Let us follow Him
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Henryk Sienkiewicz
Henryk Adam Aleksander Pius Sienkiewicz also known by the pseudonym Litwos, was a Polish writer, novelist, journalist and Nobel Prize laureate. He is best remembered for his historical novels, especially for his internationally known best-seller Quo Vadis (1896). Born into an impoverished Polish noble family in Russian-ruled Congress Poland, in the late 1860s he began publishing journalistic and literary pieces. In the late 1870s he traveled to the United States, sending back travel essays that won him popularity with Polish readers. In the 1880s he began serializing novels that further increased his popularity. He soon became one of the most popular Polish writers of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and numerous translations gained him international renown, culminating in his receipt of the 1905 Nobel Prize in Literature for his "outstanding merits as an epic writer." Many of his novels remain in print. In Poland he is best known for his "Trilogy" of historical novels, With Fire and Sword, The Deluge, and Sir Michael, set in the 17th-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; internationally he is best known for Quo Vadis, set in Nero's Rome. The Trilogy and Quo Vadis have been filmed, the latter several times, with Hollywood's 1951 version receiving the most international recognition.
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Let us follow Him - Henryk Sienkiewicz
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Title: Let us follow Him
Author: Henryk Sienkiewicz
Translator: Jeremiah Curtin
Release Date: February 3, 2013 [EBook #41988]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LET US FOLLOW HIM ***
Produced by David E. Brown, Bryan Ness and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
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LET US FOLLOW HIM
Let Us Follow Him
BY
HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ
AUTHOR OF
Quo Vadis,
With Fire and Sword,
Etc.
Translated from the Polish
By JEREMIAH CURTIN
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1897
Copyright, 1897,
By Jeremiah Curtin.
All rights reserved.
Plimpton Press
H. M. PLIMPTON & CO., PRINTERS & BINDERS,
NORWOOD, MASS., U.S.A.
PUBLISHERS' NOTE.
Although the story Let Us Follow Him
is included in the new volume by Sienkiewicz entitled Hania,
just issued in uniform style with Mr. Curtin's translations of the author's other works, its publication in a separate volume has been deemed advisable for the reason that this story gave to its author the idea of writing Quo Vadis,
which has been the literary sensation of the past twelve months.
The period of Let Us Follow Him
is that of the death of Christ. Antea, the wife of a Roman patrician, ill with terrible visions, is advised by a physician to seek the air of Jerusalem. There she and her husband meet Pilate, who tells them of the doctrine of the Nazarene, Jesus, and his condemnation to death. They are present at the Crucifixion, and Antea gives honor to the condemned Nazarene, saying, Thou art Truth.
LET US FOLLOW HIM.
CHAPTER I.
Caius Septimius Cinna was a Roman Patrician. He had spent his youth in the legions and in severe camp-life. Later he returned to Rome to enjoy glory, luxury, and a great though somewhat shattered fortune. He used and abused at that time everything which the gigantic city could offer.
His nights were spent at feasts in lordly suburban villas; his days in sword practice with fencers, in discussions with rhetors at the baths, where disputes were held, and where the scandal of the city and the world was related, in circuses, at races, at the struggles of gladiators, or among Greek musicians, Thracian soothsayers, and wonderful dancing-girls from the islands of the Archipelago. He inherited from the renowned Lucullus, a relative on the mother's side, a love for exquisite dishes. At his table were served Grecian wines, Neapolitan oysters, Numidian mice, and locust fat preserved in honey from Pontus.
Whatever Rome possessed Cinna must have, beginning with fish of the Red Sea, and ending with white ptarmigans from the banks of the Borysthenes (Dnieper). He made use of things not only as a soldier run riot, but as a patrician who passes the measure. He had instilled into himself, or had perhaps even roused in himself, a love for the beautiful,—a love for statues rescued from the ruins of Corinth, for pitchers from Attica, for Etruscan vases from foggy Sericum, for Roman mosaics, for fabrics brought from the Euphrates, for Arabian perfumes, and for all the peculiar trifles which filled the void of patrician life.
He knew how to talk of these trifles, as a specialist and connoisseur, with toothless old men, who decked out their baldness in wreaths of roses when going to a feast, and who after the feast chewed heliotrope blossoms to make the breath of their lungs odoriferous. He felt also the beauty of Cicero's periods, and of verses of Horace or Ovid.
Educated by an Athenian rhetor, he conversed in Greek fluently; he knew whole pages of the Iliad
by heart, and during a feast could sing odes of