Satires (Horace) similes, and the fiction of an anonymous interlocutor whose objections the speaker easily refutes. In addition, Horace alludes to another inspiration, the poet Lucretius whose didactic epic "De rerum natura" ("On the Nature of Things"), also written in hexameters, popularized Epicurean physics in Rome. For example, Horace's comparison of his satires with cookies that a teacher uses to encourage his students to learn their letters, reminds of Lucretius' more traditional comparison of his poetry with the sugar that sweetens the bitter medicine of philosophy. Moreover, Lucretian stock phrases such as "nunc ad rem redeo" ("now I return to the matter
Pastoral epistles responding to specific 2nd-century developments (Marcionism, gnosticism). That Marcion (ca. 140) betrays knowledge of a collection of Paul's letters that lack the Pastoral Epistles is another piece of evidence for which any model must account. (This is a separate question to Marcion's "canon", which included only edited versions of Luke and the Pauline epistles; according to Tertullian, Marcion "omitted" the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Pastoral Epistles.) According to Raymond E. Brown ("An Introduction to the New Testament", 1997), the majority of scholars who accept a post-Pauline date of composition for the Pastorals favour the period 80–100. Scholars supporting