Acts 24:24

Paul's Interviews during his long Imprisonment at Cæsarea with the Procurator Felix and his wife, the Princess Drusilla, 24-27.

Acts 24:24. And after certain days, when Felix came with his wife Brasilia, which was a Jewess. The Princess Drusilla occupied no unimportant position among the women of the middle of the first century of the Christian era. She was the daughter of Herod Agrippa I., who ended a brilliant and showy life in that miserable way at Cæsarea depicted in the twelfth chapter of these ‘Acts,' and sister to Herod Agrippa II. and the still more notorious Princess Bernice. Her name Drusilla borne also by a sister of Caligula, the emperor with whom these younger ‘Herods' were closely intimate is a diminutive of Drusus. Endowed, like her sister Bernice, whose name was a name of shame even in the careless and profligate Roman society of that age, with the often dangerous gift of extreme beauty, she was married at a very early age to Azizus, king of Emesa, who became a proselyte, but left him, and still very young was married again to the Procurator Felix. Their son Agrippa perished, Josephus relates, in an eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Dr. Plumptre has made an interesting suggestion to account for the special interest this dissolute princess evidently felt in the case of the accused Christian prisoner Paul. She must have heard of the death of James and of the imprisonment of Peter in her girlhood; and she may have connected her father's tragic end at the games of Cæsarea with the part he had taken in persecuting the very sect to which the prisoner now in custody in her husband's palace belonged. She evidently showed, from being present with Felix at one, probably at more of the examinations, that she was desirous of hearing more of that ‘way' with which her royal house had been mysteriously brought into contact.