Quo Vadis
Henryk Sienkiewicz · first published 1896
Filmed in the first year of the century and roughly once a generation since.
6 versions · 1901–2001
Ferdinand Zecca’s version appeared in 1901, when films ran a few minutes; the Italian epic of 1913 helped invent the historical spectacle; MGM’s of 1951 more or less defined what a Roman film looks like, down to the emperor’s hairline.
Sienkiewicz won the Nobel Prize partly for it. The novel is a great deal more interested in the mechanics of persecution than any of the films, which prefer the fire.
Written 1895, in a country that was not on the map
Poland had been partitioned out of existence for a century; Sienkiewicz was writing for a nation that existed only as a language and a memory, under Russian censorship. A novel about a persecuted minority holding to its faith while an empire burns was not read as ancient history by his first audience.
It made him internationally famous and contributed to his Nobel Prize in 1905. Poland reappeared on the map thirteen years later.
On screen
6Film and television, earliest first.
- 1901 Quo vadis? Ferdinand Zecca
- 1913 Quo Vadis Enrico Guazzoni
- 1924 Quo Vadis Gabriellino D'Annunzio
- 1951 Quo Vadis Mervyn LeRoy
- 1985 Quo Vadis? Franco Rossi
- 2001 Quo Vadis Jerzy Kawalerowicz
Versions are listed where they are documented. A century of stage productions and most broadcasts were never catalogued at all, so this is what can be shown rather than everything that was ever made.