There was plenty of precedent for this brand of inexactitude. Alexander the Great threw a festival to celebrate his conquest of India, which doubtless surprised the bedraggled, half-starved men who had barely survived that mission, having accomplished no such thing. * This happened by necessity in the best of families, Plutarch assures us, monarchy being “so utterly unsociable a thing.” The rules for dispensing with fellow royals were, he held, as inflexible as those of geometry.
