The Big Fisherman by Lloyd C. Douglas

Notwithstanding his weariness, Mencius was unable to sleep. Obsequious old Levi had waited up to conduct the Proconsul to what he asserted was the most comfortable bed in the house; the tavern was quiet, nobody astir; there was no vehicular traffic on the cobbled street. But Mencius lay wide awake, still listening to the bull-whip cutting into the bleeding shoulders of the defenceless Galilean.

It was not because he was unused to the sight and sound of cruel floggings. Roman discipline was harsh and punishments were severe. Three-quarters of the Empire's population were slaves. To treat their infractions of the law with any lenience at all was to invite conspiracy and rebellion. Every free-born Roman lived dangerously, alert to the merest hint of insubordination. Corporal punishment, administered in public, was the best medicine for disobedience, far more effective than imprisonment. The brutal scourging of the young Galilean, therefore, would have been--for the Proconsul--just another brutal scourging added to all the brutal scourgings he had witnessed on land and sea throughout the Empire, but for the fact that the victim was a man of mystery, a man to be treated with dignity; imprisoned, perhaps; beheaded, perhaps; but not flogged.