The Aeneid of Virgil (19 BC) narrates the story of the warrior demi-god Aeneas, as he takes charge of the Trojan refugees in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of Troy, and leads them in search of a new homeland. The refugees are eventually led by the Gods to Italy, where they are fated to become the ancestors of the mighty Roman Empire; that is, the Aeneid is at least partly political propaganda, since it provides an origin story for Rome that establishes why the Romans have divine right to rule the world (Aeneas is half-God, remember). This was likely why Emperor Augustus ignored Virgil’s deathbed request that his epic poem (which he considered incomplete) be burned at his passing, since Augustus considered it invaluable towards legitimizing his rule.

The Aeneid is also heavily indebted to Homer (some moderns might even call it a form of Homeric fan-fiction): the second half, for example, is a clever inversion of the Iliad, what with the Trojans now being the ones fighting on the beaches, as the Latins in Italy wage a war of extermination against the Trojans like the Greeks before them. Unlike the Iliad, however, the Olympian Gods finally intervene in Book XII to broker a peace between the two sides, wherein the Trojans are allowed to settle in Italy, but whose name will eventually be subsumed under that of the Latins. Likewise, Aeneas is given a chance to be morally superior to Achilles in the Iliad, when he defeats the Latin hero Turnus in personal combat; but rather than insult and desecrate him, Aeneas instead sincerely considers sparing him–that is, until he spies the pelt of his murdered friend Pallus hanging from Turnus’s belt. In a fit of rage like Achilles at the death of Patroclus, Aeneas loses control of his temper and slays Turnus on the spot. It is a grim and unsatisfying note to end the Epic on, one that undercuts any pretenses it had towards glorifying the ancestors of Rome. Emperor Augustus may have seen in the Aeneid a useful piece of propaganda, but to Virgil’s credit, it is not an uncomplicated example.

The first half of the Aeneid, meanwhile, is a clear and obvious riff on the Odyssey, right down to the Trojans visiting the island of the Cyclops shortly after Odysseus did in Book III, as well as Aeneas journeying to the underworld for wisdom like Odysseus did, in Book VI. For that matter, the fact that Virgil sends his hero exploring the underworld is a major reason why Dante Alighieri selected the ghost of Virgil to guide him through the underworld in Dante’s Inferno over a thirteen-hundred years later. Indeed, when I agreed to teach a World Literature class at the local college a few years ago (despite emphatically not being a Classics scholar myself), I only threw some selections from the Aeneid onto my syllabus because it formed the connective tissue between Homer’s Odyssey and Dante’s Inferno, two works that remain much more popular to this day. Virgil’s masterwork merely seemed a good illustration of T.S. Eliot‘s dictum that all of literature is in conversation with itself.

Yet as I re-read the Aeneid for the first time in a decade in prep for that class, I slowly came to realize that this Epic actually resonated even more now in the 21st century than any of the other epics I’d assigned. The Aeneid, after all, is at heart the story of refugees fleeing a homeland destroyed by war, sailing across the Mediterranean in search of a new home. Troy, it should also be noted, is traditionally located in western Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey), and was persecuted by the Greeks.

Wait, where have we heard all this before?

After the Syrian civil war broke out in 2015, over 5.5 million Syrian refugees fled abroad as their homeland was bombed to hell; at least 3.2 million of them landed in Turkey, to their immediate north. One would think more people would be sympathetic to the plight of the refugees—and indeed, many initially were, especially when these heart-wrenching photos of Syrian children began circulating:

But the scale of the crisis swiftly transformed that mass-sympathy into mass-animosity. The E.U. and U.S. have largely refused to grant the majority of the refugees sanctuary. Finally in early-2020, just before the pandemic lockdowns began, Turkey, tired of shouldering most the burden alone, announced they were opening their western borders to allow the refugees to flee into Europe. In response, the Greek government posted military to prevent their entering the E.U.

Now, Obama in fairness did commit to accept 250,000 refugees into America (though I still found that number way too low), a commitment Hillary said she would honor. Trump in 2016, however, ran on a vicious platform of denying any of them entrance. Indeed, 29 out of 30 Republican state governors announced they would also refuse to accept a single Syrian refugee–the lone exception, significantly, being Gary Herbert of Utah (although more on the Saints in a moment).

What does any of this have to do with The Aeneid? Because the Trojans, too, are initially treated with sympathy when they land in Carthage in Book I, and again when they reach Italy in Book VII. But again, if you ever read Books VIII-XII, you will see that sympathy swiftly transform into suspicion, hatred, and cruelty, as the local Latins turn on them en masse—in large part due to the vicious and dehumanizing rhetoric of the Latin nobleman Turnus (as the Book of Mormon is at repeated pains to remind us, never underestimate “the great wickedness one very wicked man can cause to take place among the children of men”).

In both the cases of the ancient Trojans and the modern Syrians, war-torn refugees sailing from Asia Minor to Europe are treated with suspicion and hatred when they are most in need of kindness and compassion. History may not always repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

I like to tell my students, by the way, that Homer’s Odyssey is an extended sermon on the importance of the sacred law of hospitality (which is violated, for example, by the Cyclops, Calypso, Circe the witch-queen, and the suitors, but also faithfully obeyed by the Phaeacians and Penelope herself), which required one to care for the stranger in our midst. The Aeneid, as a faithful bit of Homer fan-fiction itself, reminds us of the same.

