Gallio in Fausset's Bible Dictionary

Junius Annaeus Gallio, Roman proconsul (Greek, KJV, "deputy ") of Achaia when Paul was at Corinth A.D. 53, under the emperor Claudius. Brother of L. Annaeus Seneca, the philosopher. Adopted into the family, and so took the name, of the rhetorician L. Junins Gallis. His birth name was Marcus Annaeus Novatus (Pliny H. N., 31:33; Tacitus Ann., 15:73, 16:17). He left Achaia "when he began in a fever, often exclaiming that it was not his body, but the place, that had the disease" (Seneca, Ep. 104). "No mortal was ever so sweet to one as Gallio was to all," says his brother, adding: "there is none who does not love Gallio a little, even if he cannot love him more"; "there is such an amount of innate good in him without any savor of art or dissimulation"; "a person proof against plottings." How exactly and undesignedly this independent testimony coincides with Acts 18:12-17! The Jews plotted to destroy Paul by bringing him before Gallio's judgment seat. But he was not to be entrapped into persecuting Christians by the Jews' spiteful maneuver: "if it were a matter of wrong or wicked lewdness, O ye Jews," said he without waiting even to hear Paul's defense, just as the apostle was about to open his mouth, "reason would that I should bear with you; but since it is (Greek) a question of word and names (namely, whether Jesus is the Christ) and your law, look ye to it; for I will be no judge of such matters. And he drove them from the judgment seat." So the Greeks, sympathizing with the deputy's disgust at the Jews' intolerance, beat Sosthenes the chief ruler of the Jews' synagogue "before the judgment seat." And Gallio winked at it, as the Jewish persecutor was only getting himself what he had intended for Paul. Thus God fulfilled His promise (Acts 18:10), "Be not afraid, but speak, for I am with thee, and no man shall set on thee to hurt thee, for I have much people in this city." "Gallio cared for none of these things" does not mean he was careless about the thirsts of God (that probably he was from his easy Epicurean-like temper), but with characteristic indifference to an outbreak provoked by the spite of the Jews he took no notice of the assault. Sosthenes himself seems, by Paul's sympathy in trouble, to have been won to Christ, like Crispus (1 Corinthians 1:1). Seneca's execution by Nero made Gallio trembling suppliant for his own life (Tacitus Ann., 15:73). Jerome says he committed suicide A.D. 65. Seneca dedicated to him his treatises On Anger and On a Happy Life. The accuracy of Scripture appears in the title "proconsul" (deputy), for Achaia was made a senatorial province by Claudius seven or eight years before Paul's visit, having been previously an imperial province governed by a legate; and the senatorial provinces alone had "proconsuls."