘is distinctly old-fashioned’ in terms of both literary conventions and ideological message (Scodel and Bettenworth 2009: 8), not unlike other novels written by Sienkiewicz. Although his works’ popularity is usually explained by their ­narrative attractiveness and potential for the ‘strengthening of [Polish] hearts’ in difficult times (Sienkiewicz 1968: 527), I argue that their seductive power is also due to the persuasive colonial fantasy his oeuvre implicitly conveys, and that Quo vadis—despite being set outside Poland—was one of its most vivid examples. Kawalerowicz’s film does not erase this symbolic imperial longing; on the contrary, it manifestly uses narrative and visual strategies to evoke yearning for a territorial power that Poles never had. Although Poland did not directly participate in the process of colonization, it was implicated in it. Ewa Thompson identifies Poland as both a colonizing power and a colonized subject (2008: 114). One of the numerous reasons for Poland’s dual position in relation to colonialism concerns its geopolitical location in Europe, somewhere between East and West. In her analysis of the novel Quo vadis and its ideological aspects, Tatiana Kuzmic emphasizes the importance of Poland’s ambivalent historical experience. She writes: ‘In its unique history, the Polish nation had the experience of both enjoying the ­status of empire, in the Middle Ages, and suffering the fate of subjugation, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ (2016: 158). Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Trilogy (1884–8), as well as some of his other works such as In the Desert and Wilderness (W pustyni i w puszczy, 1911) and Quo vadis, reflect the geo­pol­it­ ical and cultural ambiguity of Polishness and its contradictory attitude toward colonialism. The novels, written when Poland was partitioned, offer a nostalgic vision of the country’s past power and its colonizing fantasies. Sienkiewicz repeatedly proposes an idealized variant of Polishness through offering a range of protagonists that represent both the Polish masculine and feminine ideal, yet are implicated in a complex and often contradictory structure of desire for the symbolically colonized other (Ostrowska 2011).

Sienkiewicz’s Novel: an Allegory of the National Past and Present Although Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis does not feature a pair of Polish pro­tag­on­ists, the reader learns that the heroine, Lygia, and her faithful servant, Ursus, are from the tribe of Lygians that inhabits the lands that would become Poland.

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The ( In ) discreet Charm of the Romans  285 As Ewa Skwara observes, Sienkiewicz is more than generous in describing the land as ‘overflowing with milk and honey’ (2018: 170). Most literary critics share this opinion and emphasize the significance of Lygia and Ursus as ancient ancestors of the Polish nation. Wyke claims that childish Lygia and her powerful protector Ursus stand for, respectively, Catholic Poland and its people. The latter are made capable of rescuing the suffering motherland, here allegorized as a female body endangered in the arena by a beast that symbolizes the partitioning powers of Russia, Prussia, and Austria. As Wyke further argues, Nero is another beast, and his ultimate downfall signifies an end to the tyrannical empires of nineteenth-century Europe, whereas the triumph of the Roman Church symbolically foreshadows the ‘resurrection’ of oppressed Poland (1997: 117–18). Sienkiewicz’s positive representation of the Lygians cannot be explained exclusively by the demands of national ideology. As Scodel and Bettenworth claim, the portrayal of the tribe in the novel was influenced by Tacitus’s Germania, in which the Germanic tribes epitomized the forces of strength and vitality as opposed to the decadence of the Romans. The authors explain that Sienkiewicz substituted ‘the proto-Polish Lygians for the German tribes described by Tacitus’, thus making subordinated Poland at least equal with, if not superior to, its Prussian and Austrian occupiers (2009: 55–6). Similarly, in her analysis of Sienkiewicz’s novel, Kuzmic claims that it features an al­le­gor­ ic­al portrayal of those oppressed Poles who escaped the political reality of the nineteenth-century partitions into the religious promise of an afterlife where every political power will cease to exist (2016: 162). The oppressed ancient Christians stood for the nineteenth-century Polish nation that imagined itself as a collective incarnation of the suffering Messiah, whereas the Roman Empire signified Russia with its political and cultural pretentions.1 The allegorical reading of Quo vadis is a dominant interpretive practice among not only literary critics but also historians, as demonstrated in a brief article for the popular magazine History Today by Richard Monte, who writes: ‘Sienkiewicz originally wrote the book to depict the Polish fight for independence against the might of the Prussian and Russian empires, with the Christians representing the Poles, and Nero and the Roman senate ­representing Bismarck and Tsar Alexander III’ (2001: 4). Admittedly, critical reception of Sienkiewicz’s Quo vadis which interprets the novel as a ‘national allegory’ is most likely affected by the writer’s other works that are clearly

1  Kuzmic 2016: 57, 158. See also Walicki 1982 and Axer in this volume.

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286  Elżbieta Ostrowska focused on national matters and aimed at boosting the collective Polish spirit com­prom­ised by decades of political subordination. Importantly, Kawalerowicz’s film has also been subjected to such an al­le­ gor­ic­al reading. Skwara notes that the critical reception of the film frequently interprets it as a metaphor for the historical oppression of the Polish nation both during the era of partition and under communism, and for the crucial role played by the Catholic Church in fighting those unjust political orders.2 Such interpretations of the film reinforce the long-standing national allegory of Poland as an innocent victim of foreign oppression. However, as I will argue in what follows, the film also lends itself to a reading ‘against the grain’ that reveals a vernacular desire for power and supremacy. The characters of Lygia and Petronius, especially in their interactions with, respectively, Ursus and Eunice, communicate—albeit implicitly—these hegemonic impulses. The appeal of their ability to subordinate others is intensified by the affective power allocated to them for the crucial purpose of spectatorial engagement. Likewise, the narrative frame of the film signifies an ideological shift from a position of subordination to one of triumphant hegemony.

Lygia: a Pious Object of (Barbarian) Desire The character of Lygia is a linchpin in the allegorical imaginary offered by Sienkiewicz’s narrative. Importantly, her persona coalesces ideals of Polishness, Christianity, and femininity as these are prescribed by normative national discourse. Kuzmic reads the character through the prism of Polish messianism, a philosophical doctrine developed within vernacular Romanticism in the nineteenth century that envisioned the Polish nation as a spiritual leader of Europe; like Jesus Christ, Poland is persecuted in order to bring freedom to the whole world (see Walicki  1982). Kuzmic claims that the narrative identifies Lygia with Jesus and, allegorically, with Poland, ‘the Christ of nations’ (2016: 170). In Kawalerowicz’s film, innocent and persecuted Lygia can also be read as a ­feminine embodiment of oppressed Poland. However, unlike partitioned Poland in the nineteenth century, she has a mighty pro­tect­or, a giant Ursus. Although he is a free man, his submissive behaviour makes him a perfect incarnation of the figure of the ‘faithful slave’ who is ready to sacrifice his life to protect his mistress. On the one hand, Lygia is subordinated to the power of the Romans, but, on the other hand, she exercises power over her mighty 2  Skwara 2018: 170; see also Miller-Klejsa 2017.

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The ( In ) discreet Charm of the Romans  287 guardian. Consequently, Lygia’s relationship with Ursus echoes the colonial exploitation of the subaltern other, which in hege­mon­ic cultures has often been presented as practising a self-imposed devotion. If Lygia is an allegory of  Poland, her tacit implication in colonial fantasy significantly changes the  ­ideological agenda of the national self. Arguably, her control over the ­character of Ursus, who can be seen as a surrogate slave, stands for Polish colonial aspirations and dreams that have never been fulfilled. However, the fact that Ursus and Lygia come from the same tribe of Lygians, makes this interpretation not completely convincing. In their discussion of cinematic ancient Rome as a screen on which contemporary issues are projected, the authors of Imperial Projections claim that it includes two processes: ‘distancing (“We are not Romans”) or identification (“We are the Romans”)’. However, ‘most often, a complex and ambivalent projection occurs in which the Romans are both self and other (“Might we be the Romans?”)’ (Joshel et al. 2001: 6). Just like numerous Hollywood films depicting ancient Rome, Kawalerowicz’s Quo vadis also allows ‘the forbidden to be expressed by cloaking it in Roman dress’ (Joshel et al. 2001: 10). The Polish film mobilizes contradictory forms of spectatorship by using visual and sound effects that undercut the narrative content and its literal message. The scenes depicting Romans use excessive mise en scène aimed at producing lavish visual spectacle. The scenes of feasts, especially, are densely populated with ­people and objects, and sparkle with vibrant colours and bright lighting. Dynamic camerawork reinforces the vitality and intensity of the various pleasures depicted on the screen. The food is presented as carefully composed assemblies, the wine is poured from shiny cups, and the dancers are clothed in insubstantial draperies that give them an unearthly charm and lightness. The expressive music reinforces these affective visual images of opulence. By contrast, the scenes depicting the Christians are rather static, both in terms of the characters and the camera movement, and emphasis is put on dialogue not mise en scène. The latter is rather minimalist in terms of setting and props, clearly representing the purity and modesty of the Christians’ lives. The scenes often use low-key lighting and a monochromatic palette of colours. The viewer is certainly invited to admire the sobriety of the Christian lifestyle, yet can easily become enchanted by the lavishness of Neronian Rome’s decadent pleasures. In Kawalerowicz’s Quo vadis, the narrative favours the Christians, whereas the visual privileges the Romans. Mise en scène, cinematography, and sound work together to create an opulent spectacle of the sensuous pleasures enjoyed by the immoral world of ancient paganism. Its intense affective power subverts the film’s explicit ideological message of Christian righteousness.

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288  Elżbieta Ostrowska The character of Lygia in Kawalerowicz’s film is contradictory in this sense too. For she constantly changes her ideological positionality between the East (Poland) and the West (Rome). Scodel and Bettenworth succinctly comment on this ambivalence. First they note that Lygia and Ursus are culturally as ­cultivated as the Romans, yet they reject Roman hedonism and immorality (2009: 81). They claim that ‘culturally, Lygia is entirely Roman’ (p. 59), which makes her character a perfect amalgam of ancient cultural sophistication and Christian chastity. Ultimately, Lygia, who represents Poland allegorically, is not only culturally equal to the Romans but surpasses them in terms of moral standing (2009: 59, 81). This simultaneous allegiance to and rejection of the heritage of Rome as represented by the allegorical female figure reveals the ambiguity of Polish national discourse on imperial power. The film presents it as being as attractive as it is appalling. The ambivalent character of Lygia can thus be read as a symptom of repressed imperial desires and aspirations. In the film, the two romances between Petronius and Eunice and between Marcus and Lygia may also potentially produce this kind of split spectatorial identification. The former, with its eroticism, represents what is repressed in the Polish national discourse, whereas the latter, with its chastity, incarnates the vernacular sociocultural norm.

