Boat people wash up on your shore one day, lots of them. They’ve come in a flotilla, begging asylum, and one of their ships has just sunk out at sea. Most of them are tough, hardened young men, coming from a war-torn country, and their reputation precedes them. What do you do? Open the border or close it? Let them stay or turn them away? Shoot them if they won’t go? And how would you react if, on a whim, your own government simply declared your borders fully open, welcomed the newcomers to stay and settle permanently, and announced that, effective immediately, it will recognize no difference between the newcomers and old-stock citizens?
Such is the story at the start of Virgil’s Aeneid, which is an epic tale of refugees seeking resettlement in a new home. Written 2,000 years ago and set 3,200 years in the past, the Aeneid is the classic text—a classicist’s classic—and yet the story it tells couldn’t be timelier. Humans flee a crisis only to encounter another, or even spark one.
At the deliberately disorienting start of the epic, a storm drives a flotilla of refugees from Turkey to the coasts of Tunisia. That’s to use the modern country names, of course. In the story, Virgil’s Turks are Trojans from Troy, and his Tunisians are Carthaginians—that is, settler colonists who recently arrived from Phoenicia (Lebanon) and promptly cheated the trusting natives out of land in a bad-faith
