Charles Ellicott Commentary Acts 25:13

"Now when certain days were passed, Agrippa the King and Bernice arrived at Caesarea, and saluted Festus." — Acts 25:13 (ASV)

King Agrippa and Bernice.—Each of the characters thus brought on the scene has a somewhat memorable history.

1. The former closes the line of the Herodian house. He was the son of the Agrippa whose tragic end is related in Acts 12:20-23 and was only seventeen years old at the time of his father’s death, in A.D. 44.

   He did not succeed to the kingdom of Judea, which was placed under the government of a procurator. However, on the death of his uncle Herod, the king of Chalcis, in A.D. 48, he received the sovereignty of that region from Claudius, along with the superintendence of the Temple and the nomination of the high priests.

   Four years later, he received the tetrarchies that had been governed by his great-uncles Philip and Lysanias (Luke 3:1), with the title of king. In A.D. 55, Nero increased his kingdom by adding some of the cities of Galilee (Josephus, Antiquities xix. 9, § 1; xx. 1, § 3; xx. 8, § 5). He lived to see the destruction of Jerusalem and died under Trajan (A.D. 100) at the age of seventy-three.

2. The history of Bernice, or Berenice (the name seems to have been a Macedonian form of Pherenice), reads like a horrible romance or a page from the chronicles of the Borgias. She was the eldest daughter of Herod Agrippa I and was married at an early age to her uncle, the king of Chalcis. Alliances of this nature were common in the Herodian house, and the Herodias of the Gospels passed from an incestuous marriage to an incestuous adultery (See Note on Matthew 14:1).

   On his death, Berenice remained a widow for some years, but dark rumors began to spread. It was said that her brother Agrippa, who had succeeded to the principality of Chalcis and who gave her, as in the instance before us, something like queenly honors, was living with her in a yet darker form of incest and was reproducing in Judea the vices of which his father’s friend, Caligula, had set so terrible an example (Suetonius, Caligula, c. 24).

   To screen herself from these suspicions, she persuaded Polemon, king of Cilicia, to take her as his queen and to profess himself a convert to Judaism, as Azizus had done for her sister Drusilla (see Note on Acts 24:24), and accept circumcision. The ill-omened marriage did not prosper; the queen’s unbridled passions once more gained mastery. She left her husband, and he promptly got rid of her and her religion.

   Her powers of fascination, however, were still great, and she knew how to profit by them in the hour of her country’s ruin. Vespasian was attracted by her queenly dignity and yet more by the magnificence of her queenly gifts. His son Titus took his place in her long list of lovers.

   She came as his mistress to Rome, and it was said that he had promised her marriage. This, however, was more than even the senate of the empire could tolerate. Titus was compelled by the pressure of public opinion to dismiss her, but his grief in doing so was a matter of notoriety: “Dimisit invitus invitam” (Suetonius, Titus, c. 7; Tacitus, Histories ii. 81; Josephus, Antiquities xx. 7, § 3). The whole story furnished Juvenal with a picture of depravity that stands almost as a pendant to that of Messalina (Juvenal, Satires vi. 155–9).

To salute Festus.—This visit was probably, as the word indicates, a formal recognition of the new procurator on his arrival in the province.