Satires 2.5 (Horace) the over-insistent heir in Thebes who was required by the will of his benefactor to carry her oil-soaked slippery carcass on his shoulders during the funeral procession. "Satire 2.5" is often thought of as the least “Horatian” of the Satires and is often compared to works by Juvenal, a poet of the 1st century AD. Juvenal’s poems focus on the perversions of man and hint at Man’s loss of “his highest potentialities”. Many scholars acknowledge this cynicism in "Satire 2.5" and see a connection between the two authors. As Shackleton Bailey writes, “Uniquely for Horace, it concerns a particular social
Horace themes throughout his poetic career, including politics, love, philosophy and ethics, his own social role, as well as poetry itself. His "Epodes" and "Satires" are forms of 'blame poetry' and both have a natural affinity with the moralising and diatribes of Cynicism. This often takes the form of allusions to the work and philosophy of Bion of Borysthenes but it is as much a literary game as a philosophical alignment. By the time he composed his "Epistles", he was a critic of Cynicism along with all impractical and "high-falutin" philosophy in general. The "Satires" also include a strong element of