The sacred law of hospitality is also, not-incidentally, why the ancient Hebrews (Mediterranean neighbors to the Greeks themselves) were commanded by the LORD: “Thou shalt neither vex a stranger, nor oppress him: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:21). It is also why the Apostle Paul (a Greek himself, recall) purportedly taught in Hebrews 13:2, “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” It is also why Christ Himself, in Matt. 25, tells those who will be found on his right hand at the last day, that “I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in,” for “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” (This is also why he told those who will be found on his left hand, “I was a stranger, and ye took me not in,” for “Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me”).

And for all these exact same reasons, in October General Conference of 2016, Relief Society General President Linda K. Burton, in conjunction with future Apostle Patrick Kearon, announced the “I Was a Stranger” initiative to assist the Syrian Refugees. It was by far the most inspiring pair of Conference talks I’ve ever had the good fortune of hearing; they seemed on par with Brigham Young of yore canceling Conference to organize the rescue of the Willie Martin Handcart Company on the plains of Wyoming. Recall how Elder Kearon told listeners that “Being a refugee may be a defining moment in the lives of those who are refugees, but being a refugee does not define them. Like countless thousands before them, this will be a period—we hope a short period—in their lives. Some of them will go on to be Nobel laureates, public servants, physicians, scientists, musicians, artists, religious leaders, and contributors in other fields. Indeed, many of them were these things before they lost everything. This moment does not define them, but our response will help define us.” So moving were his words that President Uchtdorf was openly weeping when he got up to announce the speaker; he was once an east-German refugee himself.

Alas, the “I Was a Stranger” initiative will not go down in LDS lore and history the same way as the rescue of the Willie Martin Handcart Company. The program wilted and withered on the vine in less than a year; the final update to the “I Was a Stranger” website was posted in mid-2017. It quietly disappeared, to our condemnation, due to the near-total neglect of the general membership—and that not among the disaffected margins, but among those rank-and-file members who sang “Follow the Prophet” the loudest. More discouragingly, less than a month after that “historic General Conference,” the majority of U.S. Latter-day Saints–especially in the state of Utah–voted for the candidate who explicitly ran on a platform of keeping the Syrian refugees out. His first act in office, you’ll recall, was even banning travel from seven Muslim-majority nations. They were strangers, and we took them not in. We utterly failed when it mattered most.

Make no mistake, this was a massive sin on our part, one that per Matthew 25 lands us firmly on the left hand of God; yet as Virgil reminds us, it is not a new sin. In fact, per the Aeneid, it might be one of the most ancient sins of all. History does not always repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

This all matters because Troy is part of the common cultural heritage in the West, even if there is zero actual genetic relationship between Troy and Rome; how many sports teams are named the Trojans, for example? Why so consistently name ourselves after the losers? Why did the wealthy founders of USC not name themselves for, say, the Danaans or Myrmidons, the unambiguous winners of the Trojan War? Likewise, as the Catholic-apologist G.K. Chesterton noted in The Everlasting Man (1925), Hector remains a much more popular boys’ name than Achilles to this day, despite the fact that the whole climax of the Iliad is when Achilles definitively killed Hector. Indeed, Chesterton’s larger thesis in his book is that Catholicism didn’t just happen to arise in the Roman Empire, but did so there specifically because, as the supposed descendants of Troy, the Romans already had a strong self-identity of being the descents of the losers—who in fact because they were the losers, rose up from certain death to achieve even greater glory—which itself prefigured Christ being crucified in ignominy only to resurrect and be seated on the right hand of God. (Such perhaps explains why so many early and medieval Catholics, including Dante, considered Virgil to be a sort of pre-Christian prophet.)

Even if you think Chesterton’s argument is frankly a stretch (though C.S. Lewis credited it with helping with his conversion to Christianity), and even if the supposed connection between Troy and Rome is pure self-serving myth, it nevertheless remains true that we are all the descendants of refugees and Gods ourselves, for we are all “strangers and pilgrims upon the earth” (Hebrews 11:13), seeking after a new homeland, which is really just our original homeland in the heavens. It’s why our faith is filled with refugees: The Hebrews of the Exodus were refugees to Canaan; the Lehites were also war-torn refugees in search of a new homeland, and they produced the keystone of our religion; the Saints arriving in the Salt Lake Basin were also refugees, which likely explains why Gary Herbert alone of all Republican governors said he’d welcome other refugees as well.

In any case, one thing is certain, and upon one point are all these ancient texts, both religious and profane, in agreement: if we continue to support platforms and vote for candidates who abuse, vilify, and drive out the strangers in our midst, then the Heavens themselves will condemn us. The Syrian refugee crisis, by the way, is still is not over—nor are the ones in Iraq and Central America that U.S. foreign policy created—and the ones in Ukraine and Palestine have only begun. We still have plenty of opportunities to repent.