GALLIO găl’ ĭ ō (Lucius Junius). Proconsul (KJV “deputy”) of Achaea in a.d. 51-52 or 52-53 in residence at Corinth (Acts 18:12-17).

The son of the rhetorician M. Annaeus Seneca and brother of the philospoher Seneca, he was born Marcus Annaeus Novatus at Cordova in Spain. Adopted by the rhetorician, Lucius Jiunius Gallio, he was trained by him for administration and government (Tac. Ann. 16. 17). He was a notably affable man. Seneca dedicated his treatises de Vita Beata to him and in the preface of the Naturales Quaetiones describes him as a man universally beloved.

An inscr. from Delphi shows that he was proconsul of Achaea after the 26th acclamation of Claudius as emperor. Therefore, his term of office was in 51-52 or 52-53. According to Pliny, the climate of Achaea, by Gallio’s own statement, made him ill. He went to Egypt after his term of office to recover from a lung hemorrhage. He then returned to Rome and became consul suffectus early in Nero’s reign. He was involved with his brother in a conspiracy to overthrow Nero, and, though temporarily pardoned, he was soon thereafter either forced to commit suicide or was put to death by order of Nero (Dio Cassius, History 62.25. Seutonius, Rhetoric).

While Gallio was residing at Corinth as proconsul of Achaea, a Jewish mob dragged the Apostle Paul before the rostrum and charged him with persuading men to worship God contrary to law. Gallio, concerned primarily with Rom. law, dismissed the case as a matter among Jews without letting Paul defend himself. Even when the mob seized Sosthenes, the ruler of the synagogue, and beat him in front of the rostrum, Gallio did not exercise his prerogatives (Acts 18:12-17).

Bibliography O. Rossbach in Pauly Wissowa, RE s.v. “Annaeus 12.”