The Streets of Rome: The Classical Dylan

Taming the proud: the case of Virgil For those of us––and there are a few of us in my neck of the woods–– interested in the Roman poet Virgil and in the art of Bob Dylan, the strange days that followed September 11, 2001 were particularly memorable. Dylan’s two-year stint in the Hibbing High Latin Club was at that point unknown to me. In the summer of 2005 a trip to the Seattle Music Experience revealed his early interest, set out on the page of the Hibbing High School yearbook, the Hematite, as it is called. The page is also featured in Scorsese’s No Direction Home. But even on the first time through Love and Theft, even before we had noted the quotes around the title that drew attention to the theft of Eric Lott’s title, before we had been handed the snippets of Confessions of a Yakuza, transformed into Appalachian and other vignettes, there was Virgil, loud and clear, in the tenth verse of “Lonesome Day Blues ” (itself a Blind Willie McTell title): I’m gonna spare the defeated, I’m gonna speak to the crowd / I’m gonna spare the defeated, boys, I’m going to speak to the crowd / I am goin ’ to teach peace to the conquered / I’m gonna tame the proud / / (“Lonesome Day Blues”) But yours will be the rulership of nations, / remember Roman, these will be your arts: / to teach the ways of peace to those you conquer, / to spare defeated peoples, tame the proud / / (Virgil, Aeneid 6.851-53, [trans