Petronius: Bogusław Linda and Polish Masculine Fantasies The opening scene of Kawalerowicz’s Quo vadis, which presents a young black woman tending the body of a white man, is a blatant manifestation of a Western orientalist perspective in which black femininity is presented as a provider of sensuous pleasure to a white male master—despite the novel’s ostensible interest in the suffering of the oppressed. These images mobilize what Robert Stam and Ella Shohat call ‘fantasies of sexual domination’ (1994:158). Here, these fantasies are fulfilled by Petronius, who is the novel’s ‘focalizer and guide’ (Scodel and Bettenworth 2009: 30). His character’s corresponding centrality in the film is reinforced by the camerawork. In this introductory sequence, he occupies the central position in the frame, while shallow focus isolates him as a single visual point of reference and relegates all the other (female) characters to the periphery. Petronius’s appeal is even more intense because it is Bogusław Linda who plays him. Scodel and Bettenworth note the importance of this casting decision: ‘although he is not young, Bogusław Linda’s Petronius is vigorous and sexy’, which makes the character

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The ( In ) discreet Charm of the Romans  289 sympathetic and attractive to viewers (p. 40). The character Linda plays, therefore, offers a strong point for spectatorial identification. Kawalerowicz’s casting decision to have charismatic Linda play a hedonistic and cynical character (thus, one radically opposed to the Christian virtues and values that form the moral backbone of both the novel and the film) makes him even more attractive, especially when compared to the typecasting of Paweł Deląg, a handsome young actor, in the role of the protagonist Marcus Vinicius. The latter’s redemption through love and conversion to Christianity is predictable. Right away, in the first scene, he mentions to Petronius, his uncle, that he is in love with Lygia, which initiates a foreseeable trajectory for his character’s development. Deląg, known to the Polish audience mostly from romantic comedies and television series, does not make his character’s moral awakening perceptible; furthermore, his rather insignificant position in Polish cinema works against a stronger spectatorial alignment with the character of Vinicius. Kawalerowicz’s casting decisions affect the viewers’ response to the characters and the ideologies represented by them. As a result, early Christians emerge as morally superior, yet the world of ancient Rome is beautiful and seductive, especially when presented from the point of view of Petronius (Kornacki 2001: 28). At the time when Kawalerowicz made Quo vadis, Linda was the most popu­lar actor of Polish cinema. He was a genuine star of the post-communist era, evoking all of the anxieties emerging in a period of radical political, ­cultural, and social transformation (cf. Klejsa  2011). Due to his roles in Władysław Pasikowski’s films, he created a screen persona that embodied an uncertain Polish masculinity. As I have argued elsewhere, the Polish masculine subject has been constantly deprived of agency as a result of various political and historical circumstances (Ostrowska  2016: 46). Pasikowski’s Dogs (Psy, 1992), the flagship of Polish post-1989 cinema that elevated Linda to the status of a film star, directly interrogates the uncertainties specific to Polish post-communist masculinity. As Michael Stevenson points out in his analysis of the film, Pasikowski used the universal generic conventions of the gangster film for this purpose. Most importantly, Stevenson claims that the main protagonist of Dogs has the potential to renegotiate the model of Polish masculinity ‘because of Linda playing the role’ (Stevenson 2000: 145). In Pasikowski’s films, Linda incarnated male figures that oscillated between the lack of masculine agency traditional in Polish culture and a post-communist model of manhood that was virile and capable. For example, in Demons of War According to Goya (Demony wojny wg Goi, dir. W.  Pasikowski, 1998)

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290  Elżbieta Ostrowska whose action takes place during the Bosnian War, Linda’s character is a Polish soldier who rescues a Bosnian woman from a gang of war renegades. Arguably, the motif of rescue, a founding image of the Western fantasy of masculinist supremacy, is appropriated by Pasikowski to remasculinize the Polish hero, who traditionally celebrated disasters rather than victories. In this way Linda created a range of remasculinized male characters set in modern times in a newly emerging Polish post-communist popular cinema. He also made a significant appearance in Andrzej Wajda’s Pan Tadeusz (1999), the film adaptation of the national epic published by Adam Mickiewicz in 1834 whose action takes place in the early eighteen century. In that film he plays Jacek Soplica, an archetypal Polish hero undergoing an internal change from reckless and selfish behaviour to being responsible for the (national) community. With his appearance in Wajda’s film, Linda solidified his position in national culture as an emblem of Polish masculinity. By 2001, when Quo vadis was released, Linda’s star persona was well established. Therefore, when Polish viewers looked at him in the opening scene of the film being caressed by a black woman, they would not have seen Petronius, a character fictionalized in the historical epic created by Henryk Sienkiewicz and recreated on screen by Kawalerowicz, but the strong masculine body of Linda playing Petronius. The formal decontextualization of the character of Petronius in the opening scene facilitates this perception. For the film begins with a close-up of an anonymous body (see Figure 16.1) and there is no narrative exposition that precedes it. Once it is replaced with a medium shot of the featured characters, Polish viewers recognize Linda—symbol of Polish masculinity. Importantly, he is experiencing the kind of bodily pleasure that is absent from the vernacular culture. While discussing the problem of stars playing historical characters, Vivian Sobchack notes: ‘Indeed, the very presence of stars in the historical epic mimetically represents not real historical figures but rather the real significance of historical figures. Stars literally lend magnitude to the representation’ (1990: 36). Although Sienkiewicz’s Petronius is only loosely based on his historical counterpart, Linda’s stardom reinforces the narrative significance of the character. Thus, although the romance of Lygia and Marcus Vinicius is at the centre of the narrative of the film adaptation, it is the character of Petronius that galvanizes the attention of the viewer. Conversely, the romantic lead couple are rather flat in their characterization and motivation. Cinematic Lygia perfectly mirrors her literary counterpart who, as Kuzmic notes, ‘engages in the practice of missionary dating’ (2016: 163). The narrative resolution of the romance between Lygia and Marcus signifies the triumph of the

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The ( In ) discreet Charm of the Romans  291 dominant (national) ideology, whereas the annihilation of Petronius’s ­character evokes sadness over illicit desires and fantasies that will always remain unfulfilled; hence, the intense affective power of the latter and the mere righteousness of the former. Kawalerowicz employs specific visual and narrative devices to make the narrative resolutions of these two plot lines as contrasting as possible. Petronius arranges his death as a sophisticated spectacle. His friends are gathered together to feast and enjoy dance and music. His slave lover emphatically declares her readiness to commit suicide as well as to prove her ‘eternal’ love for him. A medium shot presents them together in a loving embrace lying on a sort of chaise longue. Then a servant cuts their wrists, and in a close-up we see their hands tenderly clasped. Interestingly, as in the opening sequence, it is a female hand that touches the male one as if providing the man with his last sensuous pleasure. Warm colours and lighting imbue the scene with an intimacy that in popular cinema is typical of love scenes. And, indeed, the suicide of Petronius and Eunice appears as the ultimate lovers’ union that will last for eternity. The overexposure employed towards the end of the scene lightens the image until it disappears completely. This specific visual effect gives an elegiac tone to the dying fantasy of male supremacy. In contrast, the subsequent love scene of Lygia and Marcus does not use any formal devices for the purpose of enhancing its emotional value. We see them in a sequence of over-shoulder shots that cinema commonly uses for any kind of conversation. The colours and lighting are too bright to evoke a mood of sensuous tension or eroticism. The lovers exchange confessions of love, emphasizing that their mutual feelings transcend carnal desire. Nevertheless, Marcus tries to seal his declaration with a kiss. Lygia, however, turns away and the scene cuts to a medium shot of Ursus, who is looking at the couple with a paternal, approving gaze. Importantly, the scene does not cut back to the lovers. The image of a faithful slave closes the main narrative plot line.

Faithful Slaves: Eunice and Ursus The characters of faithful servants or slaves play an important role in activating a neocolonial fantasy. Petronius receives from his female slaves obedience, devotion, loyalty, and, most importantly, true love. Eunice prefers to be whipped and punished rather than be sent away from Petronius’s household. When he learns that she does not have a lover, he appreciates her genuine love, or ‘self-abasement’ as Scodel and Bettenworth put it (2009: 56). She

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292  Elżbieta Ostrowska ul­tim­ate­ly proves her genuine feelings of devotion and worship when she decides to commit suicide with her master and lover. There is no space within the Polish dominant cultural discourse for such a gesture. According to the vernacular romantic tradition, one can sacrifice one’s life only for the motherland out of patriotic duty. In the novel, Sienkiewicz uses ancient Roman behaviour to provide the reader with the ‘guilty pleasure’ of following the story of two people who explore the realm of erotic pleasure and fulfilment. By contrast, as already mentioned, the other romance, of Marcus and Lygia, is embedded within Christianity and acts of conversion and redemption. Only when Marcus accepts Christianity and lets himself be baptized, can their romance be fulfilled. Moreover, he needs to tame his carnal desire for Lygia and replace it with a somewhat platonic devotion, whereas Petronius and Eunice need to admit their erotic desire for each other to bring their romance to fruition. Polish dominant discourse cannot accommodate a sexual relationship that is not validated by religious or legal ritual and, thus, Petronius and Eunice must die at the end of the story. Although the death of Nero’s arbiter elegantiarum is frequently interpreted as a symbolic representation of the decline of Roman civilization, I would argue that for Polish readers and viewers it is first and foremost a symbolic act that annihilates the erotic love fantasy whose presence in Polish culture has always been replaced with love for the motherland (cf. Mazierska and Ostrowska 2006). However, this erotic love fantasy is a patriarchal fantasy of a woman acting as a love slave, worshipping her beloved master. The character of Eunice embodies the estranged notion in Polish culture of an eternal love, and as such it provides an escape from the ambivalent self of Polish men. Petronius, as played by Linda, represents a peculiar amalgam of the Western and Polish tropes of masculinity. Thus, he perfectly incarnates the vernacular fantasy of hegemonic masculinity and belonging to the Western world, but must die for doing so. Quo vadis, both the novel and the film, offers not only the character of an ideal female slave but also its male counterpart: Lygia’s protector, Ursus. Although he is introduced in both works as a ‘free man’, his devotion to his mistress borders on the self-abasement typical of the slave. Admittedly, his status as a ‘free man’ is designed to demonstrate the moral superiority of the Lygians over the Romans (the former clearly standing for the Polish nation), who, despite being deemed barbarian, do not practise slavery. Nevertheless, Ursus behaves as an archetypical ‘faithful soul’ ready to sacrifice his life to protect his mistress, as he had promised his master, Lygia’s father. As a slavelike figure, he does not seem to have any life of his own. Everything is centred

