Tangled Up In Thucydides
Bob Dylan Wanes Poetic on Ancient Texts
I don’t know for certain what the stages of grief are, but I think I go through them all whenever a politician or celebrity makes a classical reference. First shock — did Shaquille O’Neal really think the Parthenon in Athens was a nightclub? Then pain — think of actually having in your inbox, thanks to some well-meaning relative, the text of Ted Cruz’s excruciating Senate-floor recital of the First Catilinarian against Barack Obama. Then consolation of philosophy — I reread that section in the Apology where Socrates says that no politician or artist in his day knew what they were talking about either. Finally, I convince myself that maybe this is an opportunity, if not for the general culture, then at least for myself.
Enter Bob Dylan’s memoir, which is with typical self-deprecation given the title of one of the books of the Bible, Chronicles. In a couple of chapters Dylan describes his life in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, when he did not yet have an apartment and remained for several months a long-term houseguest. In those days Manhattanites who had apartments roomy enough for guests apparently also had books interesting enough to read (the times they are a-changin’, I suppose), for Dylan claims to have led the classic intellectual vagabond life. Your host goes off to work; you stay at home and read his books all day. Or at least thumb through them:
I liked staying with others. It was less of a hassle, easier, with little responsibility — places where I could freely come and go, sometimes even with a key, rooms with plenty of hardback books on shelves and stacks of phonograph records. When I wasn’t doing anything else, I’d thumb through the books and listen to the records. (267)
The library of one host in particular seems to have captured his imagination:
The place had an overpowering presence of literature and you couldn’t help but lose your passion for dumbness. Up until this time I’d been raised in a cultural spectrum that had left my mind black with soot. Brando. James Dean. Milton Berle. Marilyn Monroe. Lucy. Earl Warren and Khrushchev, Castro, Little Rock and Peyton Place. Tennessee Williams and Joe DiMaggio. J. Edgar Hoover and Westinghouse. The Nelsons. Holiday Inns and hot-rod Chevys. Mickey Spillane and Joe McCarthy. Levittown.
Standing in this room you could take it all for a joke. There were all types of things in here, books on typography, epigraphy, philosophy, political ideologies. The stuff that could make you bugged-eyed [sic]. Books like Fox’s Book of Martyrs, The Twelve Caesars, Tacitus lectures and letters to Brutus. Pericles’ Ideal State of Democracy, Thucydides’ The Athenian General — a narrative which would give you chills. It was written four hundred years before Christ and it talks about how human nature is always the enemy of anything superior. Thucydides writes about how words in his time have changed from their ordinary meaning, how actions and opinions can be altered in the blink of an eye. It’s like nothing has changed from his time to mine. (35–6)
The first stage is shock. What exactly is happening here? Is this just some incredible fail by the editor? (“Bugged-eyed”? Who says “bugged-eyed”?) How difficult could it have been to check the titles of the books to get them right? Fox’s for Foxe’s is wrong but generally acceptable. But what are Tacitus’ “lectures”? We don’t have any such thing. And “letters to Brutus”? Brutus was two hundred years dead by Tacitus’ day. Thucydides wrote a history, but that’s not its name. And Pericles — well, that’s an impressively specific title to foist on someone who didn’t write any books at all.
He goes on to mention two more classics: the Metamorphoses of Ovid, which he calls “the scary horror tale” (are there any mischaracterizations worse than pop culture simplifications?), and even more bizarrely, “Sophocles’ book on the nature and function of the gods — why there are only two sexes.” Needless to say, the Greek tragedian never wrote any such book — nor even anything remotely resembling it. Of the five classics mentioned, only one reference contains no errors: The Twelve Caesars. Considering the rest of the list, we may be lucky that he didn’t try to match it to an author or describe its content.
The pain for me really came when I read up on this a bit, trying to figure out how or why the editor left these errors in. (Does the editor want Dylan to look like a colossal poser? Isn’t it the role of the editor to catch easily corrected mistakes?) Take a look at what Jim Kunstler, a writer for Rolling Stone, says about this passage: “Dylan rattles off titles — and summaries of their content — as though he had read them, and for all we know he did.”
It sounds like a heavy course load for a graduate student let alone a twenty-year-old college drop-out. But Dylan rattles through these things without pretension, and like his folksong scholarship, which prepared him to understand the array of song forms at his disposal, this broad reading would soon pay off in a breathtaking ability to compose arrestingly complex lyrics.
In other words, invoking titles like Pericles’ Ideal State of Democracy is supposed to impress the sort of people who become writers for Rolling Stone magazine and have no idea that Pericles never wrote any books, but know that to read Pericles is a trait of profound people. And it works: it does impress them. Take a look at how a professional classicist, Richard Thomas, a professor at Harvard, handles this passage in an article entitled “The Streets of Rome: The Classical Dylan.” After stating that calling Thucydides’ history The Athenian General is “not necessarily a mistake” (without ever suggesting what it then might be), Thomas says of Dylan’s bibliography:
It is curious that three of these are non-existent books, but in subtle ways: Tacitus wrote a dialogue about orators (including the long-dead Brutus, to whom Cicero wrote actual, surviving letters); Pericles, who was an Athenian general, wrote nothing that survives but looms large in Thucydides, whose work includes the general’s famous funeral oration, which does treat the ideal state of Athenian democracy; Sophocles only wrote tragedies, but they are often about the nature and function of the gods.
