When Herod seized the throne of Judea in the first century BCE, he fell in love with a Hasmonean princess — Mariamne — whose royal blood would legitimize his rule. She despised him. When he forced her to marry him, she bore him two sons and then, in grief and protest, killed herself.
Herod could not accept her death. He had her body preserved in honey and kept it in his palace for seven years, visiting the embalmed corpse as if she might still speak to him. In his paranoia over his shaky legitimacy, he then gave orders to slaughter the sages of Israel — the one community whose moral authority could have named him an usurper. Rabbi after rabbi was killed.
Only one was spared: Bava ben Buta, who was blind. Herod concluded that a blind man could not testify and so let him live, but he put out Bava's eyes a second time to be sure no sight remained.
After a time Herod came to Bava secretly, in disguise, and began cursing the king to see whether Bava would agree. Bava refused to speak ill of the ruler, saying only, "Even in your thoughts do not curse the king" (Ecclesiastes 10:20). Herod was amazed. Over many nights he sat with the blind sage and learned, for the first time, what a truly cautious and devoted Torah scholar looked like.
At last Herod revealed himself. "I am the king," he said. "I killed your colleagues. What can I do to repair the wound?"
Bava answered without flinching. "You have extinguished the light of the world — the sages of Israel. Go now and rebuild the light of the world — the Temple."
Herod listened. He rebuilt the Second Temple on a scale the old Hasmonean structure had never reached, and Jewish tradition remembered that the man who slaughtered the sages also raised the building in which their descendants would later pray.
The Exempla preserves the story as a fierce paradox: even a tyrant, advised by a blind sage, can be steered toward building something holy.
(From The Exempla of the Rabbis, Moses Gaster, 1924, no. 250, based on Bava Batra 3b-4a.)