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The ( In ) discreet Charm of the Romans  293 on Lygia. With his strong and muscular body, Ursus perfectly fits a stereo­typ­ical image of the black slave (cf. Bernier 2002: 91). His physical stature is almost excessively perfect and as such it fits the normative pattern of masculinity. Thus, it is somehow astonishing that there is no allusion to him being in any kind of sexual relationship, not to mention any prospect of him obtaining a wife. Ursus’s masculine self is ambivalent in that he represents both power and powerlessness. Thus, his character might be seen as another metaphorical embodiment of Polish masculinity whose patriarchal position had been undermined by political slavery, first during the partitions and then under communism. His exaggerated physical strength displayed in the film in numerous shots depicting his muscular body efficiently masks his lack of subjectivity evident in the plot line. Played by Rafał Kubacki, a professional judoka, Ursus demonstrates his masculine power for the first time in the scene of the feast in Nero’s palace. When drunken Marcus tries to kiss Lygia and forces himself on her, Ursus, like a superhero, unexpectedly enters the scene and intervenes. He pushes Marcus away, takes Lygia into his arms, and leaves the room majestically as if certain that nobody would dare stop him. Although the motif of rescuing a woman from an enemy is a common convention of popular film genres, it needs to be stressed here that Polish cinema, or Polish culture more broadly for that matter, has not scripted such a role for male characters. Polish films are populated with men who are often shown as passive witnesses of ‘their’ women being abused by their enemies. Suffice to mention Hurricane (Huragan, dir. J. Lejtes, 1928); How to be Loved (Jak być kochaną, dir. W. Has, 1962); The Ring with the Crowned Eagle (Pierścionek z orłem w koronie, dir. A.  Wajda, 1992); and, more recently, Rose (Róża, dir. W.  Smarzowski, 2011). All these films and their helpless male protagonists stand for the emasculation of Polish men that resulted from centuries of political oppression, first during the partitions, then in World War II, and finally under communism. Ursus is one of many heroes in Sienkiewicz’s ­novels who embody compensatory fantasies of (Polish) masculinist supremacy. However, the character of Ursus in the film represents also another ­fantasy—that of a perfect slave. To make this fantasy more pronounced, Kawalerowicz made casting decisions that modified the literary characters in terms of their appearance. Sienkiewicz describes Ursus as a blue-eyed and rather Slavic type, whereas Lygia is dark-haired. Kubacki is also blue-eyed, yet his hair and beard are dark and so is his complexion. By contrast, Lygia, played by Magdalena Mielcarz, is blonde-haired and with fair skin, which visually distinguishes her from her giant protector. With his dark features,

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294  Elżbieta Ostrowska Ursus embodies the figure of the oriental other who behaves like a ‘faithful soul’, a slave of the Polish woman. Ursus, like Kali from Sienkiewicz’s From Desert and Wilderness (W pustyni i w puszczy, 1911), can be interpreted as a compensatory colonial fantasy of the Polish nation that at the time when these novels were published was colonized by the partitioning powers. Ultimately, Kubacki’s performance as Ursus is a multivalent and contra­dict­ ory symbol of masculine power and submission and, thus, the (male) viewer can admire him and still feel superior to him. His dominant characteristic, however, is his ability to rescue a (Polish) woman and, thus, the Polish male spectator, when aligning himself with Ursus, is spared from helplessly witnessing her abuse and dishonour. In Kawalerowicz’s film, Ursus rescues Lygia several times, yet the most spectacular demonstration of his physical power is in the scene of the persecution of the Christians in the Colosseum.3 When Nero gives a signal to begin the games, Ursus enters the arena. First he is shown in a medium shot that displays his muscular, strong body (Figure 16.3). In contrast to his physical prowess, he is not provided with the privilege of his own gaze that would have conveyed the subjectivity of his character. His lack of a gaze blocks the standard device of the point-of-view shot and, thus, the viewer cannot visually align with him. Instead, the camera (and the viewer) take the perspective of the Colosseum’s audience, among whom Nero and Petronius are distinguished with subjective shots. As a result, the subsequent slightly high-angle extreme long shot shows Ursus as a tiny figure within the massive arena (Figure 16.4). Initially looking powerful, now he is a mere spectacle for the Colosseum’s audience. He looks around, then he falls on his knees. From the

Fig. 16.3 Athlete Rafał Kubacki as Ursus, in Kawalerowicz’s Quo vadis (2001). 3  See Dall’Asta and Faccioli in this volume.

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The ( In ) discreet Charm of the Romans  295

Fig. 16.4  Long shot of Ursus as a small figure in the arena, in Kawalerowicz’s Quo vadis (2001).

far distance it is unclear whether he is praying to God or paying tribute to the emperor. Either way, Ursus’s powerful body here expresses powerlessness. The change of camera distance in this scene, from a medium close-up ­displaying Ursus’s muscular and powerful body to a high-angle extreme long shot, parallels the ambivalent attitude of the ancient Romans to gladiators: admiration and distain (cf. Davis 2000: 31). Moreover, the extreme long shot transforming Ursus into a visual spectacle questions the scopic regime of the traditional model of cinema’s visual pleasures that employs the female body as an object of a (male) spectator’s gaze. According to Leon Hunt, the ‘display of the male body’ present in gladiatorial scenes is typical of male epics (1993: 66). The genre provides the viewer with what Paul Willemen calls an ‘unquiet pleasure’ aligned with homoerotic desire (1981: 16). However, as Hunt notes, the spectacle of the male body in epics is frequently mediated for the viewer via the enemy’s or opponent’s gaze in order to locate homoerotic desire in a negative ideological space (Hunt 1993: 74). Kawalerowicz effectively uses this strategy in the arena scene. The high-angle shot conveys the point of view of the Colosseum audience and, specifically, the gaze of Nero, Petronius, and Marcus. Among these three, Nero is the antagonist and his gaze expresses the ambivalent sentiments of Romans towards gladiators. On the one hand, the emperor looks with hatred at Ursus standing up for the Christians but, on the other hand, his gaze seems to convey an apprehensive admiration and, pos­sibly, desire for the giant’s muscular and powerful body. When Marcus,

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296  Elżbieta Ostrowska who has already transgressed his Roman identity, refuses to look at the arena and the fight, he symbolically denies these sentiments. After the entry of Ursus (contradictory in so many ways), the viewer sees the gate open again and a huge bull advances into the arena with a naked Lygia tied to its back. Ursus gets up from his knees, approaches the beast and instantly grasps his horns. Now the spectacle reaches its apogee in the per­ vers­ity of its archetypal content; it features a virgin, a beast, and a muscular male hero. The camera presents Ursus’s fight in alternating long and close-up shots. Marcus passively observes the struggle or, rather, tries to avoid watching it as much as possible. He closes his eyes so as not to be exposed to the sight of his beloved in deadly danger. Only when Ursus is just about to win the fight does Petronius say to him, ‘Watch!’ He does so and sees the strongman free Lygia and take her into his arms. Then, in an instant, Marcus jumps down from amidst the arena spectators, runs towards Ursus, and covers Lygia’s naked body with a cloth. Then he takes her from the giant’s hands into his own and moves round to stand in front of Nero and await his decision. The emperor accepts the will of the crowd to save the woman as it is expressed by the famous gesture of an upturned thumb. The scene performs a wellknown scenario in Polish culture of male impotence (cf. Ostrowska 2016), as incarnated by Marcus, and a fantasy of male strength and power embodied by the temporarily assertive Ursus. The scenes fixated on the powerful and impressive body of Ursus that openly address the male gaze (and desire) contrast with the earlier scenes of crucifixion that offer an alternative and seemingly less problematic display of the male body. As Leon Hunt observes, the imagery of crucifixion ‘is more contradictory at each level: passivity offset by control, humiliation offset by nobility of sacrifice, eroticism offset by religious connotations of transcendence’ (1993: 73). In the scene of crucifixion Kawalerowicz employs formal devices that facilitate this effect of ‘transcendent perspective’. The act of col­ lect­ive crucifixion takes place at the arena as well, and the camera seemingly takes the position of the audience or, rather, a position above it. Smooth camera movement reveals numerous crosses, with the stretched bodies of both men and women hanging from them. This high-angle and extreme long shot cannot be identified with anybody’s perspective; it is, rather, as if a transcendent non-human observer were pondering on the perverse and horrifying spectacle. Instead of an individual tormented body, the viewer sees the col­ lect­ive body of Christendom, or perhaps the Polish people—‘the Christ of nations’. At some point, a strong voice is heard and the camera cuts to one of the martyrs, an old man whose close-up fills most of the film frame. He curses

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The ( In ) discreet Charm of the Romans  297 Nero. The collective weak and tormented body is replaced with the power of Logos. Corporeality is relegated to Romans and slaves.

All (Polish) Roads Lead to Rome Unlike the voice-over commentary employed at the beginning of the 1951 Hollywood version of Quo vadis that described the corruption of ancient Rome under Nero’s rule and its gradual demise brought on by the rising power of Christianity, the opening of Kawalerowicz’s Quo vadis utilizes an extended tracking shot that circles the contemporary Colosseum from a low angle (Figure 16.5). The camerawork emphasizes the visual might of the symbolic landmark that signifies the origins of Western civilization in its ambiguous predilection for violence and cruelty. The low angle monumentalizes the building that seems to overpower the spectator, whose gaze is mediated by the camera. The film’s opening featuring the ‘real’ Colosseum fulfils several functions. First and foremost, an authentic setting is used to launch the historical narrative that follows. Second, it implicates the cinematic audience in the diegetic world that appears as an amalgam of the past (evoked by the sound of the cheering crowd in the arena) and the present (signified by the real footage of the contemporary, empty Colosseum).4 The relationship established between

Fig. 16.5  Opening low-angle shot of the contemporary Colosseum, in Kawalerowicz’s Quo vadis (2001). 4  Cf. Scodel and Bettenworth 2009: 39.

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298  Elżbieta Ostrowska the present and the past as well as the real and the fictive becomes even more ambivalent when one contextualizes the film’s opening in relation to the ­religious practices located relatively recently in the Colosseum. Every year on Good Friday, John Paul II used to perform there the liturgy of the Stations of the Cross, establishing an evident link between Christ’s passion and the martyrdom of the early Christians.5 Although a Polish film audience would be well aware that the film’s story is adapted from the late nineteenth-century novel by Henryk Sienkiewicz and is, thus, a product of literary fiction, the opening shots featuring the actual Colosseum establish a connection between present-day commemoration and the martyrdoms scripted in the novel. The cinematic fiction is validated here by means of real space and landmarks with a contemporary religious currency. Yet the opening documentary footage of the contemporary Colosseum is immediately followed by an interior fictive scene recreating everyday life in ancient Rome whose mise en scène is inspired not so much by historical documents as by the Western painterly tradition represented by Alma-Tadema and the Polish painter Henryk Siemiradzki. Consequently, the opening of the film offers an intriguing blend of documentary realism and painterly artifice. The last scene of the film also offers a blend of fiction and reality, creating a compositional frame for the intervening narrative. In the closing images of Kawalerowicz’s Quo vadis, the Apostle Peter returns to Rome and looks over it from a hill (Figure  16.6). The dome of St Peter’s Basilica dominates the

Fig. 16.6  Apostle Peter looks out at present-day Rome in the closing shot of Kawalerowicz’s Quo vadis (2001). 5  Cf. Scodel and Bettenworth 2009: 49.

