In your opinion, what is the oddest event in history?

 In the year 305 BC, two great armies met on the plains of the Indus River. Both of them had come quite far from home. At stake was control over the valuable land of the Indus River Valley.

Leading one army was the Greek king Seleucus, the mightiest of the late Alexander the Great’s generals, who had consolidated his control over much of Alexander’s conquered lands and won victories over many kings. With his venture across the Indus, he was seeking to expand his domain, win glory, and go farther than anyone - even Alexander himself - had gone before. The Greek civilization would sit unquestioned atop the known world.

A bust of Seleucus

At the head of the other army was a man who had already won for himself a great reputation in India. He and his lieutenants had successfully orchestrated the takeover of much of northern India. Conquering the fertile Indus River valley, the hearth of Indian civilization, would be the capstone for his achievements. The name Maurya would strike fear, awe, and love into the hearts of Indians. His name was Chandragupta.

A statue depicting Chandragupta

Two great kings met on the plains of the Indus River. Their coming battle would determine the destiny of the Indian continent.

Spoiler alert: they never had a battle. Both kings recognized that they would be better off as friends than as enemies. Appian, a Greek historian, writes in his Syriaca that the two kings “came to an understanding with each other.” Seleucus gave up his ambitions of conquering the Indus River valley, allowing Chandragupta to integrate the region’s cities and peoples into his growing empire. Appian writes that the two kings “contracted a marriage relationship,” indicating that they formed a new alliance and linked their dynasties together.

Finally, in exchange for the withdrawal of Greek forces from India, Chandragupta gifted Seleucus five hundred trained war elephants.

Chandragupta would go on to expand and consolidate India’s first great empire, becoming the Alexander of India and one of the most respected men in the world, before leaving it all behind and joining a monastery, where he disappears from history. His empire, the Maurya Empire, would take Indian civilization to its first great apex; his grandson, Ashoka, presided over the finest era of peace humanity had ever known.

Seleucus would take his elephants west, where he continued his dominance over western civilization. Those elephants proved useful in Seleucus’s confrontations with his rivals for power in the Greek world, terrifying battle-hardened veterans and shattering unbreakable phalanxes. Chandragupta’s elephants, born in the forests of Magadha, bred in the war camps of India, taken over the mountains of Persia and across the great rivers of Mesopotamia, found their calling, halfway across the world, on the battlefields of Anatolia

Sources

Appian, The Syrian Wars

https://www.thefridaytimes.com/chandraguptas-elephants-in-hellenistic-wars/