In “Narrow Way,” on the 2012 album Tempest, Bob Dylan sings:

You got too many lovers waiting at the wall
If I had a thousand tongues I couldn’t count them all
Yesterday I could have thrown them all in the sea
Today, even one may be too much for me

The bolded line demonstrates that Dylan’s classical influences can be seen even in very small ways for the reader who is interested in such things. For the hypothetical multiplication of tongues and mouths to show the impossibility for a mere mortal of recounting large numbers of things goes back to our earliest ancient Greek poem, Homer’s Iliad.

In Iliad 2, as a preface to the Catalogue of Ships (in which Homer lists all the Greek contingents at Troy, Homer says this:

Tell me now, you Muses who have your homes on Olympos.

For you, who are goddesses, are there, and you know all things,

and we have heard only the rumour of it and know nothing.

Who then of those were the chief men and the lords of the Danaans?

I could not tell over the multitude of them nor name them,

not if I had ten tongues and ten mouths, not if I had

a voice never to be broken and a heart of bronze within me,

not unless the Muses of Olympia, daughters

of Zeus of the aegis, remembered all those who cam beneath Ilion.

I will tell the lords of the ships, and the ships’ numbers. (Iliad 2.484-93, trans. Richmond Lattimore)

This motif is then picked up and used by subsequent authors. For example, the Roman epic poet Ennius, whose work survives only in fragments, wrote in the Annales:

Non si, lingua loqui saperet quibus, ora decem sint,

innumerum, ferro cor sit pectusque revinctum…

Not if I were to have ten mouths with which my tongue could have skill to speak words without number, and my heart and breast were fast bound in iron… (Fragments 547-48, trans. E.H. Warmington)

Later, other writers magnify the number. On two different occasions (Georgics 2.42 and Aeneid 6.625), Vergil uses the expression, but refers to “100 mouths” rather than ten.

…non, mihi si linguae centum sint oraque centum,
ferrea uox…

…not if I had 100 tongues and 100 mouths, a voice of iron…

Servius, the late antique commentator on Vergil, tells us that Vergil borrowed this line from Lucretius (who had lifted it from Homer), though Lucretius referred to a “golden voice” (aerea vox) rather than an iron one.^[1]

We finally get to the number 1000 (Dylan’s number) in Book 11 of Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, where the narrator says to the goddess Isis:

at ego referendis laudibus tuis exilis ingenio et adhibendis sacrificiis tenuis patrimonio; nec mihi uocis ubertas ad dicenda, quae de tua maiestate sentio, sufficit nec ora mille linguaeque totidem uel indefessi sermonis aeterna series.

For rendering you praise, my talent is paltry; for bringing you sacrifices, my fortune is petty. Nor do I have the lush eloquence to tell what I have experienced of your glory. Neither a thousand mouths nor as many tongues would suffice, nor an eternal, unwearying parade of speechmaking. (Metamorphoses 11.25, trans. Sarah Ruden)

I am not suggesting that Dylan got his number from Apuleius (though I also wouldn’t put it past him).

But I am suggesting that Dylan in “Narrow Way” is making an entry in a tradition of hyperbole that goes back to Homer.

And it may be worth noting that Alexander Pope, in his translation of the Iliad, actually gives a different number from Homer himself:

…O say what heroes, fired by thirst of fame,

Or urged by wrongs, to Troy’s destruction came.

To count them all, demands a thousand tongues,

A throat of brass, and adamantine lungs.

Notice how close this is to Dylan’s “If I had a thousand tongues I couldn’t count them all.” Is Pope Dylan’s source here? If I had to guess, I’d say, “Yes.” If so, Dylan has taken us back to Troy, on the walls with Helen and Priam in the Teichoscopia of Book 3, using an expression from Book 2 to count up all the men laying siege to Troy on behalf of Menelaos and his love for Helen.

Would the speaker of this verse be Paris, then? Perhaps. But in any case, the atmosphere, as I hope I’ve shown, is Homeric–as are other parts of the song. But that is for another post.