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The ( In ) discreet Charm of the Romans  299 urban landscape seen by the Apostle. Presenting the contemporary view of Rome as St Peter’s point of view conveys the symbolic power, or perhaps even ownership, he has over it. For the Polish viewer, especially in 2001 when the film was released, this final image would evoke the presence of ‘our’ Polish Pope in Rome. In contrast to the camera’s initial low angle that looked up at the ancient city’s landmark in order to suggest respect and humility, its high position and angle in the closing shots convey a perspective of power and domination. Importantly, this camera’s set-up was used earlier, when Nero was looking at Rome from the hill of Anzio within the film’s ancient time frame. Thus, using an identical perspective to show St Peter’s return to the city  signifies a transfer of power from the barbaric Roman emperor to the Christian civilization that now, in 2001, is represented symbolically by the Vatican and its Polish Pope. Scodel and Bettenworth make the even more radical claim that the film’s ending creates a connection between Peter and John Paul II (2009: 97). The Polish film audience, at least a significant ­segment of it, would most likely support this interpretation because of the national aggrandizement it offers (Kałużyński 2001: 52–3). The symbolic images at the end of Kawalerowicz’s Quo vadis acquire ­special importance when set in the political context of the time when the film was made. It was released in 2001, only twelve years after the collapse of ­communism. The political slogan of ‘the return to Europe’ was eventually translated into political reality when Poland signed the Treaty of Accession to the European Union two years later. However, it needs to be noted that at that time many Poles radically opposed the slogan, arguing that Poland had been a part of Europe for the last ten centuries, based on a modern rehash of the mythologized nationalistic belief in Poland’s special mission as guardian and bulwark of Christian civilization. The election of Cardinal Karol Wojtyła as Pope reinforced this myth, and the ending of the film echoes it in a straightforward fashion. Regardless of Kawalerowicz’s intention, the film lends itself to interpretation as a continuation of this nationalistic discourse, especially given that its premiere took place in the Vatican and was attended by the Pope himself.6 This unusual film screening symbolically confirmed the close connection between Poland and the Vatican and, thereby, the country’s ­long-standing place in the West.

6  See Kabiesz 2001: 27; Duda 2010.

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300  Elżbieta Ostrowska

Conclusion Kawalerowicz’s Quo vadis merges Sienkiewicz’s colonial fantasies with contemporary discourses concerning Poland’s Europeanness. Most importantly, the film, paralleling its literary original, offers to audiences constantly chan­ ging points of spectatorial identification with various characters representing different ideological agendas relevant to Poland’s modern standing. Specific narrative and visual strategies position viewers both as persecuted Christians and as hedonistic and imperial Romans. Arguably, Lygia’s romance with Marcus Vinicius, who decides to convert to Christianity, implies the possibility of reconciliation between these contradictory structures of desire. Symbolically, their future marriage stands as a metaphor of the union between (Eastern European) Poland and the (Western European) Roman Empire. Kawalerowicz’s decision to frame the nineteenth-century Polish fiction with two images of contemporary Rome seems to suggest that, ultimately, long after the time of Sienkiewicz, Poland has ‘returned to Europe’, while the film’s premiere in the Vatican, in the presence of Pope John Paul II as inheritor of the authority of St Peter, further implies a Polish (hegemonic) presence in Rome, and across Europe for that matter. However significant this highly ideo­logic­al modern framework and its attendant nationalistic message may be, the tender and tragic scene displaying the suicide of Petronius and Eunice may offer to the viewer a more intense point of affective identification. Most likely, a female slave sacrificing her life for a mighty male master evokes a more seductive fantasy for Polish (male) audiences than the one of political hegemony expressed in the final image of Peter looking down at Rome.

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Bibliography  315 Shiel, M. (2009). ‘Branding the Modernist Metropolis: The Eternal City and the City of Lights in Cinema After World War II’, in S. Hemelryk Donald, E. Kofman, and C. Kevin eds., Branding Cities: Cosmopolitanism, Parochialism and Social Change. London: Routledge, 105–22. Shohat, E., and Stam R. (1994). Unthinking Ethnocentrism. Multiculturalism and the Media. London, New York: Routledge. Sienkiewicz, Enrico. (1901). Quo Vadis? Romanzo. Con 54 disegni di A.  Minardi. Milan: Treves. Sienkiewicz, Enrico. (1906–7). Quo vadis? Nuova e integrale traduzione di C.  Collini. Florence: Casa Editrice Nerbini. Sienkiewicz, Enrico. (1908). Quo vadis? Nuova e integrale traduzione di C. Collini, illustrata dal pittore G. Rossi. Florence: Casa Editrice Nerbini. Sienkiewicz, Enrico. (1910). Quo vadis? Nuova e integrale traduzione di C.  Collini. Florence: Casa Editrice Nerbini. Sienkiewicz, Enrico. (1913a). Quo Vadis? Romanzo. Edizione cinematografica cioè illustrata da 78 quadri tratti dalle celebri ‘films’ della Società Italiana Cines. Milan: Treves. Sienkiewicz, Enrico. (1913b). Quo vadis? Nuova traduzione integrale. Florence: Casa Editrice Nerbini. Sienkiewicz, Enrico. (1914). Quo Vadis? Nuova traduzione integrale con illustrazioni, Florence: Nerbini. Sienkiewicz, Enrico. (1985). Quo Vadis? Nuova traduzione integrale con illustrazioni di T. Scarpelli. Florence: Casa Editrice G. Nerbini (anastatic reprint of the 1944 edition). Sienkiewicz, H. (1949–55). ‘O swojej własnej twórczości’, in H.  Sienkiewicz. Dzieła. Wydanie zbiorowe pod redakcją Juliana Krzyżanowskiego. Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, v. 40, 143–5. Sienkiewicz, H. (1950). ‘List z Rzymu’, in: J. Krzyżanowski ed. Dzieła, v. XLIV–LX, Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. Sienkiewicz, H. (1968). Pan Michael; an historical novel of Poland, the Ukraine, and Turkey, trans. J. Curtin. New York: Greenwood Press. Sienkiewicz, H. (1996). Listy, v. II, part 1, 2, 3, M. Bokszczanin eds. Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. Sienkiewicz,  H. (2002a), ‘Antologia wypowiedzi Henryka Sienkiewicza o „Quo vadis’ zaczerpniętych z jego korespondencji’, in: J.  Axer, M.  Bokszczanin eds. Z Rzymu do Rzymu. Warsaw: OBTA UW—Unia VERUM, 249–329. Sienkiewicz, H. (2002b), Quo vadis: powieść z czasów Nerona, T.  Żabski ed., Biblioteka Narodowa II 298. Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich. Sienkiewicz, H. (2016) [1896]. Quo Vadis. A Narrative of the Time of Nero trans. J. Curtin. Boston: Little, Brown, & Company. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2853 Sienkiewicz, Henryk. (1897). ‘Quo Vadis’. A Narrative of the Time of Nero [. . .], trans. from the Polish by J. Curtin. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co. Sienkiewicz, Henryk. (1898). Quo Vadis. Racconto storico dei tempi di Nerone. Prima versione italiana autorizzata dall’autore di F. Verdinois. Naples: Detken & Rocholl. Sienkiewicz, Henryk. No date [but 1901–3]. Quo vadis? Roman néronien, édition illustrée par Jan Styka; traduction nouvelle et complète par E. Halpérine-Kaminsky, 1–3. Paris: E. Flammarion. Sienkievicz, Henryk. (1921). Quo Vadis? Racconto storico dei tempi di Nerone. Illustrazioni del prof. F. Fabbi. Milan: ‘Gloriosa’ Casa Editrice Italiana. Sienkievicz, Henryk. (1923). Quo Vadis? Racconto storico dei tempi di Nerone. Illustrazioni del prof. F. Fabbi. Milan: ‘Gloriosa’ Casa Editrice Italiana.

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318 Bibliography Veronesi, M. (2018). ‘Renée Deliot’, biographical entry in J.  Gaines, R.  Vatsal, and M.  Dall’Asta eds. Women Film Pioneers Project online portal. New York: Columbia Libraries. https://wfcdrs.columbia.edu/pioneer/renee-deliot/ (accessed 5 March 2018). Vivarelli, N. (2015). ‘Hollywood on the Tiber Puts Rome Back to Work’. Variety, 22 July 2015: 77–8. Walczak, B. (1991). ‘Uwagi o języku Quo vadis’, in L. Ludorowski ed. Henryk Sienkiewicz. Twórczość i recepcja, ‘Litteraria Lublinensia’, vol. 3. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS, 171–91. Walicki, A. (1982). Philosophy and Romantic Nationalism: the Case of Poland. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wallace, L. (1873). The Fair God, or, The Last of the ‘Tzins. A Tale of the Conquest of Mexico. Boston: James R. Osgood & Company. Wallace, L. (1889). Ben-Hur: opowieść z czasów Chrystusa, trans. Z. Grabowska. Warsaw: Wydanie Redakcji Wędrowca. Wallace, L. (1900). Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ: The Player’s Edition. New York: Harper & Brothers. Wallace, L. (1900). Ben Hur: una storia di Cristo: Prima Traduzione Italiana, trans. H. Mildmay and G. Cavalieri. Milan: Baldini, Castoldi & Co. Wallace, L. (1906). Lew Wallace: An Autobiography. New York: Harper & Bros. Wallace, L. (1908). Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ: Wallace Memorial Edition. New York: Harper & Brothers. Wallace-Hadrill, A. (1983). Suetonius. London: Duckworth. Wandycz, P.  S. (1974). The Lands of Partitioned Poland 1795–1918. Seattle and London: Washington University Press. Warner, C. D. ed. (1897). Library of the World’s Best Literature, Ancient and Modern. New York: the International Society. Waters, W. E. (1902). Cena Trimalchionis. Boston: B. H. Sanborn & Co. Wietecha, A. (2011). ‘Historia antycznego Rzymu jako tworzywo literackie: Kraszewski, Jeske-Choiński, Sienkiewicz’. Śląskie Studia Polonistyczne 1, 53–62. Willemen, P. (1981). ‘Anthony Mann: Looking at the Male’. Framework,: 15/16/17, p. 16. Winkler, M.  M. (2001). ‘The Roman Empire in American Cinema After 1945’, in S. R. Joshel, M. Malamud, and D. T. McGuire, Jr, eds. Imperial Projections: Ancient Rome in Modern Popular Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 50–76. Winkler, M. M. (2008). ‘Hollywood Presents the Roman Empire, 1951-1964: The Rhetoric of Cinematic Prologues’. Classical and Modern Literature 28 no. 1: 53–80. Winkler, M.  M. (2009). The Roman Salute: Cinema, History, Ideology. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Winkler, M. M. (2016). ‘M-G-M’s Quo Vadis (1951): ‘This Is the Big One!’, trans. M. Wrana, in M. Woźniak and K. Biernacka-Licznar Quo Vadis? Da caso letterario a fenomeno della cultura di massa: ispirazioni—adattamenti—contesti. Rome: Edizioni Ponte Sisto, 60–7. Winkler, M.  M. (2017a). ‘Imperial Roman Architecture Made in Hollywood’ in A. M. Liberati and E. Silverio eds. Civiltà Romana, v. 3. Rome: Edizioni Quasar, 75–95. Winkler, M.  M. (2017b). ‘Nero in Hollywood’, in S.  Bartsch, K.  Freudenburg, and C. Littlewood eds. The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Nero. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 318–32. Winnington, R. (1952). ‘Nero Would Love This Quo Vadis’. National Chronicle, 26.01.1952. Woźniak, M. (2016). ‘Dove ci ha portato Sienkiewicz? ‘Quo vadis’ da caso letterario a fenomeno di massa’, in M. Woźniak and K. Biernacka-Licznar eds. Quo vadis? Da caso letterario a fenomeno della cultura di massa. Ispirazoni—adattamenti—contesti. Rome: Edizioni Ponte Sisto, 6–15.

