Closet classicist …

… The Metamorphosis | How Bob Dylan was influenced by Homer and Ovid. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Ancient Rome has always mattered to Bob Dylan, from his teenage years when he saw films such as The Robe, Demetrius and the Gladiators, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar starring Marlon Brando as Mark Antony. Dylan went for free to the cinema owned by his uncle: there wasn’t much else to do in the deep winters of Hibbing up on the iron range in the far north country of Minnesota. The fifteen-year-old Dylan, then Robert (or Bobby) Zimmerman, studied Latin and joined the Latin Club in his sophomore year.