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Characters / Quo Vadis

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The characters from Henryk Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis.

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Main characters

    Vinicius 

Marcus Vinicius

A Roman officer with a really huge (and more or less mutual) crush on Lygia. He shows himself to be rash, brutal and rather reckless in his pursuit of her; his track record includes kidnapping, sexual abuse, killing completely innocent people just because he got mad and seriously offending his uncle's good taste. He gets better thanks to the combined powers of love and Jesus - just in time for the difficulties of a more political nature to arrive...

  • The Determinator: First in his pursuit of Lygia, then in his attempts to save her.
  • Earn Your Happy Ending: After many misfortunes, he gets to marry Lygia and flee the hell out of Rome.
  • Entitled to Have You: His behaviour towards Lygia in the first half. He just wants her, whatever the price is, without thinking that she may not want him, or may be happy with her current family life. He gets better, though.
  • Happily Married: With Lygia, in the end.
  • Heel–Faith Turn: Which takes a good while to properly stick, but when it does, it does.
  • Heel Realization: He leads an assault on the Christian community where Lygia is staying and is thwarted by Ursus. Despite this, Lygia and the Christians tend to his recovery and treat him with kindness, which is the start of him realizing what a complete tool he's been.
  • Hot-Blooded: Pretty much the reason for all the conflict in the book that isn't caused by Nero.
  • I Owe You My Life: The first hint of his change for the better comes when, after being nursed back to health by Christians, he's repulsed at the thought of returning to their house to seize Lygia; he knows it would be absolutely horrible repayment for them saving his life, especially since they did so despite how he terrorized Lygia.
  • Jerk with a Heart of Gold: His Character Development sees him shedding the entitlement and obsession that made him such a douche for the first half of the book. While he still has temper issues, he becomes a much more compassionate, selfless, and loving man.
  • Love at First Sight: How he sees his attraction to Lygia. In reality it's more lust as first sight, and the difference is something he himself notes once he starts actually loving her.
  • Love Makes You Crazy: Though it also redeems, when you consider it the rightnote  way.
  • Misplaced Retribution: Poor Gulo. And Chilon. And several other (more or less random) people.
  • Red Oni, Blue Oni: Red Oni to both Lygia's and Petronius' Blue.
  • Stalker with a Crush: His pursuit of Lygia in the first half of the book is this when it's not even worse.
  • Villain Protagonist: Before he finally undergoes a Heel–Face Turn that sticks.

    Lygia 

Callina a.k.a. Lygia

A barbarian princess of the Lygians (hence her nickname). She was taken as a hostage when she was a child, but, forgotten by both Roman officials and her own people, grew up with her caretakers, the Aulus family, as their daughter in anything but name. Because of her foster mother, she adopted Christian faith and has been a devout believer ever since.

  • Christianity is Catholic: She's basically the embodiment of a "Mother Pole" (sort of a Polish equivalent to Yamato Nadeshiko), and definitely has more to do with (an idealized version of) the traditional Polish, Catholic world-view than with what you'd expect from a Judeo-Christian girl raised in Ancient Rome.
  • Creator Provincialism: It's strongly suggested Lygia's people are proto-Poles. (The name "Callina", spelled "Kalina", is rare in today Poland, but still used sometimes).
  • Even Girls Want Her: Acte's reaction to seeing her naked is... not very heterosexual.
  • Godiva Hair: At one point, when Acte strips her (while dressing Lygia for the party), she manages to cover her entire body with it.
  • Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: The book has her a brunette, but most adaptations make her blonde.
  • Happily Adopted: By Aulus and Pomponia who love her like their own daughter.
  • The Ingenue: Blonde (in the films), sweet, innocent, and plucky, with a romantic streak to a somewhat-unrealistic imagination.
  • Martyr Without a Cause: When Nero invites her to dinner at his Decadent Court, she briefly fantasizes about refusing (out of her Christian values), then being tortured or killed in retaliation. Acte calls her out for romanticizing martyrdom, especially over such a small issue, and tells her to pick her battles. (This was actually a problem for the early church and some of the surviving letters from leaders basically urge the disciples to do the same.)
  • Naked First Impression: The first time Vinicus sees her.
  • Only Known by Their Nickname: Her actual name is Callina, but pretty much everybody calls her Lygia, derived from her nationality (with an exception of Ursus, who is also Lygian).
  • Plucky Girl: Except for her very first and very last appearances, the plot from her perspective is one continuous series of traumatizing events. Despite that, she remains a sweet - if a little shaken up - girl.
  • Princess Classic: She is the daughter of a Lygian king and is beautiful, innocent, sweet and good.
  • Silk Hiding Steel : She seems innocent, vulnerable girl but is strong- willed and brave.