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Bibliography  319 Woźniak, M., Biernacka-Licznar, K., Rybicki, J. (2020). 120 lat recepcji ‘Quo vadis’ Henryka Sienkiewicza we Włoszech. Warsaw: DiG. Wyke, M. (1997a). Projecting the Past. Ancient Rome, Cinema, and History. New York, London: Routledge. Wyke, M. (1997b). ‘Herculean Muscle! The Classifying Rhetoric of Bodybuilding’. Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 4.3: 51–79. Wyke, M. (2012). Caesar in the USA. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wyke, M. (2017a.). ‘Parola e immagine: fattori competitivi dell’adattamento nel lungometraggio Quo vadis? (1913)’, in E.  Gagetti and M.  Woźniak Quo vadis. La prima opera transmediale. Rome: Accademia Polacca delle Scienze, 76–98. Wyke, M. (2017b). ‘From 1916 to the Arrival of Sound: The Systematization, Expressivity and Self-reflection of the Feature Film’, in A. J. Pomeroy ed. A Companion to Ancient Greece and Rome on Screen. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 61–90. Wyke, M. (2019). ‘Mobilizing Pompeii for Italian silent cinema’. Classical Receptions Journal, 2019: 1–23. Yourcenar, M. (1990). ‘Tone and Language in the Historical Novel’. ‘The New Criterion’, 35. https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/1990/2/tone-and-language-in-the-historicalnovel. Żabski, T. (1979). Poglądy estetyczno-literackie Henryka Sienkiewicza. Wrocław: Ossolineum. Żabski, T. (2002). ‘Wstęp’, in H. Sienkiewicz. (2002) Quo vadis. Powieść z czasów Nerona, T. Żabski ed. Wrocław: Ossolineum, V–CII. Zielinski, F. (1958). ‘American Critics of Sienkiewicz’. Polish American Studies 15.3/4: 73–5. Ziółkowski, A. (2002). ‘Urbs Roma w Quo vadis, czyli Sienkiewicz jako topograf antycznego Rzymu’, in J. Axer and M.Bokszczanin eds. Z Rzymu do Rzymu. Warszawa OBTA UW—Unia VERUM, 13–56. Ziomek, J. (1980). Powinowactwa literatury. Studia i szkice. Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe. Żurawska, J.  M. (2005), ‘Il museo di Villa Certosella. Jan Styka a Capri’, in M.  Böhmig Capri. Mito e realtà nelle culture dell’Europa centrale e orientale. Naples: Europa Orientalis, 39–48. Zwierlein, O. (2010). Petrus in Rom: Die literarischen Zeugnisse mit einer kritischen Edition der Martyrien des Petrus und Paulus auf neuer handschriftlicher Grundlage. 2nd ed. Berlin: De Gruyter.

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Index Note: Tables and figures are indicated by an italic “t” and “f ” following the page number. For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Acilii 48–9 Acta Liberii et Damasi 44–5 Acté (1839 novel)  11–12 Addison, Joseph  108n.3 Aeschylus 55–6 agalmatophilia (statue love)  185–6 Aguiari, T.  195–6 Aida (1953 film)  275 Albertini, Luciano (Sansone)  271 Aldrich, Thomas Bailey  92–3 Alexander the Great (1956 film)  223–4 Alma-Tadema, Lawrence  64–6, 297–8 Amherst College  78 Anacreon 55–6 Anderson, Paul W. S.  279 Andreotti, Giulio  211 Androcles and the Lion (1913 stage play) 118–19 Angiolini, Alfredo  169–70 Antéchrist, L’ (1873 novel)  11–12, 66n.21, 68 Anthar l’invincible (1964 film)  240 Apicius 55–6 Apollodorus 265 Aristotle 55–6 Armellini, Mariano  53 art, influence on Quo vadis see historical paintings Astrea 271 Atherton, Daisy  111 Atleta fantasma, L’ (1919 film)  268–9 Attentato, L’ (1918 film)  267 Aubert, J.  195–6 Augustine, St  81n.16 Aulus Gellius  70–1 Ausonia see Guaita, Mario

Au temps des premiers chrétiens (1910 film)  127 Avanti! della Domenica 169–70 Baer, Buddy  238–9, 239f, 267, 273–4 Baer, Max  273–4 Bajon, Filip  283–4 Balbus, S.  195n.9 Baldi, Giovanni  170 Banaś, P.  203n.20 Barthes, Roland  219–20 Barrett, Wilson  102–3, 108–11, 113–15, 115f Barron, James  83–4 Battistini, Mattia  136–7 Beecher, Henry Ward  93 Beerbohm, Max  113–14 Beery, Wallace  213–14 Behrman, S. N.  214–15, 218, 248 Bellini, Adriano (Kirk Morris)  278 Ben-Hur (1899 stage play)  87–8, 101–3, 108, 110 Ben-Hur (1907 film)  103–4 Ben-Hur (1925 film)  88, 101, 103–4, 217, 264–5 Ben-Hur (1959 film)  223–4, 273–4 Ben-Hur (2016 film)  211 Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880 novel)  4, 20–1 adaptations see under cinema; theatre American reception of  18, 87, 91, 93, 101 as brand name  88–9 chariot race  18–19, 157n.40 compared to Quo vadis  18, 87, 89–90, 93–7, 100–4

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322 Index Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (cont.) copyright disputes  91–2, 103–4 evangelical underpinnings of  18, 89–90, 93, 95 inspiration for Quo vadis 10–11 as ‘noisy’ success  79n.13 plot 108–9 Vatican version  100 Ben-Hur, in Tableaux and Pantomime 92 Berti, Marina  220 Bertolucci, Bernardo  242 Bettenworth, Anja  21–2, 157n.40, 163n.58, 182, 240n.18, 241–2, 282–3, 285, 288 Bible Jefferson Bible  93 and Quo vadis  31–2, 252 Biliński, Bronisław  7–8 Bioscope, The 148–50 Blanchard, Calvin  76–7 Blom, Ivo  268 Boccaccio, Giovanni  76–7 Boccolini, Alfredo (Galaor)  271 bodybuilding  266; see also poses plastiques Boni, Giacomo  41 Boscoreale Treasure  182–3 Boullier, Robert  132–4, 135f Bowersock, Glen  73n.2 Boyer d’Agen, Jean-Auguste  39 Boyhood of Christ, The (1888 novel)  91, 100 Bradford, Ellen Wright  92 Bragaglia, Carlo Ludovico  277 Brandauer, Klaus Maria  259–60 Brard 132–4 Brass, Tinto  73n.2 Britain film industry  217–20 theatrical adaptations of Quo vadis  111–17, 115f ‘toga plays’  108–10, 119 Broch, H.  200–1 Brooks, Mel  234–5, 278 Brown, Tom  222–3 Brunetta, Gian Piero  278 Bruno, Garibaldi Giuseppe  195–6, 199–200, 199f, 205–6 Buckstone, John Baldwin  109 Bujnicki, T.  64n.13

Bulthaupt, Heinrich  103 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward  4, 11–12, 20–1, 104, 109 Burke, Samson  274 Burton, George  98 Butler, Shane  26 Cabiria (1914 film)  269–70 Caduta di Troia, La (1911 film)   124–5 Caesar, Julius  62n.9 Cain, Henri  103, 134, 136–8, 153–4 Caligula (1979 film)  73n.2 Calpurnius Siculus  236n.14 Camerini, Mario  275 Campogalliani, Carlo  275–6 Capitani, Giorgio  277 Capuano, Luigi  277 Carados (H. Chance Newton)  108–9 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da  252–3 Carbone, Marco  26 Carluccio, Giulia  176–7 Carnera, Primo  273–4 Carpézat, Eugène  132–4 Carracci, Annibale  1n.1 Casa Editrice Nerbini see Nerbini, Giuseppe Casaleggio, Francesco (Fracassa)  271 Caserini, Mario  264–5 Cassius Dio  2, 62n.9 Castellani, Bruto  158n.44, 264–5, 267–8 Catholicism and Poland  30, 283–5 and Quo vadis  89–90, 100, 108, 150–2, 176n.31, 191n.61, 213, 284–5 response to socialism  150–2 and toga plays  110, 119 see also Christianity, early Cavalieri, Gastone  100 Chaperon, Jean  170–1 Chariton of Aphrodisias  186n.54 Chase, Charles W.  110–13 Chateaubriand, François-René de  11–12 Checa, Ulpiano  157 Cherubini, Eugenio  200 Chibnall, Steve  217–18 Children of the Soil (1894 novel)  9–10 Chilo Chilonides  14, 36, 60–1, 67–8, 116–17, 131–2

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Index  323 Christianity, early Christian oppression paralleled with Jewish genocide  218 classless 59n.3 and historical novels  4 martyrdom as allegory for Polish oppression  3–4, 13, 36–7, 39, 196, 203–4, 285 martyrdom as horror kitsch  194–6, 197f martyrdom as religious kitsch  203–4 persecution exaggerated  84–5 sites in Rome  43–5, 48–9 see also Catholicism Chrzanowski, Ignacy  16n.26 Cicero  29–30, 32, 55–6, 61, 62n.9, 70–1 Cicognani, Augusto  128–9 cinema and adaptations  144–7, 152–4 adaptations of Ben-Hur  103–4, 211, 217 adaptations of Quo vadis  22–4, 103–4, 123, 143–4, 146, 159–60, 211–12, 227–8, 281–2 in Britain  217–20 as democratic art form  158–9 English accents associated with Roman patricians  219–20, 248 and the ‘historical gaze’  222–3 intertitles  89–90, 127, 144, 247 in Italy  124–5, 140, 146–8, 211, 215–19, 221–4, 240, 263–4 limitations 143–4 in Poland  283–4 runaway films  211, 217, 224–5 strengths  117, 128, 139, 157 strongman genre (‘cinema dei forzuti’)  263–4, 267–9, 271–7 sword-and-sandal genre  263–4, 271–2, 274 in the USA  212, 214–16, 219–25 Cines  123–5, 127–8, 134–6, 140, 145–7, 149–52, 159–60, 167, 173, 181 Cioni, Sergio (Alan Steel)  278 circuses 158–9 Clash of the Titans (2010 film)  279 classical reception  19, 26 and historical novels  4 and nationalism  2–3 and popular culture  20

Claudian (1883 stage play)  109–10 Claypole, Clarke  110n.7 Clement I, Pope (Clement of Rome)  68 Cleopatra (1934 film)  213–14 Cleopatra (1963 film)  273–4 Cody, William (Buffalo Bill)  120 Coen, Joel and Ethan  243–4 Collignon, A.  76–7 colonialism  283–4, 286, 291–2 comedy (Roman)  56 Compagnia Drammatica della Città di Roma 128–9 Cone, Orello  80–1 Coquelin, Benoît-Constant  119–20, 131 Coquelin, Jean  119–20, 131 Couder 132–4 Couderc, Fernand  170–1 Courcelles-Dumont, Henri  204–6, 205f Crane, Frank  98 Crowe, Russell  245 Currie, Finlay  252 Curtin, Jeremiah  4, 73–4, 87, 93–4, 96, 112–13, 247, 254–5 Czas 5 Dall’Orto, Beato  124 D’Annunzio, Gabriele  269 D’Annunzio, Gabriellino  120, 165–8, 176–7 Dans les mansards de Paris (1924 film) 268–9 D’Arborio, Silvano  128–9, 132, 170–1 Darthy, Gilda  120n.34 David, Jacques-Louis  279 D’Azeglio, Massimo  170–1 Decameron, The 76–7 De Concini, Ennio  258–9 Deląg, Pawel  289 Delaroche, Paul  137, 138n.40 Del Grosso, Remigio  277 Deliot, Renée  268–9 Del Senno, Antonio  171 Deluge, The (1886 novel)  13–14, 93–4, 96–7, 227 DeLuis, Dom  234–5 Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954 film)  223–4 DeMille, Cecil B.  176–7, 190–1, 213–14