So the fact that someone two centuries before Tacitus wrote letters to Brutus means it’s fine to claim that Tacitus wrote them? That would be about as correct as a presidential candidate telling the press that his favorite album was the duet Bob Dylan did with Antonio Salieri. Pace Professor Thomas, it’s actually not very subtle. Dylan can’t even get the titles right, much less the content. Not only are Sophocles’ tragedies not really about the nature and function of the gods, but also Thomas doesn’t even try to defend what is by far the odder part of Dylan’s claim: that Sophocles had thence derived a theory of why there are only two sexes. It’s hard to imagine Thomas accepting this kind of inaccuracy from even the greenest of his undergraduates.
But perhaps this is just a sign of the sad reality that in the postliterate world, even the barest gestures towards accuracy do not matter. The entire point of pretense is to acquire the appearance of intelligence and sophistication without the discipline and effort. Being a poser is as sufficient for celebrities as it is for politicians.
But of course, Plato discusses this phenomenon in the Apology, when Socrates speaks of both poets and politicians (Apology 21c, 22b-c):
My experience was something like this: I thought that he appeared wise to many people and especially to himself, but he was not… I soon realized that poets do not compose their poems with knowledge, but by some inborn talent and by inspirations, like seers and prophets who also say many fine things without any understanding of what they say.
This is not to say that Bob Dylan’s songs are bad. But it does pinpoint an aspect of them noted by Clive James in his famous 1972 essay on Bob Dylan, brilliantly paraphrased by Kunstler: “that Dylan had done an astounding job of developing his precocity, and not such a good job of developing his maturity.” It would be a sign of precocity to recognize that there were real treasures in these books, and to be excited by them and inspired by them, even if it were just to the point of wanting to pretend to know them. It is the work of maturity to have enough discipline to make all those early lies and pretenses true — to actually read the books you divined in your youth were true and important, and with mature eyes to see even further into them. But Dylan does not show any indication of that. There is no sign that he ever went back to these books to get to know their contents or even get their titles right. It’s not surprising, but it is a little disappointing.
And the youthful Dylan does show a precocious eye, in at least one instance: Thucydides’ remarkable description of how partisan bloodshed between the democratic and aristocratic factions in Corcyra completely undermined social relations, and where “human nature… showed itself proudly in its true colors, as something incapable of controlling passion, insubordinate to the idea of justice, the enemy to anything superior to itself” (from the Rex Warner Penguin translation, which Dylan might have seen):
To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. (3.82)
In this scene Thucydides shows all the quality of thought and writing that makes him a true classic:
In the various cities these revolutions were the cause of many calamities — as happens and always will happen while human nature is what it is, though there may be different degrees of savagery, and, as different circumstances arise, the general rules will admit of some variety. In times of peace and prosperity cities and individuals alike follow higher standards, because they are not forced into a situation where they have to do what they do not want to do. But war is a stern teacher; in depriving them of the power of easily satisfying their daily wants, it brings most people’s minds down to the level of their actual circumstances.
It’s wonderful stuff. It makes me want to look up the rest of Dylan’s references. If only they actually existed.
In the end, does any of this matter? Whether or not Dylan is ascribing bogus books to Tacitus, “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” and “Like A Rolling Stone” — and many others Dylan wrote — will remain great songs. He doesn’t have to be a philologist to be a poet, and he doesn’t have to be a historian to have his place in history. Socrates was apparently unimpressed by the poets of his day as philosophers, but when we think of what kind of poets they were — Sophocles, Aristophanes, Euripides — we rarely worry about whether they were good philosophers. And memoirs are full of errors, because they are dependent on our fallible memories.
But every community has standards about errors. Some are accepted as mental hiccups or idiosyncrasies, but others mean you can’t go to press — you have to correct them. If Dylan had declared for whatever reason — misremembering or slip of the hand or disinterest — that the Beatles album Nixon had given him chills (as he claims Thucydides’ The Athenian General did), or saluted Exile On Main St as Ella Fitzgerald’s finest work, someone would have fixed the error, or reviewers would have attacked.
When it comes to artists and their work in particular, getting the details right is a sign of respect. Dylan even tries to invoke Thucydides as a kind of peer — “it’s like nothing has changed from his time to mine” — but he doesn’t treat him that way. He treats him the way a namedropper would a celebrity, hoping that the mere invocation of a name will add luster to his personality. He does provide us with an opportunity to brush up on our Thucydides — and we should thank him for that — but he still leaves me wishing we had a culture where our celebrities were capable of a bit more than error-filled blundering in the world of classics.
John Byron Kuhner taught Latin for ten years before moving to an off-grid cabin in the Catskill Mountains in 2008. Since then he has spent his time reading, thinking, writing, observing nature and growing plants. More of his writing can be found at www.johnbyronkuhner.com.
