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Secretary of Defense William Gates wrote:“My logisticians are a humorless lot … they know if my campaign fails, they are the first ones I will slay.”
I haven't had a chance yet to check my folders of sources, but I don't recall ever seeing that one. If it exists, is it in Moralia, perhaps?
I have to disagree with the RogueClassicist, though. He says:
RogueClassicist wrote:While I can imagine Alexander saying something like that, I can’t imagine him saying it exactly like that (especially the ‘humourless’ bit)
Actually, I can't see Alexander saying that. It sounds more like Stalin to me!
I also don't think that it sounds like something Alexander would have said. I did a Google search for the exact phrasing but without the word "Alexander" and the only positive result was a page that credited it to "Alexandre". I also did a Google desktop search using the words logistician and/or humorless and I didn't find either of them in my Alexander files, so this may well be another internet myth. I can't even recall reading anything vaguely similar to this, although there is one source we don't have transcribed - Athenaeus Mechanicus, On Machines, Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag, 2004. (Link is to a BMCR Review.) The problem is, the book is never available at a reasonable price or is always out of stock.
amyntoros wrote:I also don't think that it sounds like something Alexander would have said. I did a Google search for the exact phrasing but without the word "Alexander" and the only positive result was a page that credited it to "Alexandre". I also did a Google desktop search using the words logistician and/or humorless and I didn't find either of them in my Alexander files, so this may well be another internet myth. I can't even recall reading anything vaguely similar to this, although there is one source we don't have transcribed - Athenaeus Mechanicus, On Machines, Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag, 2004. (Link is to a BMCR Review.) The problem is, the book is never available at a reasonable price or is always out of stock.
Best regards,
No, I managed to spend a bit of time looking through the source files, after I'd posted the message, and failed to come up with anything. It just doesn't sound like the sort of thing Alexander would have said ... at all. Doesn't even sound ancient to me, which is why I said it sounded more like Stalin - he did, after all, kill all his generals just because he thought they were too good!
I don't believe it's even in any of the modern fiction works about Alexander. It's so out of character, in my opinion, that any book that puts those words in his mouth must be pretty rubbish (as, unfortunately, so many of them are).
I just realised something, they have William Gates as SecDef. The SoD is ROBERT Gates...so they can't even get the guy's name right...I didn't catch that till now.
athenas owl wrote:I just realised something, they have William Gates as SecDef. The SoD is ROBERT Gates...so they can't even get the guy's name right...I didn't catch that till now.
It totally sounds out of character for Alexander. Especially seeing as his logistics seem to have been almost impeccable, so he had a pretty competent staff that probably didn't need a slaying to stay on top of things. Oddly enough though, these quotes sometimes appear where not expected. A few months back I finally had found a source for a quote that had been driving me crazy, Alexander's secret to success: "Never put off until tomorrow what can be done today", and this was from a Scholiast on Homer's Iliad. Perhaps there are others gems out there where you wouldn't expect it?
I think I was better off not knowing it existed.