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324 Index Democritus 55–6 Demons of War According to Goya (1998 film)  289–90 De Rossi, Giovanni Battista  41–2, 45, 48–53 Dickson, William K. L.  266 Dietrich, Marlene  213–14 Dinosaur Valley Girls (1996 film)  240 Dogs (1992 film)  289 Donatus 67n.22 Doumic, René  143–4, 162 Dumas, Alexandre  9n.19, 11–12 Du Maurier, George  79n.13 Dutsch, Dorota  2–3 Dyer, Richard  273 Dziennik Poznański 5 Eco, Umberto  201–2 Edizioni Artische Fotografiche ‘A. Traldi’ 171–2 Edwards, Julian  111–13 Ellenshaw, Peter  219–20 Elley, Derek  282–3 Ercole, Sansone, Maciste e Ursus, gli invincibili see Samson and the Mighty Challenge Erlanger, Abraham see Klaw & Erlanger Eunice (character) costume  62–3, 70 as faithful slave  291–2, 300 kissing Petronius’s statue  64–5, 184–90, 188f, 190f, 253–4 and poetry  253–4, 254t postcards of  130–1, 180t relationship with Petronius  111, 113, 288, 291–2 suicide  75, 113, 132, 291–2, 300 Euripides 186n.54 evangelism see under USA Everett, Charles Carroll  80–1 Fabbi, Fabio  167–8, 170–1, 184, 188f, 189 Fabiola (1918 film)  264–5 Fabiola; or, The Church of the Catacombs (1854 novel)  110 Farnese Bull see Toro Farnese Farnese Hercules  268 Farrar, Frederic  41–2 Ferdinando, Tsar  127n.12

Fielding, Henry  76 Film d’Art  127 films see cinema Fire in the Steppe (Pan Michael; 1888 novel)  9–10, 96–7, 227 Fitzball, Edward  109 Flammarion 178n.37 Forest, Mark  275n.22, 278 Forgacs, David  224 Fornari, Luca  169–70 Forrest, Mark see Forest, Mark Fosse, Paul  136, 154 Fouquier, Henry  131–2 F. R. 205–8 Fracassa see Casaleggio, Francesco Fracassi, Claudio  275 France cinematic adaptations of Quo vadis  127, 159 operatic adaptations of Quo vadis 103, 120, 136–9, 137f, 139f reception of Quo vadis 119 theatrical adaptations of Quo vadis 107–8, 119–20, 131–4, 133f, 135f toga plays  119 Francisci, Pietro  267, 274–5 Frey, Eugène  138 Friedländer, Ludwig  78 From Cross to Crown; or, The Christian Martyrs (1897 stage play)  110n.7 Fury, Ed  240, 274–6, 278 Galaor see Boccolini, Alfredo Galdemar, Ange  39–40, 70n.27 Gambino, Domenico (Saetta)  271 Garfield, James  91 Garzanti, Aldo  168–9 Gazeta Polska 5 Genette, Gérard  21–2, 165, 195n.8, 200n.14 Genn, Leo  257, 261 Gérôme, Jean-Léon  64–5, 157–8, 185–6, 266–7 Gerusalemme liberate, La (1911 film)   124–5 Giambaldi, F.  195–6 Gibbon, Edward  81–6 Gibson, Mel  247–8 Gilder, Jeanette  110–13, 116–17

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Index  325 Gilman, Nicolas Paine  80–1 Giori, Mauro  276 Gladiator (2000 film)  246, 279 ‘Gloriosa’/Casa Editrice Italiana  165–8, 170–1, 184 Głowiński, Michał  194n.5 Godlewski, Mieczysław  11 Godwin, E. W.  109–10 Goldhill, Simon  4, 18–19 Goldwyn, Samuel  103–4 Gonneau, George  278n.25 Gray, Hugh  218, 220, 232–3 Gregory the Great, Pope  44–5 Griffith, D. W.  247 Guaita, Mario (Ausonia)  268–71 Guazzoni, Enrico  22–3, 103–4, 120, 123–6, 128–9, 136–8, 140, 144, 162, 165–7, 174, 176n.31, 264–5 Guccione, Bob  73n.2 Guéranger, Dom Prospère  41–2, 46, 49–50 Gundle, Stephen  224 Hail, Caesar! (2016 film)  243–4 Hales, Shirley  20–1 Halpérine-Kaminski, Ely  178n.37 Hardwick, Lorna  20 Harlin, Renny  279 Harper & Brothers  91–2, 103–4 Harrison, Stephen  20 Hawthorne, Julian  97 Hearst, William Randolph  83–4 Helen of Troy (1956 film)  223–4, 232n.10, 273–4 Hercules (character)  240, 263–4, 266, 274 Hercules (1958 film)  240, 267, 274–5 Hercules (2014 film)  279 Herman, Henry  109–10 Hermes 186 Héron de Villefosse, René  182–3 Hesiod 185–6 historical novels  4, 9–12 historical paintings  56–7, 64–9, 67f, 68f, 152–3, 157–8 History of the World, Part 1 (1981 film) 234–5 Hoffman, Jerzy  283–4 Holmes, Oliver Wendell  92–3 Homer  7–8, 55–6 Horace  6–7, 33, 55–6, 62n.9, 70–1

Hornblow, Arthur, Jr  214–15, 218 Hoshour, Samuel K.  89 Howells, William Dean  92–3 Hugo, Victor  168n.9, 170 Hülsen, Christian  41 Hunt, Leon  295–7 Huston, John  218, 233–4 Hutcheon, Linda  144 Huysmans, Jan  76 Hyginus  68, 186n.54 Immortals (2011 film)  279 Index oleorum 44–5 Innocenti, Camillo  190–1 In the Desert and Wilderness (1911 novel) 284 Intolerance (1924 film)  247 Irydion (1836 novel)  12 Isocrates 265 Istituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica 41 Italy cinematic adaptations of Ben-Hur 217 cinematic adaptations of Quo vadis  103–4, 123, 143–4, 146, 159–60, 211–12 ‘cinema dei forzuti’ (strongman genre)  263–4, 267–9, 271–7 film industry  124–5, 140, 146–8, 211, 215–21, 223–4, 240 nationalism  130–1, 147–52, 272 reception of Quo vadis 147–8 theatrical adaptations of Quo vadis  128–31, 130f Jacoby, Georg  120, 165–8, 176–7 Jannings, Emil  176–7 Japan, benshi 136 Jefferson Bible  93 Jergens 88 Jeske-Choiński, Teodor  35n.10 Joannes Brothers  88 Johannes, presbyter  44–5 John Paul II, Pope  297–9 Johnson, Andrew  91 Jonson, Ben  109n.4 Julian the Apostate, Emperor  16n.26 Julius Caesar (1953 film)  223–4 Juvenal 70–1

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326 Index Kalem Company  103–4 Kawalerowicz, Jerzy  237, 246–7, 261, 281–2, 291 Kelley, Edgar Stillman  103 Kerr, Deborah  219–20 kitsch  194–5, 205–6 erotic kitsch  194–5 horror kitsch  194–6, 197f, 198f, 199f, 202–3 religious kitsch  194–5, 203–4 sweet kitsch  194–5, 200–1, 204–8 Klaw & Erlanger  87–8, 101–4, 110 Kleine, George  103–4, 160–1 Knowles, Edwin  111–13, 115–16 Knowles, James Sheridan  109n.4 Kochanowski, Jan  6–7 Korpal, Tadeusz  195–6, 199–200 Kossak, Wojciech  196n.10 Krämer, Peter  215–16 Krasiński, Zygmunt  12 Kraszewski, Józef Ignacy  3–4, 12–13 Kubacki, Rafał  293–4, 294f, 295f Kubrick, Stanley  243 Kulka, Tomás  194–5 Kuzmic, Tatiana  284–5, 290–1 La Bella, Vincenzo  171 Lamarr, Hedy  232n.10 Lambert, M.  195–6, 205–6 Lanciani, Rodolfo  41–2 Land of the Pharaohs (1955 film)  223–4 Lapacierie, Cora  120n.34 Larraz, José Ramón  235 Last Days of Pompeii, The (1834 novel)  4, 11–12, 20–1, 104, 109 Last Days of Pompeii, The (19th-cent. stage plays)  109, 119 Last Days of Pompeii, The (1913 film) 264–5 Last Days of Pompeii, The (1926 film) 264–5 Last Days of Pompeii, The (1935 film) 213–14 Last Tango in Paris (1972 film)  242 Latin language see under Romans Laubadère, Paul de  195–6, 200–1 Laughton, Charles  214–15, 219–20 Legend of Hercules, The (2014 film)  279 Lemeunier 132–4

Leo XIII, Pope  100 Leonardo da Vinci  252–3 LeRoy, Mervyn  218, 227–8, 237–9, 246–7 Leterrier, Louis  279 Levien, Sonya  215, 218, 248 Levine, Joe  278 Lincoln, Abraham  91 Linda, Bogusław  288–90 Little, Brown & Company  73–4, 87, 93–4, 112–13 Livy 7–8 Lombardi, Dillo  128–9 Louÿs, Pierre  170–1 Love of Three Queens (1954 film)  232–3 love poetry (Roman)  56 Lowe, Nick  19n.29, 20 Lowe, W. D.  78 Lowell, James Russell  92–3 Lucan (character)  116–17 Lucretius 55–6 Lygia (character)  14 as allegory of Christianity  286–7 as allegory of Italy  150–2 as allegory of Poland  150, 284–8 in the arena  14–15, 68, 68f, 108, 114, 115f, 116–17, 119–20, 121f, 122f, 235–8, 239f, 240, 296 and colonialism  286–7 costume  57–8, 61–2, 70–1 as culturally Roman  288 illustrations of  178–9, 182 and palliata 56 Petronius’s description of  152–3 postcards of  175f, 180t, 181–2, 195–6 protected by Ursus  293–4 receiving necklace from Nero  131–2 relationship with Vinicius  68–9, 82–3, 116–17, 159–60, 162–3, 173–4, 290–2, 300 and suicide of Petronius  132, 138 Lygians 284–5 Lysippos 55–6 Maciste (character)  269–70, 272, 274, 275n.22 Maciste (1915 film)  270–1 Mackail, John William  76–8, 81n.16 Mahin, John Lee  218, 248 Maiden Vows (2010 film)  283–4

