The life and work of St. Paul

PHILIPPL 281
misdeeds of their countrymen had brought upon them at Rome. As the proceedings
wore doubtless in Latin, with which Paul and Silas had littlo or
no acquaintance, and in legal formulae and procedures of which they were
ignorant, they either had no time to plead their citizenship until they wore
actually in the hands of the lictors, or, if they had, their voices wore drowned
in the cries of the colonists. Before they could utter one word in their own
defence, the
"
sentence summovete, lictores, despoliate, verberate" was
uttered ; the Apostles wore seized ; their garments were rudely torn off their
1 backs ;
they were hurried off and tied by their hands to the palus, or whip-
ping-post in the forum ;
and whether they vainly called out in Greek to their
infuriated enemies, " Wo are Roman citizens," or, which is far more likely,
bore their frightful punishment in that grand silence which, in moments of
high spiritual rapture, makes pain itself seem painless 2 in that forum of
which ruins still remain, in the sight of the lowest dregs of a provincial out-
post, and of their own pitying friends, they endured, at the hands of these
low lictors, those outrages, blows, strokes, weals, the pangs and butchery, the
extreme disgrace and infamy, the unjust infliction of which even a hardheaded
and hard-hearted Gentile could not describe without something of
pathos and indignation. 3 It was the first of three such scourgings with the
rods of Roman lictors which Paul endured, and it is needless to dwell even
for one moment on its dangerous and lacerating anguish. We, in those
modern days, cannot read without a shudder even of the flogging of some
brutal garottor, and our blood would run cold with unspeakable horror if one
such incident, or anything which remotely resembled it, had occurred in the
life of a Henry Martyn or a Coleridge Patteson. But such horrors occurred
eight times at least in the story of one whose frame was more frail with years
of suffering than that of our English missionaries, and in whose life these
pangs were but such a drop in the ocean of his endurance, that, of the eight
occasions on which he underwent these horrible scourgings, this alone has
been deemed worthy of even passing commemoration. 4
1
On this tearing off of the garments see Liv. viii. 32 Tac. H. ; iv. 27 ; Val. Max. il.
7, 8; Dion. Halic. ix. 39. The verbs used are scindcre, spoliare, lacerare (also the
technical word for the laceration of the back by the rods), TrepixoTopp^ai, showing that it
was done with violence and contumely.
2 A much lower exaltation than that of the Apostle's would rob anguish of half its
sting (cf. Cic. in Verr. ii. v. 62, " Hac se commemoratione civitatis omnia verbera depulsurum,
cruciatumque a corpore dejecturum arbitrabatur ").
3 Cato ap. Aul. Gell. x. 3.
The five Jewish scourgings were probably submitted to without any protest (v. supra,
p. 24). From a fourth nearly consummated beating with thongs (?) he did protect himself
by his political privilege (Acts xxii. 25). Both that case and this show how easily,
in the midst of a tumult, a Roman citizen might fail to make his claim heard or understood
and the instance mentioned ; by Cicero, who tells how remorselessly Verres scourged
a citizen of Messana, though "inter dolorem crepitumque plagarum," he kept exclaiming
"
Civis Itomanus mm," shows that in the provinces the insolence of power would some-
times deride the claim of those who were little likely to find an opportunity of enforcing
it (Cic. in Verr. L 47 ; v. 62, &c.). Moreover, the reverence for the privilege must have been
ronph weakened by the shameless sale of it to freedmen and others by the infamous Blessa-