Nero's court

    Nero 

Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus

The Emperor of Rome.

  • A God Am I: Firmly believes this.
  • Bad Boss: Roman officials and aristocrats are all terrified of his random outbursts of violence.
  • Big Bad: Especially starting with the fire of Rome.
  • The Caligula: He's Caligula's nephew (his mother, Agrippina, was Caligula's sister). It probably runs in the family.
  • Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Of the darkest possible variety.
  • Dissonant Serenity: Stands out in the notoriously-violent Roman culture for calmly strolling through his gardens even as he has Christians burned alive in them.
  • Evil Redhead: Don't call him Ahenobarbus ("Bronze-Beard") - it annoys him. Lots.
  • Historical Domain Character: The real, depraved Emperor Nero, although modern historians tend to be careful about attributing all those atrocities to him, believing he may have been a case of Historical Villain Upgrade (for example, the Great Fire may have been caused by the poorly-constructed wooden slums of Rome burning, though Nero's reaction of building a new lavish villa for himself did cause backlash).
  • Historical Villain Upgrade: To what degree is debatable. See the above entry.
  • I Cannot Self-Terminate: In both the novel and the 1951 film, he is unable to kill himself when his downfall is imminent. The novel concludes with an account of his death based on Suetonius, in which he forced his private secretary to kill him. In the film, it is his former lover Acte who helps him push the dagger into his chest, killing him.
  • Mad Artist: He set Rome on fire just so he would be able to properly reference a burning city in his poems.
  • Never My Fault: In the film, he calls Poppaea his "evil genius" as he murders her with his bare hands as everything falls apart around him. To be sure, her manipulations made him worse than he was, but Nero is guilty of more than enough crimes on his own.
  • Psychopathic Manchild: This characterization of him is a huge, cruel, spoiled brat who never learned to rule or be a functional adult.
  • Sadist: The horribly creative execution methods he comes up with are new, even to Rome. And he doesn't just invent them for "entertainment"—he's noted to occasionally stop and observe the Christians being burned alive "with more care", and to study Vinicius's pain with satisfaction.
  • Self-Made Orphan: Had his mother murdered, as well as his half-brother and wife.
  • Terrible Artist: According to Petronius, he's Giftedly Bad.
  • Tragic Villain: In both novel and film, it's occasionally suggested that at heart, Nero is a figure to be pitied rather than hated, despite all his horrible misdeeds. In the end, while he commits unspeakable crimes and bears some responsibility for many of them, he didn't make the Rome swimming in corruption, blood, and dirty treasure he rules over, or the Deadly Decadent Court full of sneering advisors manipulating him for their own gain, or even just for fun. They made him.
  • "Well Done, Son" Guy: In an unusual way. He and Petronius don't see each other in a familial way at all, yet Nero is noted to desperately, constantly seek his validation on his poetry. Which is why Petronius's suicide note disparaging his art hits harder than just about anything else.
  • Would Hurt a Child: All those Cruel and Unusual Death|s he inflicted on the Christians? Yeah, he didn't spare children from them. He also orders the murder of Poppaea's young son.

    Petronius 

Gaius Petronius Arbiter

Vinicius' uncle. Aesthete, hedonist, writer. Possibly the sanest person in Rome, at least not counting the Christians, and one of its most influential politicians.

