This is the sixteenth-century painter Federico Barocci’s _Aeneas’ _Flight from Troy_. If the composition looks unsettling and chaotic, it should: it attempts to capture the turmoil of a man having to flee his homeland because of war. The violence propelling the family of Aeneas to escape Troy is mostly offstage, but the billowing fabric, darkened foreground, and downcast glances of the four figures running get their desperation across.
The emotions that face refugees are something I mercifully have no personal experience with. And that makes the ancient story of Aeneas one of the closest entry points I have to understanding what so many people across time have lived through. Aeneas is burdened with the responsibility of carrying his aged father while trying to keep his little son and wife safe — he is helpless to prevent his home’s destruction and has no time to process his own anguish.
Some of Virgil’s most poignant lines include the moment when Aeneas’ small son puts his tiny hand in his father’s and takes short steps to keep up, the shadowed and familiar town walls and gates that had been familiar but now hold only danger, and the terror that every sound invokes as they flee the city. (Book II, lines 940-980).
In Virgil’s _Aeneid_, the readers learn that the hero makes it out safely with his father and son (his wife dies). The aristocratic Roman audience who lived at this time had personal experiences of violent chaos — Vergil had lived through the civil wars that had brought down the Roman Republic.
