Philip Schaff's Popular Commentary (4 vols)

Acts 16:35

Acts 16:35. And when it was day, the magistrates sent the serjeants, saying, Let those men go. There is but little doubt that, subsequently to the tumultuous condemnation of Paul and Silas, the magistrates (Duumviri or Praetores) understood that the men who had been so hastily sentenced after the popular tumult were Roman citizens. It must be remembered the apostles had been resident at Philippi in the house of Lydia ‘many days,' and therefore many persons in the city would know some details respecting them. When this fact came to the praetors' ears, their first care was to get quietly rid of these strangers. These Roman officials knew well the grave trouble which might ensue if it were known at Rome that a ‘citizen' had been beaten publicly. The Porcian and Valerian laws exempted all citizens of Rome from stripes and torture. In a famous passage of one of Cicero's orations, the following statement occurs: ‘In the midst of the forum of Messina was a citizen of Rome scourged with rods. In the midst of his suffering, and the noise of the rods, the only word which was wrung from the unhappy man was, “I am a Roman citizen”' (In Verrem). And again, in the same oration, he writes: ‘It is a misdeed to bind a Roman citizen, a crime to scourge him; it is almost parricide that he should be executed.'

It was this knowledge that determined Paul on the following morning, when the magistrates (the praetors) sent to request they would leave Philippi in silence, to require on the part of the Roman authorities a public declaration of his and Silas' innocence. This acknowledgment was no doubt sought for in order to encourage the little company of converts who might otherwise, after the apostles' departure, have felt that they in some way were under the displeasure of Rome. Such a state of feeling might have hindered the further spread of the gospel.

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Philip Schaff's Popular Commentary (4 vols)

Acts 16:35

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