Speak your philosophy none too fast. Seneca, Epistles 4.40.9-10

Seneca continues defending careful, slow rhetoric as proper for philosophy. If you must have bad discursive style, he says, pick a bad style that doesn't commit you to speaking too fast.

Recte ergo facies si non audieris istos qui quantum dicant, non quemadmodum quaerunt, et ipse malueris, si necesse est, vel P. Vinicium dicere qui itaque (†). Cum quaereretur quomodo P. Vinicius diceret, Asellius ait tractim. Nam Geminus Varius ait, quomodo istum disertum dicatis nescio: tria verba non potest iungere. Quidni malis tu sic dicere quomodo Vinicius? Aliquis tam insulsus intervenerit quam qui illi singula verba vellenti, tamquam dictaret, non diceret, ait dic, numquam dicas? Nam Q. Hateri (‡) cursum, suis temporibus oratoris celeberrimi, longe abesse ab homine sano volo: numquam dubitavit, numquam intermisit; semel incipiebat, semel desinebat.

You will do well to ignore those who attend only the quantity of their discourse, and not its quality. If needs must, you would even prefer to speak like Publius Vinicius (*) rather than pour words recklessly. When someone asked him how Vinicius spoke, Asellius gave answer: “Like a wagon stuck in the mud.” Geminus Varius offered another opinion: “I don't know how you people manage to consider that man fluent: he cannot even join three words together.” Why not give this delivery a chance? Even so, won't some rube come barging in, saying that the man who struggles to put single words together should pour out paragraphs instead of sentences? “Speak, man! Though you never do.” The breakneck delivery of Quintus Haterius, one of the most famous orators of his time, is far from what I expect of a man sane and sound. Haterius never hesitated, never paused; his rushing tide of words blew out on the same frenzied breath that brought it in.

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(†) vel P. Vinicium dicere qui itaque. Scholars suspect this passage of being corrupt. Capps replaces the itaque in the MSS with titubat.

(‡) I accept Lipsius' emendation of the MSS, which offer namque hateri or namq. aetheri here instead of the proper name Q. Haterius. The Roman praenomen is often abbreviated with a point in ancient texts and later MSS, so the emendation makes good sense.

(*) Some of the characters mentioned here are known to history. Vinicius & Haterius were senators during the time of Augustus and his heir Tiberius. Tacitus remembers Haterius as a well-known orator, though he had more flash than sense (Annales 4.61: impetu magis quam cura vigebat). Asellius might be the writer mentioned by Suetonius as composing fluff to order for Tiberius (Tiberius §42).