The more things change,.......................Part 2

     Language, moreover, which devotes its attention to truth ought to be plain and unadorned.  This popular style has nothing to do with truth.  Its object is to sway a mass audience, to carry away unpractised ears by the force of its onslaught.  It never submits itself to detailed discussion, is just wafted away.  Besides, how can a thing possible govern others when it cannot be governed itself?  And apart from all this surely language which is directed to the healing of men's minds needs to penetrate into one?  Medicines do no good unless they stop some length of time in one.  There is, moreover, a great deal of futility and emptiness about this style of speaking, which has more noise about it than effectiveness.  There are my terrors to be quieted, incitements to be quelled, illusions to be dispelled, extravagance to be checked, greed to be reprimanded:  which of these things can be done in a hurry?  What doctor can heal patients merely in passing?  One might add, too, that there is not even any pleasure to be found in such a noisy promiscuous torrent of words.  Just as with a lot of things that one would never believe possible one finds it quite enough to have seen them once proved possible, so with these performers with words, to have heard them once is more than enough.  What is there in them, after all, that anyone could want to learn or imitate?  What view is one likely to take of the state of a person's mind when his speech is wild and incoherent and knows no restraint?

-Seneca (4 BC- AD65),  Letter XL, Letters from a Stoic