Richard Thomas - Why Dylan Matters

Serpent of the Nile: Gopher, July 26, 1953

The Robe: State, January 1, 1954 (and its sequel):

Demetrius and the Gladiators: Lybba, June 24, 1954

Julius Caesar: State, February 9, 1955

The Silver Chalice: State, February 11, 1955

Jupiter’s Darling: Lybba, March 11, 1955

Helen of Troy: State, March 4, 1956

Alexander the Great: Lybba, June 16, 1956

In 1951 he may have been too young for Quo Vadis, with Peter Ustinov as the lyre-playing emperor Nero, but it probably made a return visit in the years that followed. By the time Ben-Hur came out in 1959, Bob Zimmerman was moving on, though he claimed in an interview that the book on which the movie was based was part of the scriptural reading he did in his youth, just as he mentions The Robe and the 1961 King of Kings as early influences. There is not much else to do in Hibbing, particularly in the cold of the northern Minnesota winter, whether or not the theater is owned by your uncle.

I know I’m not the only classicist who was attracted to the world of Rome by Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 movie, Spartacus, starring Kirk Douglas, which I first saw as an eleven-year-old. That movie opened at the Lybba on December 29, 1961, when Bob Dylan was back in Hibbing from his first year in Greenwich Village, for the end-of-year holidays—a year later he chose to visit Rome, and on his return to Greenwich Village sang a song he had just written, “Goin’ Back to Rome.” These movies were beginning to peter out when Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton gave us Cleopatra and Mark Antony in Mankiewicz’s lavish 1963 epic, Cleopatra. Such things happen. Bob Zimmerman moved on, dropped Latin and stuck with his music, and became Bob Dylan. But my contention is that the memory of his contact with classical antiquity, like the memory of everything else, stayed with him, and had a similar early influence on the evolution of his music, as did the poetry he read in B. J. Rolfzen’s English class and his own extensive and varied reading.

According to Dylan’s own account in Chronicles: Volume One, published in 2004, the Rome of Hibbing makes one more appearance in his high school days, by way of the Black Hills Passion Play of South Dakota, a touring group that came to town to act out the suffering, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus. It seems they also needed locals to play the part of extras, as Dylan fondly recalls:

One year I played a Roman soldier with a spear and helmet—breastplate, the works—a non-speaking role, but it didn’t matter. I felt like a star. I liked the costume. It felt like a nerve tonic … as a Roman soldier I felt like a part of everything, in the center of the planet, invincible. That seemed a million years ago now, a million private struggles and difficulties ago.

Who knows what year this was, perhaps Dylan’s sophomore year of high school, when members of the Hibbing High Latin Club got to take on such roles. If he was a Roman soldier, he presumably participated in the scene depicted in the gospels where Roman soldiers cast lots to see who will get the tunic of the crucified Jesus—both scenes familiar to him from The Robe and King of Kings. Bob Dylan revisited that scene in the 1975 song “Shelter from the Storm,” where the singer’s role is different, but reminiscent of the play he refers to in Chronicles. First “she walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns,” suggesting an identification with Jesus Christ, and four verses later “In a little hilltop village, they gambled for my clothes / I bargained for salvation an’ they gave me a lethal dose.” It doesn’t matter whether his role as a Roman soldier was a reality or one of the many inventions and embellishments in his memoir, though the former seems more likely in this case. In his mind, back in 1957 and an epoch later in 2004, the road from Hibbing, like all roads, led to Rome. Dylan went back to Rome again, and to his role as a Roman soldier, in his Nobel lecture, delivered on June 5, 2017. In the lecture, he discusses three books that influenced him since grammar school, All Quiet on the Western Front, Moby-Dick, and the Odyssey, and describes the experience of Paul Bäumer, the soldier-narrator of All Quiet as being like “You’re on the real iron cross, and a Roman soldier’s putting a sponge of vinegar to your lips.”

In Dylan’s 2006 song “Ain’t Talkin’,” the narrator says, “I’ll avenge my father’s death, then I’ll step back.” While the avenging of a father’s death may initially suggest Hamlet, one of Dylan’s favorite plays, I believe the echoes of the line may also lead to Rome, and to the aftermath of the killing of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March, 44 BC, the event celebrated by the Latin Club in 1957. As is now well known, “Ain’t Talkin’ ” steals a number of verses from the exile poems of the Roman poet Ovid, banished in AD 8 by the emperor Augustus to the desolate shores of the Black Sea. When Augustus took control through civil war and came to rule over the Roman Empire, he presented himself as restoring the state from the slavery imposed by Brutus and the other assassins of Julius Caesar:

Those who killed my father I drove into exile, by way of the courts, exacting vengeance for their crime. … I did not accept absolute power that was offered to me.

The reality was otherwise, of course. Augustus maintained the trappings of republic, but in effect his power was absolute; he avenged his father’s death, but he did not step back.

Whatever the impulse, for Bob Dylan the city of Rome, and along with it the culture of the ancient Romans, came to hold a special place over the years. We’ll never know for sure what all those movies and his membership in the Latin Club have to do with this productive association, but the fact is that Rome and the Romans turned up in his songs from early on, and they continue to play a role in his creative imagination.

DYLAN AND CATULLUS

Folk music and the blues may be seen as the primary reservoir of Dylan’s words and melodies for pretty much all of his music that followed. Rock and roll was the musical staple of his high school years, and it remained a part of him as he soaked up the various folk traditions, in Dinkytown in Minneapolis, and later in Greenwich Village. But folk was the old from which the new would emerge. For the youth of America, rock and roll was generational; it belonged to them. It cleared out the music of their parents, the era before immediately after World War II, the Great American Songbook, given voice by Perry Como, Frank Sinatra, and Tony Bennett—the mine to which Dylan would return, starting with the 2015 album Shadows in the Night. With what was happening, musically and culturally in the mid-1960s, Bob Dylan’s genius was in the right time and the right place.

Something similar was happening in the middle part of the first century BC in Rome. Traditional forms of literature, drama, and early epic poetry were coming to be perceived as old-fashioned, precisely as society was opening up in other ways. A clash of cultures was taking place in Rome during this period, similar to the clash that would begin to take place in post-sixties America. Among other now-lost poets of antiquity, flourishing in the two decades before Julius Caesar was killed, was a rare survivor, an ancient Roman poet who can usefully be compared to Dylan, the avant-garde lyric poet Catullus. He died young (c. 54 BC) after creating a body of work that electrified Roman readers, reflected the turmoil and the modernity of Roman times, and changed the course of literary history.

Catullus has long been one of my favorite poets. For me, no other poet, except maybe Dylan, has been able to convey a sense of the pain caused by the loss of love as intensely as Catullus. Dylan wouldn’t begin to make creative use of the poetry of ancient Greece and Rome until the albums he released in the twenty-first century, even though he had long been living in the Rome of his memory and imagination.