Acts 23:24

(24) Felix the governor.—The career of the procurator so named is not without interest as an illustration of the manner in which the Roman empire was at this time governed. In the household of Antonia, the mother of the Emperor Claudius, there were two brothers, first slaves, then freed-men, Antonius Felix and Pallas. The latter became the chosen companion and favourite minister of the emperor, and through his influence Felix obtained the procuratorship of Judæa. There, in the terse epigrammatic language of Tacitus, he governed as one who thought, in his reliance on his brother’s power, that he could commit any crime with impunity, and wielded “the power of a tyrant in the temper of a slave” (Tacit. Ann. xii. 54; Hist. v. 9). His career was infamous alike for lust and cruelty. Another historian, Suetonius (Claud. c. 28), describes him as the husband of three queens, whom he had married in succession:—(1) Drusilla, the daughter of Juba, King of Mauritania and Selene, the daughter of Autonius and Cleopatra. (2) Drusilla, the daughter of Agrippa I. and sister of Agrippa II. (See Acts 23:24.) She had left her first husband, Azizus, King of Emesa, to marry Felix (Jos. Ant. xx. 7. § 1). Their son, also an Agrippa, died in an eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79 (Jos. Ant. xx. 7, § 2). The name of the third princess is unknown.