The sudden direct quotation of the supplication in line 188 seizes the attention and immediately alerts us to this section's topic. J. progresses easily enough from the request for glory backfiring in 187 to another request backfiring here – with a verbal link in optata (‘prayers’) in 187 and optas (‘you pray’) in 189 – and from the mass of corpses (186) to the mass of evils (190f.) attendant on both misguided entreaties. Jupiter's appearance in line 188 picks up the gods from 180–4 too. But there are also lively contrasts – between death (185f.) and long life, between the red of the waves at 185f. and the pallor of the face in 189, and between Persians at sea and Romans on land.

The military aspect of the exempla at 246ff. draws together this section and the previous one, but there are major differences as well, because at this point in X there is a definite danger of monotony. This is a much longer section (almost twice as long) and it contains many more exempla, of which, for a change, four are mythological and two are Roman. There is much more pathos here too, especially in connection with Nestor (246ff.) and Priam (258ff.). In addition, this is the first time in the poem that J. engages combatively with an extended episode in a predecessor, when at 258ff. he emends and ‘improves on’ Virgil's account of the death of Priam in Aeneid 2. Also new in this satire is the sordidness – in the ugliness at 191ff., the feebleness at 229ff. and especially the sexual material at 204ff., 223f. and 238f.

But the biggest difference is that J.'s basic point in this section is indisputably sound. If you live for a long time, you are necessarily elderly for a long time; and normally advanced old age (line 190) does sooner or later involve the drawbacks mentioned by our poet, and the longer you survive the more likely you are to experience many or even all of them (J. does allow that they are not all inevitable at 204f. and 240).