context: Because Epode 2 appears to praise the simple life in the country, I was taken by surprise by the last four lines:
haec ubi locutus faenerator Alfius,
iam iam futurus rusticus,
omnem redegit idibus pecuniam,
quaerit kalendis ponere.
When the money-lender finished saying these things
Just about to become a country-dweller
He called in all the money owed him on the Ides
He plans to put it out again on the Kalends.
The text I read (Loeb) had no quotation marks so, I assumed that the voice of the poem was the Horace’s own, until the ending, which makes it clear that all of the poem, except the last four lines, are in fact spoken by the moneylender. The Perseus presentation gives the read a strong hint by enclosing the moneylender’s speech in quotation marks.
Even without the quotation marks, should I have suspected that except for the ending, the poem is quoted speech of someone not the author? Or did Horace mean to surprise the reader?
Horace meant to surprise the reader. The last four lines subvert the pious platitudes of the rest of the poem.
The ancient Romans, of course, didn’t use quotation marks or any other punctuation, for that matter. I think some editions use them in this poem to separate the speech of the money-lender from the comment at the end, but really they detract from the punch.
iam iam futurus rusticus, – not quite “just about to become a country-dweller” but someone who is perpetually professing an intent to move to the country someday soon. That’s the force of iam iam.
The epodes are very different from the Odes–they’re more irreverent and snarky, indecorous, sometimes outright nasty and obscene, in keeping with the Greek antecedent, Archilochus. A different genre, characterized by different meters. (You have gotten over your aversion to metrical analysis, haven’t you?) The Odes are sometimes humorous, but the humor is gentler.
I assumed that the voice of the poem was the Horace’s own
As a footnote to Hylander I would just observe that it is generally unwise to assume that anything in a poem is the “poet’s own voice”, if such a thing can actually exist. Latin poets are much more slippery. They adopt many different poses which may or may not correspond to their actually opinions.
But I am glad you were surprised. Horace’s art lives on!