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Index  327 Mankiewicz, Joseph L.  273–4 Mannix, Eddie  243 Mantegazza, Giacomo  195–6, 204–5 Marcantonio and Cleopatra (1913 film) 264–5 Marcus Aurelius  81 Martial 70–1 Martindale, Charles  19 Martinelli, Vittorio  128–9 Martyrologium Hieronymianum 45 Martyrs, The (1809 novel)  11–12 Marucchi, Orazio  48–53, 148–9, 155–6 Maschietta (Flapper) 170–1 Mastroianni, Domenico  165–6, 171–2, 174, 175f, 179–80, 180t, 183–4, 187–9, 188f, 195–6, 206–8, 207f Matthieu-Castelani, Gisèlle  194n.6 Mauri, Achille  128–9 Mayer, Louis B.  218 Mazierska, Ewa  283–4 McKinley, William  97 Medina, Louisa  109 Metlicovitz, Leopoldo  136–7 MGM  88, 212–15, 217–24, 222f, 228f Mianowski, Józef  30 Mickiewicz, Adam  36–7, 289–90 Mielcarz, Magdalena  293–4 Mildmay, H.  100 Minardi, Adriano  167–8, 182–3 Mirabilia urbis Romae  44–5, 48–9 Moeb, George  88 Moles, A.  194–5, 205–6 Monte, Richard  285–6 Montherlant, Henry de  37–8 Morawski, Kazimierz  15n.23, 71n.28 Moreau, Émile  119–20, 121f, 131–2, 133f, 135f Morris, Kirk see Bellini, Adriano Musonius Rufus  82 Mussolini, Benito  213–14 Myers, Carmel  88 Myron 55–6 nationalism  1, 21–2 and classical reception  2–3 in Italy  130–1, 147–52, 272 in Poland  3–4, 7, 21–2, 30, 36–7, 283–6, 288, 298–9 in the USA  97

Nerbini, Giuseppe (Casa Editrice Nerbini)  166–8, 170, 176, 179, 183 Nero (character)  23–4 as allegory of Polish oppression  285–6 costume  63–4, 68, 70 death  206–8, 207f dialogue 256t, 257, 258t downfall allegory of Church’s triumph 284–5 as exaggeration of historical Nero  79–80 illustrations of  179, 182 and kitsch  200–1, 206–8 and poetry  230–3, 253–4, 254t postcards of  180t, 181, 196–7, 198f, 199f, 206–8, 207f Ustinov as  229f, 233–5 Nero, Emperor Christians blamed for Rome’s fire  84–5 Christians burnt as torches  66, 198f as Christian oppressor/ Antichrist  3–4, 218 Christian oppression paralleled with Jewish genocide  218 compared to Tsar Alexander III  285–6 compared to Tsar Ferdinando  127n.12 as corrupt and dissolute  8 hostile primary sources  2 as poet and musician  229–30 portrayal of character in Quo Vadis 79–80 positive assessment of rule  81 Rome burning, role in  231 Seneca’s influence  81 Suetonius as source  32–3, 70–1, 79–80, 229–30 wearing synthesis in public  70n.25 Nero, or the Destruction of Rome (spectacle) 158–9 Nerone (1901 stage play)  131–2 Nico, Carlo  167–8 Nouguès, Jean  103, 120, 136–7, 137f, 139f, 140, 153–4 Novelli, Amleto  128–9, 140, 153–4 novels see historical novels; ‘toga novels’ Noyer, Armand  171–2 Oakley, Rev. Frederick  110n.7 Octavia (pseudo-Senecan drama)  2 Okón, W.  64n.13, 69n.24

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328 Index operas of Quo vadis  103, 120, 134, 136–9, 137f, 139f Orfei (family)  277 Ovid  55–6, 62–3, 70–1, 185–6, 253–4 Oxenford, John  109 Pacino, Al  245 Pagano, Bartolomeo  269–71, 275n.22 Pain, John  109 paintings see historical paintings palliata 56 Pan Michael see Fire in the Steppe Pan Tadeusz: The Last Foray in Lithuania (1999 film)  283–4, 289–90 Paolella, Domenico  277 Paramount  213–14, 223–4 Park, Reg  274, 278 Parker, Charles Pomeroy  79–83 Pasikowski, Władysław  289–90 Passion of Christ (2004 film)  247–8 Passio sanctorum Papiae et Mauri  44–5, 48–9 Pastrone, Giovanni  124–5, 269–71 Pathé Frères  127, 159 Paul, St (character)  82–3, 252–3 Paul, Joanna  20–1 Peck, Gregory  218, 249n.6 Peck, Harry Thurston  78–80, 82–3 Pellizza da Volpedo, Giuseppe  169–70 Péricaud, Louis  119–20, 121f Perret, Léonce  186n.55 Persius 55–6 Peter, St  44–5, 44f, 241 Peter, St (character)  82–3, 110, 119–20, 252 Peter, Otto  195–6, 200–3, 202f, 205–6 Petronius (character)  15–16, 36, 74–8, 133f, 145–6, 146f as allegory of artistic repression  145n.8 as allegory of masculinity  292 as alter ego of Sienkiewicz  15–16, 36 costume 59–61 deathbed letter to Nero  32n.8, 162–3 description of Lygia  152–3 description of Nero’s poetry  230–1 dialogue 251t, 255–7, 256t as focal point of novel  145n.7, 288–9 as hedonistic and cynical  289 as Hermes  186–7

Linda as Petronius  288–92 more sympathetic than historical Petronius  73, 76–8, 81, 85–6 postcards of  130–1, 181 in Quo vadis? 1913 film  152–3 rejecting Christianity  32n.8 relationship with Eunice  111, 113, 116–17, 288, 291–2 sources, Latin  32–3, 75 suicide  75, 81–3, 113, 132, 291, 300 Petronius (writer)  15–16, 32–3, 56, 74, 77–8, 81, 85–6 Phidias 55–6 Piderit, Theodor  202–3 Plautus 56 Pliny the Elder  55–6, 70–1, 74, 81 Pliny the Younger  32 Plutarch  70–1, 74 poetry in Quo vadis (1951 film)  253–4, 254t Roman love poetry  56 see also under Nero (character) Poland Aesopian speech  36n.13 Catholicism  30, 283–5 Christian martyrdom as allegory for Polish oppression  3–4, 13, 36–7, 39, 196, 203–4, 285 cinema 283–4 cinematic adaptations of Quo vadis  246–7, 260, 281–2 classicism (Latinitas)  6–7, 29–30 and colonialism  284, 286–7, 293–4 and masculinity  289–90, 292–3, 296 nationalism  3–4, 7, 21–2, 30, 36–7, 283–6, 288, 298–9 romantic love versus patriotic love 291–2 under Russian partition  36n.13, 37, 37n.16 Pololo, Ray  275–6 Pompeii 20–1 Pompeii (2014 film)  279 Ponson du Terrail, Pierre Alexis de  170–1 poses plastiques 268–70; see also bodybuilding postcards of Quo vadis  165–7, 171–2, 172f, 174, 175f, 178–84, 180t, 193–4, 205–6, 208

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 07/11/20, SPi

Index  329 and horror kitsch  194–6, 197f, 198f, 199f, 202–3 Nero’s death  206–8, 207f nudity of Christian martyrs  200–2, 202f, 205f and religious kitsch  203–4 and sweet kitsch  200–1, 204–8 Pozza, Giovanni  136–7 Praxiteles 55–6 Presa di Roma, La (1905 film)  128–9 Preston, Harriet Waters  75–6 Prince of India, The (1893 novel)  90–1, 100 Propertius 70–1 Pulitzer, Joseph  83–4 Purves, Alex  26 Quo Vadis (Catholic summer camp)  5 Quo Vadis (dining club)  5 Quo Vadis (1899 stage play)  102 Quo Vadis (1900 stage play; Barrett)  102–3, 111, 113–15, 115f Quo Vadis (1900 stage play; D’Arborio)  128–32, 130f, 170–1 Quo Vadis (1900 stage play; Gilder–Chase)  110–13, 116–17 Quo Vadis (1900 stage play; Stange)  102–3, 111–16 Quo vadis (1901 film)  127, 159 Quo Vadis (1901 stage play)  119, 121f, 131–2, 133f, 135f Quo Vadis? (1901 weekly newspaper)  169–70, 169f Quo vadis (1909 opera)  103, 120, 136–9, 137f, 139f Quo vadis? (1913 film)  22–3, 103–4, 120, 123–6, 128, 139–41, 143–52, 151f, 154–63, 165–6, 190–1, 264–5 advertising brochure  159, 167, 173, 175f arena scene  157–8 and Catholicism  150–2, 176n.31, 191n.61 Cines Revue promotion  159–60 criticism, positive  149, 161, 172–3 criticism, negative  143, 162–3 crowd scenes  124–5, 140 distribution and screenings  160–1, 175–6 ending  150–2, 151f, 159–60, 162–3, 173–4

Eunice kissing Petronius’s statue  189–90, 190f faithfulness to novel  126–7, 159–60 French premiere  153–4 influence of painting  157–8 influence of theatre  140, 155 intertitles  127, 144–5 and Italian national identity  147, 149–52 Italian performances  153–4, 160–1 music of  154, 158 Ostrianum scene  155–6 Petronius, depiction of  145–6, 146f Roman premiere  158 Rome, shooting in  148–9, 155–6, 160 Rome burning  156–7 sets and props  124–5, 140, 149, 190–1, 264–5 and socialism  150–2, 176 stills used as illustrations/ postcards  167–8, 171, 181 Ursus and the bull scene  237 Quo Vadis (1925 film)  120, 165–8, 172–3, 184, 190–1 censorship cuts  177n.35 deviation from novel  176–7, 182 Eunice kissing Petronius’s statue  189–90, 190f intertitles 247 stills useds as postcards  167, 171, 182 Ursus and the bull  237, 264–5, 267 Quo Vadis (1926 stage play/opera)  119–20, 122f Quo Vadis (1951 film)  23–4, 211–15, 218–23, 227–8, 228f, 251f British MGM’s involvement  219–20 as Cold War film  222–3 costumes reused in Hercules (1958)  275 dialogue  246–57, 251t, 253t, 254t, 261 divine epiphany scene  241, 242f finances 216–22 Italian extras  220–1 Nero, depiction of  228f, 229, 231–4 Rome, shooting in  216–19 Rome burning  233 screenplay 248 Ursus and the bull scene  237–9, 239f, 267, 273–4 Vinicius, depiction of  249

