Philippians 4:22

chiefly More exactly, but chiefly. There was something marked and emphatic about this message.

they of Cesar's household "Probably slaves and freedmen attached to the palace" (Lightfoot). It has been sometimes assumed that these persons, on the other hand, were members of the imperial family, and this has been used either to prove the remarkable advance of the Gospel in the highest Roman society during St Paul's first captivity, and incidentally to evidence a late date in that captivity for the Epistle, or to support a theory of the spuriousness of the Epistle. Bp Lightfoot, in an "additional note," or rather essay (Philippians, pp. 171 178), has shewn with great fulness of proof that the "household of Cæsar" was a term embracing a vast number of persons, not only in Rome but in the provinces, all of whom were either actual or former slaves of the Emperor, filling every possible description of office more or less domestic. The Bishop illustrates his statements from the very numerous burial inscriptions of members of the "Household" found within the last 170 years near Rome, most of them of the period of the Julian and Claudian Emperors. And the names of persons in these inscriptions afford a curiously large number of coincidences with the list in Romans 16; among them being Amplias, Urbanus, Apelles, Tryphæna, Tryphosa, Patrobas, Philologus. And it appears by the way to be very probable that both Aristobulus" and Narcissus" "households" (Romans 16:10-11) were in fact the slave-establishments of the son of Herod the Great, and of the favourite of Claudius, respectively, transferred to the possession of the Emperor. Bp Lightfoot infers from this whole evidence the great probability that the "saints" greeted in Romans 16 were, on the whole, the same "saints" who send greeting here from Rome. Various as no doubt were their occupations, and their native lands, the members of the Household of Cæsar as such must have had an esprit de corps, and, for their rank in society, a prestige, which made it humanly speaking likely that a powerful influence, like that of the Gospel, if felt among them at all, would be felt widely, and that they would be in the way to make a distinctive expression of their faith and love, when occasion offered.

The view thus given of the saints here mentioned, their associations and functions, not only in the age of Nero but in the precincts of his court, and probably for many of them within the chambers of his palace, gives a noble view in passing of the power of grace to triumph over circumstances, and to transfigure life where it seems most impossible.

A certain parallel to the Household of Cæsar appears in the vast Maison du Royof the later French monarchy. But the Maisonwas for the noblessealone.