[40] All this continued to depress and anger Moses, who had no power either to punish those who did the wrong or help those who suffered it. What he could he did. He assisted with his words, exhorting the overseers to show clemency and relax and alleviate the stringency of their orders, and the workers to bear their present condition bravely, to display a manly spirit and not let their souls share the weariness of their bodies, but look for good to take the place of evil.
[41] All things in the world, he told them, change to their opposites: clouds to open sky, violent winds to tranquil weather, stormy seas to calm and peaceful, and human affairs still more so, even as they are more unstable.
[42] With such soothing words, like a good physician, he thought to relieve the sickness of their plight, terrible as it was. But, when it abated, it did but turn and make a fresh attack and gather from the breathing-space some new misery more powerful than its predecessors.
[43] For some of the overseers were exceedingly harsh and ferocious, in savageness differing nothing from venomous and carnivorous animals, wild beasts in human shape who assumed in outward form the semblance of civilized beings only to beguile and catch their prey, in reality more unyielding than iron or adamant.
[44] One of these, the cruellest of all, was killed by Moses, because he not only made no concession but was rendered harsher than ever by his exhortations, beating those who did not execute his orders with breathless promptness, persecuting them to the point of death and subjecting them to every outrage. Moses considered that his action in killing him was a righteous action. And righteous it was that one who only lived to destroy men should himself be destroyed.
[45] When the king heard this, he was very indignant. What he felt so strongly was not that one man had been killed by another whether justly or unjustly, but that his own daughter’s son did not think with him, and had not considered the king’s friends and enemies to be his own friends and enemies, but hated those of whom he was fond, and loved those whom he rejected, and pitied those to whom he was relentless and inexorable.