  • Berserk Button: He's generally a very chill guy. As long as you don't threaten him with physical violence, because then he'll show you he's better at it than you. While never losing his chill.
  • Better to Die than Be Killed: Once Nero finally turns on him, he decides to die on his own terms.
  • Blue-and-Orange Morality: He doesn't really care about what's right. He cares a great deal, however, about what's civilized and aesthetically pleasing. Seneca tells Lygia's Roman parents that Petronius will shrug off attempts to shame him for arranging her to be taken away from them into Nero's house based on how how morally wrong it was, but can still be wounded by being told it was crass, vulgar, and fitting for a lower-class tradesman.
  • Camp Straight: Assuming his comments on his nephew's beauty are purely platonic.
  • Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Tends to randomly go on long, unrelated rants about art and literature in the middle of the most dramatic events.
  • Cool Uncle: To Vinicius, who had the luck of having the coolest Deadpan Snarker in Rome as a father figure.
  • Corrupt Politician: He's most of the time in it only for himself, but he can be decent if the right buttons are pushed.
  • Driven to Suicide: As in history. It's not out of despair, but to spite Nero.
  • Everyone Has Standards: Amoral, lazy hedonist he may be, Petronius is utterly repulsed by Nero pinning the fire that destroyed Rome—which he himself started—on the innocent Christians and then torturously murdering them en masse.
  • A Good Way to Die: Realizing that Nero has turned on him and he'll die one way or another, Petronius gathers all his friends together for one last party, has a trained medic slowly and painlessly bleed him so that he'll pass peacefully, and sends Nero one last message insulting not only his tyranny but his artistic ability, knowing as he does that no assassin's dagger could ever wound the Emperor more deeply, and that he will have put himself beyond the reach of revenge in the process. His one fleeting regret is that Eunice, whom he'd intended to leave all that he owned to, chooses to die alongside him instead... and even then, there's only so unhappy he can be to experience such loyalty from the woman he loves.
  • Gratuitous Latin: Almost all the characters speak Latin in-universe all the time, since the action takes place in Ancient Rome. Petronius, however, inexplicably gets Gratuitous Latin lines, anyway, as it serves to paint him as the most cultured among them.
  • Jerk with a Heart of Gold: He's a Deadpan Snarker to the core and a snob, but he loves his nephew, treats his slaves well and is genuinely disturbed by Nero's increasingly violent insanity.
  • The Hedonist: When your nickname is "arbiter of elegance," it must mean that. That said, he's a classy hedonist; he deeply appreciates the understated, less is more beauty of Aulus's simple, tasteful classical home.
  • Historical Domain Character: He's the historical Gaius Petronius Arbiter, the Ur-Example of a dandy and the author of the racy poem The Satyricon.
  • Minored in Ass-Kicking: He's an effeminate, eccentric intellectual who spends most of his time bitching about poets he doesn't like, playing the Emperor like a fiddle just for fun and annoying his wife. He's also perfectly capable of kicking Vinicius' ass should he try and direct one of his violent outbreaks at him or to kill a drunken gladiator who jumps him in the street without even interrupting the conversation. We're also informed that he used to be one of the best governors (in Bitynia) Rome ever had, to no one's surprise more than his own.
  • The Proud Elite: The guy has a snobbish contempt for anything he considers vulgar, up to and including his Emperor. In the end, he rejects Christianity before his suicide in his letters with his nephew, despite admitting he finds much to admire in it, because he cannot agree to its calls for egalitarianism and universal human brotherhood if it means having respect and compassion for the everyday people of Rome he despises.
  • Red Baron: Arbiter elegantiae.
  • Red Oni, Blue Oni: The Bluest of all Onis. Particularly to Vinicius' and Nero's Reds.
  • Sharp-Dressed Man: And famous for it.
  • Suicide Is Painless: Justified. When you carefully stage it to be so and have it conducted by a trained medic, it sure is.
  • Token Good Teammate: To the entire Nero's court, more or less. His ethics may be majorly messed up, but at least they exist.
  • True Love is Exceptional: At the start of the novel, Petronius is, like many Romans of his time, a raging misogynist who doubts whether or not women even have souls and sees them as, at best, amusing and beautiful toys for men to use to enjoy themselves. But Eunice's sincere and unselfish love and loyalty win him over to the point that he plans to leave everything that is his to her, along with her freedom, when he plans his suicide, and even then underestimates her when she instead chooses to join him.
  • Unwitting Instigator of Doom: He criticizes Nero's poem in his usual sarcastic manner, causing him to burn down Rome and blame it on the Christians, which is the source of most of the conflict in the latter half of the book.

    Tigellinus 

Gaius Ofonius Tigellinus

Prefect of the Praetorian Guard. Petronius' main rival in the Roman court.

    Poppaea 

Poppaea Augusta Sabina

Nero's wife.

    Acte 

Claudia Acte

Nero's former lover.

