Why Dylan Matters. Richard Thomas F.

Club meetings, and he certainly posed for the group photo of the club that came out in the 1957 Hematite. Bob Zimmerman’s enrollment file “disappeared” years ago from the meticulously kept records of the school, but we know that he was taking Latin and learning about Rome that same year he put his first band together. In addition to the yearbook, the school paper, the Hibbing Hi Times, for November 30, 1956, in the regular “Club Notes” column also gives us a unique rarity, a record, unimpaired by the potentially creative memory of those friends who later recalled this or that detail—part of a day in the life of the fifteen-year-old:

      SOCIETAS LATINA HOLDS INITIATION

      Societas Latina [Latin Club] held its annual initiation party and ceremony for new members recently in the high school cafeteria. Several associated members of the club were present also.

      Second-year students vied on a mock TV program, answering questions on Roman gods and goddesses and identifying words dealing with various phases of Roman life. Winners were awarded prizes. After the formal pledge of allegiance by new members, initiates received badges and were raised from the status of slave to that of plebeians. Members then adjourned to the punch bowl where Consul Mary Ann Peterson and Anna Marie Forsmann, in Roman dress, presided.

      Consul Joe Perpich, assisted by Dennis Wickman, Bob Zimmerman, and John Milinovich, was in charge of the formal induction and radio program.

      For whatever reason, interest in the Roman gods and goddesses, helping with the radio, or the favorable gender imbalance (fifty girls to fourteen boys)—or all three—Bob Zimmerman was a member of the Hibbing High Latin Club. The only other information about the Latin Club comes with the paper’s issue for March 15, 1957, in the spring of Bob’s membership year, under the headline LATIN CLUB EDITS IDES OF MARCH NEWS:

      Societas Latina members today published a paper to celebrate the death of Caesar on the Ides of March (March 15). The paper included Roman history, an original poem, cartoons, and many other items with a Roman background.

      Any trace of that paper is long gone, but it is safe to assume Bob Zimmerman played some role in the celebration. Almost sixty years later, as we’ll see, Dylan was quoted as saying, “If I had to do it all over again, I’d be a schoolteacher—probably teach Roman history or theology.”

      We can’t be sure what got Bob Zimmerman interested in Latin and the Romans, but it looks as if those interests started in the years before he walked into Miss Irene Walker’s Latin class in the fall of 1956. Bob’s uncle owned the Lybba, named after Dylan’s great-grandmother, one of the town’s four movie theaters, along with the State, and the Gopher, like the Lybba both just a few blocks from his home, the fourth a drive-in. The early to mid-1950s saw an intensification of movies about Greece and Rome, the latter in particular, along with biblical movies, with or without Romans. This was part of a post–World War II, Cold War–generated escape into the relative security of antiquity: swords and sandals, rather than the atom bomb. At the same time, these years saw the height of McCarthyism and the blacklisting of Hollywood actors, producers, and directors. The ancient world could be used as a medium for camouflaging contemporary red-baiting while depicting persecutions emanating not from Washington, D.C., and the House Un-American Activities Committee, but rather from the city of Rome: between 1950 and 1956, when Bob decided to take up Latin, any number of such movies were available for him to have seen, including Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1953 hit version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, starring Marlon Brando, one of Dylan’s favorites, who got the best actor nomination for his role as Mark Antony.

      In these years the following movies about the ancient world were available for Bob Zimmerman to see, free at the Lybba, or at either of the other two theaters, opening on the following dates:

      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