Charles Ellicott Commentary Acts 23:24

"and [he bade them] provide beasts, that they might set Paul thereon, and bring him safe unto Felix the governor." — Acts 23:24 (ASV)

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 governed at this time. In the household of Antonia, the mother of the Emperor Claudius, there were two brothers, first slaves, then freedmen, Antonius Felix and Pallas.

The latter became the chosen companion and favorite minister of the emperor, and through his influence Felix obtained the procuratorship of Judea. 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” (Tacitus, Annals 12.54; Histories 5.9).

His career was infamous alike for lust and cruelty. Another historian, Suetonius (Claudius, chapter 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 Antonius 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 (Josephus, Antiquities 20.7.1). Their son, also an Agrippa, died in an eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79 (Josephus, Antiquities 20.7.2).

The name of the third princess is unknown.