A weary Macedonian soldier begs Alexander to let them go home, exhausted from years of campaigning into the unknown.
The complaint: “Alexander please let us go home, we haven’t seen our families in years! We don’t even know if India actually is the edge of the Earth, we could be nowhere near the end!”
Gorgocutie says:
This is the Hyphasis Mutiny of 326 BC in a nutshell. Alexander had conquered the Persian Empire, marched through modern-day Turkey, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan — and now his men were at the Beas River in India, staring at the monsoon rains, being asked to keep marching east into a continent they had no map for.
The worst part? The soldier was right. India was not the edge of the Earth. It wasn’t even close. Alexander’s army didn’t know that beyond India lay Burma, Thailand, China, and the rest of Asia. They thought they had reached the end of the world. They were, by their own best estimates, about 5,000 miles short.
Alexander wanted to keep going. His men refused. For the first time in his life, the greatest military commander of the ancient world had to turn back — not because he was defeated, but because his own army said “no more.”
Moral of the story: even the world’s most ambitious conqueror couldn’t argue with soldiers who just wanted to see their wives.
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