Verse 22
22. Multitude… magistrates These Philippians would be no true Romans, their illustrious colonia would be no true miniature of the eternal city, if all the blood in their veins was not now in a magnificent tumult.
Rent… clothes… beat No time is taken to examine witnesses, or to try the case of the arraigned; no words are they allowed to utter. What need when all parties, except the prisoners, are agreed? Yet this broke the very letter of the Roman law, which declared, as Cicero says, Cognita causa, possunt multi absolvi; incognita, nemo condemnari potest ”The case being heard, many can be acquitted; unheard, none can be condemned.”
The usual sentence after this was concisely and majestically Roman: Summove lictor, despolia, verbera ”Take lictor, strip, scourge.” The wording of this verse, which places the stripping before the commanding, would certainly suggest that the two magistrates on the present occasion did, in the excitement of the moment, perform the lictor’s office so far as
stripping was concerned. Nothing but our respect for the Roman magistracy prevents this construction.
To beat them ”Happy for us,” says Howson, “that few modern countries know, by the example of a similar punishment, what a Roman scourging was!” The Roman sense of justice was systematic, firm, and high, but in its inflictions needing the gentleness which a true Christianity alone can inspire.
We must not figure this prison after the shape of a modern house or jail, but, according to our cuts, imagine a quadrangular structure enclosing a roofless square yard or court, or courts within. The prison cells are in the ground story, and the jailer resides in an upper story. There is probably a well or fountain in the court. The inner prison may be a subterranean cell in the court. More probably it is the inner row of cells of the ground story which lines the court.
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