  • Adaptation Expansion: In the film, when Nero is at the end of his rope and facing death, she sneaks into the palace and, at his request, kills him as gently and carefully as she can, trying to be compassionate to him at the last.
  • All Love Is Unrequited: Still very much in love with Nero. Specifically, the good man that Nero once was before he was corrupted by power.
  • Ambiguously Christian: In-universe. There are rumours that she's secretly a Christian, but actually, while she enjoys reading Christian texts and sympathizes with their ideals, she isn't one herself.
  • Even Evil Can Be Loved: She's probably the only person in the world who genuinely loves Nero.
  • Historical Domain Character
  • Morality Pet: Downplayed, but seems to be this for Nero. While other people he got bored with mostly end up dead, Acte remains alive even long after her relationship with the Emperor has ended.
  • Reasonable Authority Figure: She's treated as the one person Lygia can trust in Nero's court who isn't part of her own entourage.
  • Undying Loyalty: To Nero, because she knew him when he was young, before power and abuse corrupted him into the monster he is now, and she remembers the good and sensitive person he was then. After Nero dies, Acte is the one who cremates his body.

Christian community of Rome

    Ursus 

Ursus, Christian name Urban

Lygia's simple-minded, ridiculously strong servant and bodyguard.

    Crispus 

The unofficial leader of a Christian community Lygia and Ursus belong to.

    Glaukos 

A Greek physician.

    Pomponia 

Pomponia Graecina

Lygia's foster mother.

    St. Peter & St. Paul 

Apostles. Co-leaders of the Christian Church.

  • Big Good
  • Cruel and Unusual Death: When Peter opines that he doesn't deserve to die in the same way as Christ, the Romans sardonically crucify him upside down instead. Averted for Paul; as a Roman citizen he is afforded the comparatively more "dignified" death of beheading.
  • Heroic Sacrifice: That's where the title of the book comes from.
  • Historical Domain Character
  • Out of Focus: Paul is in the movie as a teacher in Lygia's house, but he's heavily de-emphasized in favor of Peter, who delivers a dramatic sermon on the life and teachings of Christ that impresses and moves even an unconverted Vinicius and an has an equally climactic role in the bloodstained persecutions when he returns to be martyred alongside the other Christians.
  • Reasonable Authority Figure: Their serenity and tolerance are powerful tools in legitimizing the Christian religion in the eyes of the misfortunate, and tamp down on Crispin's excesses. The two men's early rivalry over control of the movement is, by this point, mostly mended, and both of them die as martyrs.
  • Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Defied, as per Catholic tradition. As the persecutions start up, the Christians smuggle Peter out of Rome, but he has a vision of Christ going back to Rome to be crucified again. Realizing he was abandoning the Christians to their deaths in their hour of need just as he once abandoned Jesus, Peter returns to preach to and comfort them in captivity, and suffers martyrdom via upside-down crucifixion rather than betray Christianity's fundamental egalitarianism by setting himself as more important than his brothers and sisters in Christ.
  • Those Two Guys

Other characters

    Chilon 

Chilon Chilonides

Philosopher, medic and a fortuneteller. Hired by Vinicius to infiltrate the Christians and find out where Lygia is hiding.

    Aulus 

Aulus Plautius

Lygia's foster father.

  • Allegorical Character: Aulus is a living representation of everything Sienkiewicz found admirable about the Romans and the values they held (or at least claimed to hold) sacred. It is not a coincidence that his estate stands in stark contrast with the glitzy, decadent, and corrupt city that surrounds his little island of tasteful tranquility, or that the Christians are at home there in a way they aren't in the rest of Rome.
  • Ambiguous Situation: It's left unclear wether he's actually oblivious enough to not know that his wife is secretly a Christian or just pretends he doesn't know really hard.
  • Cool Old Guy: Though Lygia is entrusted to him as a hostage, he raises her like his own daughter.
  • Good Old Ways: In general, Aulus is meant to represent the virtues of the old Roman way of life, and the ideals they held sacred: piety, dignity, justice, tolerance, restraint, martial honor, and all the other things which are being washed away by the decadent flood of corruption and ill-gotten wealth modern Rome is swimming in. When Petronius visits his house, he is pleasantly surprised to be impressed by its tastefulness and understated beauty.
  • Historical Domain Character
  • Living Legend
  • Old Soldier
  • Retired Badass: Commander of the Roman conquest of Britain, as well as its first governor. He never shuts up about it.
  • Speech Impediment: Caused by losing his front teeth in the war.

    Eunice 

Petronius' slave and lover.

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