ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how Philip Pullman’s immensely popular His Dark Materials trilogy falls squarely within the tradition by using the Aeneid as a source for depicting the extent of the humanity and sacrifice of its protagonist, Lyra, for the greater good. It shows how Pullman deploys and inverts features from the Aeneid in order to shape his modern heroine. Pullman creates a heroine who is similar to Aeneas but possesses certain qualities that give her an advantage over the ancient hero: she has the vivid imagination of a child, which she uses effectively, and she keeps learning and maturing throughout the trilogy. Aeneas, in contrast, fails to learn, and so inflicts so much pain on others that his famed pietas may be doubted. Even though Pullman strongly and obviously draws on the parallel passages from the Aeneid, he presents his readers with a protagonist who in many ways is an anti-Aeneas who can succeed where he fails.
