Heyworth has well observed the way that the named dates in the last two lines of
the poem, the Ides and the Kalends, drive home the disjunction between the richly
described round of cyclical life in the country and the hard-nosed, unvarying
urban environment of the usurer Alfius.^178 Until the surprise ending, the poem fol-
lows a natural rustic calendar straight out of the Georgics,a seasonal progression
in an annual round: “there is... a progression in lines 9 – 16 from spring to early
summer activities which balances the more clearly articulated movement in lines
17 – 36 from autumn to winter.”^179 Horace has surely noticed that the world of the
Georgicsgoes on in a noncalendrical environment, for his Epodeshows only one
date or festival of any kind, the Terminalia, when a lamb is killed (agna festis caesa
Terminalibus,59).^180 The life of the country follows its natural round without
supervision by the fasti,just as in the Georgics,whereas the last two lines of the
poem introduce the two dates that regulate the flow of cash in the city, two dates
of exclusively financial significance — the Ides for calling in debts and the Kalends
for making new loans — days that are the same every month, rain or shine, sum-
mer or winter.^181
The point about the Georgicsthat Horace had noticed is also picked up on by
Ovid when he writes his own didactic poem — not the Fasti,of course, which is
entirely full of calendrical dates and festival days, but his other didactic poem, the
Ars Amatoria,which follows Virgil and Hesiod in having its own section on
“days.”^182 Ovid knows very well what didactic — especially rusticdidactic — ought
to look like, but no one before him had written a didactic poem on sex and the city.
In Ovid ’s case, the days to avoid are ones where the lover might be expected to buy
his puellaa present (so “bad” days are good,because the shops will be closed). He
introduces his “days” section with the key word tempora,the first word of the
Fasti;and he makes the point that it is not just the denizens of the georgic world
who need to know the “times” (1.399 – 400):
Tempora qui solis operosa colentibus arua,
fallitur, et nautis aspicienda putat.He is mistaken who thinks that only those who cultivate the plow lands with
their work, or sailors, need to look out for times.^183Ovid ’s “times,” however, are radically different from Virgil’s, for he is situating
his work at the heart of cosmopolitan urban life. The days he proceeds to itemize,
then, are not Hesiodic or georgic lunar days, but a cluster of all kinds of time
- Years, Months, Days II: Grids of the Fasti