Acts 16:38 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

And the serjeants, &c.— St. Paul seems, in his own conduct here, to have had a regard to the honour and interests of Christianity in this place, as well as to their own civil rights as men and Romans; for such a token of public respect from the magistrates, as the serjeants or lictors were commissioned to require, would undoubtedly encourage the new converts, and remove a stumbling-block out of the way of others, who might not have discerned the true lustre of the characters of Paul and Silas amid so much infamy as they had before suffered.