Nor is a symbol used in connexion with Epeius, who, noted for his cunning in constructing the wooden horse at the siege of Troy, and whose cowardice afterwards became proverbial, is seen ‘passing into the nature of a woman cunning in the arts’.
As to the jester Thersites, who puts on the form of a monkey, comment is unnecessary.
Accordingly, the expressions concerning the heroes’ hatred of being born of woman seem to be purely metaphorical and employed to carry out logically the literary use of the animal-symbols, just as the passages are concerning ‘animals tame and wild which changed into one another and into corresponding human natures—the good into the gentle and the evil into the savage, in all sorts of combinations’, and of ‘birds, on the other hand, like the swan and other musicians, wanting to be men’.
Even the ordinary soul, the first seen by Er to make choice—although neither an incarnate divinity like Orpheus or Agamemnon, nor a hero like Ajax—and though possessed of a mind obscured by animal propensities, is not assigned by Plato, as he would be by a believer in the exoteric rebirth doctrine, to birth in sub-human form. In his case, too, no animal-symbol is made use of:
‘He who had the first choice came forward and in a moment chose the greatest tyranny; his mind having been darkened by folly and sensuality, he had not thought out the whole matter before he chose, and did not at first perceive that he was fated, among other evils, to devour his own children. … Now he was one of those who came from heaven, and in a former life had dwelt in a well-ordered State, but his virtue was a matter of habit only and he had no philosophy.’
And, as the Bardo Thödol teaches, in other language, in its insistence on the need of Right Knowledge to the devotee who follows the Bodhic Path, so Plato teaches:
‘For if a man had always on his arrival in this world dedicated himself from the first to sound philosophy, and had been moderately fortunate in the number of the lot, he might, as the messenger reported, be happy here, and also his
