alt Hacker NewsId have hoped that it isn’t much of any kind of argument, since sharp wits can be an indispensable aid to …
(pace Edward Gibbon — personally, via Feynman*!)
… leading by example (showing >>> telling)
( but also/and by swagger
(Since wit, appropriately weaponized & singularly demo’d, is its own distinction?
)
)
* >But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous (quoted in TFLiP)
EDIT2: seems like NB had other ways to motivate his men (beside fear & swag)— according to that English historian “Livy” was smacked in this kind of context, but we’ll never know for sure now
EDIT: (material) baubles require a more or less centralized fount of honor (as republics ever had), transmission of (the clear products of) wit.. otoh, needs just… a market (of at least one)
wow, full context from Gibbon is great:
> It has been objected to Marcus, that he sacrificed the happiness of millions to a fond partiality for a worthless boy; and that he chose a successor in his own family, rather than in the republic. Nothing however, was neglected by the anxious father, and by the men of virtue and learning whom he summoned to his assistance, to expand the narrow mind of young Commodus, to correct his growing vices, and to render him worthy of the throne for which he was designed. But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy...
compare (~500 years earlier for MA; a couple of thousand for EG)
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext... et seq. (93c-95a; great foreshadowing by Anytus...)