THE Emperor Who Crowned Himself came to the dusty, sunlit Legacy that fit inside a jar, and he found Diogenes sitting outside his cracked clay jar in his single ragged cloth, with his bare feet in the dust and his old lamp unlit beside him.
Napoleon had brought no army and no singers, only himself and the iron rod he had once pulled himself up on, which he still carried on his back, bent into a curve. He sat down in the dust across from Diogenes, because he had come to settle an argument the two of them had been having for a long time.
"You threw everything away," Napoleon said. "Your name, your destiny, and now you live in a jar. I took everything existence would not give me, until I stood at the top of countless things and crowned myself, because no one else had the right."
Diogenes scratched his beard and asked him why he had needed a crown at all, if no one had the right to give him one.