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 07/11/20, SPi

330 Index Quo Vadis? (1985 TV series)  240, 246–7, 258–60, 279 Quo Vadis (2001 film)  24–5, 246–7, 281–300, 282f, 297f crucifixion scene  296–7 dialogue 260–1 and fantasies of sexual domination 288–9 Lygia and the bull scene  237 as metaphor for Polish oppression  286 Peter returning to Rome scene  298–9, 298f Rome presented as more appealing  287, 289 suicide of Petronius and Eunice scene 291–2 Ursus and the bull scene  279, 294–6, 294f, 295f Quo vadis: A Tale of the Time of Nero 4–6 adaptations see under cinema; theatre; see also operas of Quo vadis artistic influences  64–9 Biblical sources  31–2 capitalization of title  17n.27 Catholic underpinnings of  89–90, 100, 108, 150, 213, 284–5 characters 15 and colonialism  283–5 compared to Ben-Hur  18, 87, 89–90, 93–7, 100–4 copyright issues  102–3, 112–13 costumes in  56–60, 69–71, 200–2 criticism by J.W.H.  83–5 criticism by Parker  81–3 criticism by Peck  79–83 divine epiphany  241 illustrated editions  152–3, 165–8, 179, 181–4; see also postcards and kitsch  194–5, 200–1 language  31–4, 260 literary influences  12–13, 39 Nero, depiction of  230–1 and the Ostrianum  43, 45–54, 48f Petronius, depiction of  73, 76–8, 81, 85–6 plagiarism accusations  11–12 plot 13–15 and Polish nationalism  21–2, 97, 150, 284–5 reception 5

reception in France  119 reception in Italy  147–8 reception in the USA  18, 73–87, 93–8, 100–4 and Roman literary sources  55–6 and Rome, depiction of  33, 35 and Rome, as source of inspiration 39–40 and socialism  170 sources, Latin  32–3, 39–40, 70–1 title 241 and totalitarian oppression  37–9 translations  5–6, 74, 152–3, 247 Ursus and the bull  236–7 Quo vadis, Baby? (2005 film)  242 Raicevich, Giovanni  271 Rampolla, Cardinal  100 Ranft, Richard  195–7, 198f, 205–6 Ratner, Brett  279 Reeves, Steve  240, 267, 278, 278n.25 Reich, Jacqueline  271 Reinisch, Joseph J.  103 Renan, Ernest  11–12, 68, 93 Revenge (2002 film)  283–4 Riley Brothers  91–2 RKO 213–15 Robe, The (1953 film)  214–15, 221–4 Robinson, Joe  274 Rodolfi, Eleuterio  264–5 Roman Catholicism see Catholicism Romans clothing  58–63, 69–70 comedies (palliata) 56 Latin language and translation issues  23–4, 31–4, 69, 246–50, 261 love poetry  56 political and cultural legacy of  282–3 Roman Sandals (1933 film)  213–14 Rome Aqua Virgo/Aqua Vergine  47–8 archaeology and topography of  41–2 cemetery of Priscilla  44–50 Cinecittà studios  218–19, 223–4 Coemeterium Maius  45–51 Colosseum  297–8, 297f Domine Quo Vadis chapel  10, 39–40, 241 and early Christian sites  43–5, 48–9

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 07/11/20, SPi

Index  331 and film-making  211 hypogeum of the Acilii  48–53 setting for Quo vadis? (1913 film)  148–9 Sienkiewicz’s visits  8–9, 39–40 Rösler, F.  195–6, 200–2 Rossi, Franco  240, 258–9 Rossi, Giuseppe  167–8, 183, 188f Royal Milling Company  88 Royal Philharmonic Orchestra  219–20 Rózsa, Miklós  219–20, 231–3 Rubens, Peter Paul  252–3 Rubinstein, Anton  103 Rumpler, F.  195–6 Ryan, Barbara  20–1 Ryan, Michael J.  78 Saetta see Gambino, Domenico Salambò (1914 film)  268–9, 270n.15 Salvação Barreto, Nuno  273–4 Salvadori, Enrico  50, 100 Salvatore, Gabriele  242 Samson and the Mighty Challenge (1965 film)  277 Sandow, Eugen  266 Sansone see Albertini, Luciano Santos, Henrique  267 Sardou, Victorien  131–2 Sarmatia/Sarmatians 6–7 Satyricon  32–3, 71n.28, 73–4, 76–8 Scardamaglia, Francesco  258–9 Scarpelli, Tancredi  167–8, 167n.7 Scodel, Ruth  21–2, 157n.40, 163n.58, 182, 240n.18, 241–2, 282–3, 285, 288 Scopas 55–6 Scott, Gordon  278 Scott, Ridley  246, 279 Scott, Walter  9n.19 sculptogravures  171–2, 175f; see also postcards Sears, Roebuck & Co.  87–8 Seikilos 231–2 Semeria, Giovanni  174–5 Seneca  32, 55–6, 81–2 Serao, Matilde  125, 128, 136–7, 161–2, 172–3 Setkowicz, A.  195–6 Shakespeare, William  76, 109n.4, 125 Shamir, Milette  20–1 Shaw, George Bernard  114, 118–19

Shelton, William Henry  96 Shohat, Ella  288–9 Siemiradzki, Henryk  8–10, 39, 52–3, 64–9, 67f, 68f, 152n.22, 158n.42, 297–8 Sienkiewicz, Henryk  3–4, 30 education 7–8 historical novels  9–10 Latin, knowledge of  7–8, 39–40, 70n.27 Nobel Prize  1, 7–8, 30, 147–8, 227 success 5 visit to Rome  8–9 see also Quo vadis Sign of the Cross, The (1895 stage play)  108–10, 113–14, 118–19 Sign of the Cross, The (1932 film)  213–14, 219–20 Simonelli, Giorgio  277 Singh, Tarsem  279 Sirti 167–8 Skwara, Ewa  284–6 Slave Merchants, The (1964 film)  240 Smith, James  194n.1 Smollett, Tobias  76–7 Snyder, Zack  279 Sobchak, Vivian  290–1 Soloman, Jon  20–1 Son of Hercules in the Land of Fire (1963 film)  277 Sophocles 55–6 Sosman Landis & Hunt  112–13 Sourire, Le 170–1 Spartacus (1913 film)  268, 270–1 Spartacus (1960 film)  243 Spring to Come, The (2001 film)  283–4 Stachiewicz, Piotr  178, 187, 188f Stam, Robert  154n.29, 288–9 Stange, Stanislaus  102–3, 110–16, 115f Steel, Alan see Cioni, Sergio Stephens, Susan A.  2–3, 26 Stevenson, Henry (Enrico)  53 Stocker, Bryony  246 Stowe, Harriet Beecher  93 Strauss, David Friedrich  93 strongman genre of films see under cinema Styka, Jan  152–3, 178, 187, 188f, 195–7, 197f, 200–8 Suetonius  2, 11–12, 32–3, 55–6, 62n.9, 64–5, 70–1, 70n.25, 79–80, 85, 206–8, 229–30

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 07/11/20, SPi

332 Index Sulla 62n.9 Surtees, Robert  218–19 sword-and-sandal genre of films see under cinema Szymonowic, Szymon  6–7 Tacitus  2, 7–8, 11–12, 32 as inspiration for Quo vadis  10, 39–40 on Christian dress in the arena  200–1 on Christian torches  66 on Germanic tribes  285 on Nero  81 on Nero as poet  230n.4 on Nero’s persecution of Christians  84–5 on Petronius  32–3, 74–6 on Petronius’s deathbed letter  32n.8, 75 on Rome burning  32–3 Taylor, Robert  218–20, 248, 261 Tearle, Edmund  110n.7 Ten Commandments, The (1956 film)  221–2 Terence 56 theatre adaptations of Ben-Hur 101–3 adaptations of Quo vadis  22–3, 74, 79–80, 102–3, 107–8, 110–22, 128–34, 130f, 133f, 135f, 153–4 limitations of  108, 117, 128, 137–8 programmes 134–5 see also ‘toga plays’ Theocritus 55–6 Theodolinda, Queen  44–5 Thomé, Francis  119–20, 131–2 Thompson, Ewa  284 300: Rise of an Empire (2007 and 2014 films) 279 Tintoretto, Jacopo  252–3 ‘toga novels’  20–1 ‘toga plays’  22–3, 108–10, 118–22, 213 Toro Farnese (Farnese Bull)  8–9 Toro selvaggio, Il (1919 film)  267–8 Toy, Crawford Howard  80–1 Traldi 182 Treves  165–9, 178–9, 181–3 Tribe of Ben-Hur, The  88, 92 Trouhanova, Natalia  138–9 Turner, Lana  214–15 Trylogy (Trilogy; 1883–6 novels)  9–10, 13–14, 30, 227, 284 20th Century Fox  218–19, 223–4

UCI 176–7 Ulysses (1954 film)  232n.10, 275 United Artists  223–4 Ursus (character) as allegory of Polish masculinity  293 as allegory of Polish people  150, 203–4, 285 costume 70 as faithful slave  286–7, 292–4 fighting the bull  114, 121f, 158–9, 235–40, 265, 294–6, 294f, 295f postcards of  180t, 181 and strongman genre  263–4, 267, 269–70, 273–7, 276f Ursus (1922 film)  267 Ursus (1961 film)  275–6, 276f Ursus and the Tartar Princess (1961 film) 277 Ursus in the Valley of the Lions (1962 film) 277 Ursus nella terra di fuoco see Son of Hercules in the Land of Fire Ursus the Rebel Gladiator (1963 film)  277 USA and Cold War  222–3 copyright laws  91–2, 103–4, 112–13 evangelism  89–90, 93, 213 film adaptations of Ben-Hur 211 film adaptations of Quo vadis 211–15, 217–23 film industry  212, 214–17, 219–25 nationalism 97 reception of Ben-Hur  87, 91, 93 reception of Quo Vadis  18, 73–87, 93–8, 100–4 runaway films  211–12, 217, 224–5 theatrical adaptations of Quo vadis  111–13, 115–16 ‘toga plays’  108–10 Ustinov, Peter  23–4, 219–20, 229f, 232–5, 239, 257, 259–61 Vadis, Dan  240, 274, 278 Van der Weyde, Henry  268 Vanzi, Pio  267 Vasunia, Phiroze  2–3, 26 Vengeance of Ursus, The (1961 film)  277 Verasani, Grazia  242 Verdinois, Federigo  165n.2, 174–5

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 07/11/20, SPi

Index  333 Vespasian 82 Viaggio verso la morte, Un (1920 film)  267 Vinicius, Marcus (character)  36, 251f and American values  249 attempted abduction of Lygia  14 conversion to Christianity  93–4, 150–2, 174–5, 249 costume  57, 60–1 dialogue 251t, 252–4 illustrations of  178–9, 181–2 letter to Petronius  32n.8, 159–60, 173–4 poetry 254t postcards of  175f, 179–80, 195–6 relationship with Lygia  56, 68–9, 82–3, 116–17, 159–60, 162–3, 173–4, 290–2, 300 rescuing Lygia from the arena  114, 115f, 121f route to Ostrianum  47, 48f and suicide of Petronius  132, 138 Taylor as  248 Virgil  6–7, 55–6 Visconti, Ennio Quirino  186 Vitagliano, Nino  170–1 Wagner, Alexander von  157 Wajda, Andrzej  283–4, 289–90 Walczak, B.  31n.5

Wallace, Lew  88–93, 98–103 Wallace, Zerelda Bishop  89 Waters, W. E.  78 Welles, Orson  214–15 Whitney, F. C.  102–3, 111–13, 115–16 Wilcox, John T.  111–13 wild animal acts  120, 158–9 Willemen, Paul  295–6 Wills, William G.  109–10 Wise, Robert  273–4 Wiseman, Cardinal Nicholas  110 With Fire and Sword (1884 novel)  9–10, 93–4, 96–7, 227 With Fire and Sword (1999 film)  283–4 Without dogma (1891 novel)  9–10, 15n.24 Wujek, Jacob  31n.6 Wyke, Maria  222–3, 282–5 Wyler, William  273–4 Young, William  108, 110 Yourcenar, Marguerite  245 Zaccaria, Gino  267 Zaccaria, Giuseppe  267–8 Zévaco, Michel  170–1 Zimbalist, Sam  218 Ziomek, Jerzy  198n.12