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| Dylan's English teacher's desk is for sale. |
This connection to Cicero runs through Richard F. Thomas’s Why Bob Dylan Matters, reviewed by Thomas Palaima for Bryn Mawr Classical Review. The gold Nobel medallion Dylan received in 2016 carries an image and inscription linked to Virgil’s Aeneid 6.660–665 and Eclogues 1. Thomas sets those lines beside T. S. Eliot’s 1945 essay “What Is a Classic?” and Cicero’s De Officiis, then against Dylan’s “Desolation Row” and Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
Dylan, Thomas argues, absorbed the Virgilian words and scene on the medal as both painter and songster. The book follows one of the many “roadmaps for the soul” that show the empathy for the human condition at the center of Dylan’s work. Hence the nod to Cicero. Thomas renders the idea this way: “I am a human. I consider nothing connected to humanity to be alien to me.”
David Gaines made a related point in the John Bushey Lecture Series during Duluth Dylan Fest several years back. He stressed the lasting influence of teachers and noted that Dylan took two years of Latin in high school—then a normal course of study, and a direct encounter with the ancient classics. Like Thomas, who had spoken in the series the year before, Gaines observed that Dylan belonged to the Latin Club. The detail is small, but it places the later allusions inside an ordinary classroom rather than a later affectation.
It is to Dylan’s credit, and to Cicero’s, and now to Thomas’s, that they keep returning to the need for human empathy. Cicero does it by argument. Dylan does it by redeploying passages from texts that have grown obscure—classical authors, or the Civil War poet Henry Timrod—so that readers and listeners see, think, and feel what it is to be a struggling human being in any time or place, inside what Dylan calls “this weary world of woe.” The ideas are recognizable. The clothing of those ideas is also beautiful; the prose itself--and his style of delivery when recording or performing--carries moral weight.
That combination of thought and style is why Cicero kept being recovered.
The 14th century Italian scholar and poet Petrarch is often credited with the rediscovery of Cicero’s letters, thus helping open the fourteenth-century Renaissance in public affairs, humanism, and classical Roman culture. Cicero’s authority peaked again in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. His impact on Locke, Hume, Montesquieu, and Burke was substantial. America's founding fathers were likewise acquainted with Cicero as well. George Washington purportedly had two books on his nightstand, the Bible and Cicero.
Cicero's works remain among the most influential in European culture and still supply primary material for the history of the late Roman Republic. Augustine, who was living and writing as Rome fell, read him closely and argued with him while valuing his insights and contributions to beautiful writing.
It's interesting to find that these ancient writers and philosophers continue to speak to us today. In our modern/post-modern era, we see that people are pretty much the same as they have always been, wrestling with issues of meaning, power, powerlessness, greed, envy, deceit, pride, ambition, freedom and injustice.
The Old Testament prophets seemed to specialize in confronting kings and powerful entities with honest, often critical facts about their abuses or mistakes. Today we call it, "Speaking truth to power."
When I Googled the origin of that phrase, I was surprised at its recent vintage, though we well know the idea behind it goes far back in time. The phrase was broadly popularized by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in the 1955 pacifist publication, Speak Truth To Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence.
"In the land of An Eye for an Eye, all men are blind.
Related Link
More Thoughts from Cicero: On Life, Death and Philosophy
Photo Source:
https://x.com/Matt_Stike/status/2108940566037967181
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