In pursuit of such a policy it was inevitable that he should add to his other victims the priests of the Church. Indeed, he cut off the greater part of the monies set apart for their sacred buildings, and having transferred these sums to the public funds, he estimated the bare necessities for the clergy, thereby making the name ‘place of meditation’ really appropriate. He did this with the insouciance of a man picking up a grain of sand from the seashore. He just set his hand to the task, and it was all done without the slightest commotion. Indeed, I never saw any man on earth so deliberate in his reasoning; or so quiet in the execution of vast ideas.
Vilify the emperor’s actions
61. This conduct at the time seriously alarmed most of his subjects, but after a while the majority became more resigned to it. Obviously, if men wished to vilify the emperor’s actions, it was sufficient for him to point out that they were in the public interest. And the policy would have been hailed with applause, if only the emperor, like a man who has swum to shore out of the sea, had given himself some time to get back his breath.
Isaac, however, did not know what it was to lie at anchor for a while, or rest in harbour. On the contrary, he braved the sea a second time, a different sea this time, and then a third, and after that a greater and most fearful one, as if he were not merely engaged in stirring up the waves of politics, but in cleaning up the dung of Augeas’s stable.**207
62. As I have emphasized before, if this emperor had chosen the proper time for his reforms; if he had condemned one practice, shall we say, and allowed another to stand for the time being, destroying it at some later date; if, after the amputation, he had rested before attempting another operation; if he had advanced thus, step by step, in his extermination of evil, quietly and without attracting attention like the Creator in Plato, this man who, like him, had inherited a world — in his case the world of politics — in a state of flux, without harmony, without order, then he too, I affirm, would have brought it back from chaos to calm, and he too would have introduced real harmony into the affairs of state. God is described by Moses, the leader of His people, as creating the universe in six days, but if Isaac did not complete his whole task in a single day, he reckoned the failure intolerable, such was the excessive zeal with which he tried to accomplish his purpose.
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