Mythological figures are presented as archetypes, but to consider these archetypes as originary or universal means accepting that the female figures that we encounter in translations of Ovid or Homer or even those mentioned by philosophers such as Plato are silent and/or only exist in relation to their masculine counterparts. They are either raped and then often punished for being raped, or they are mothers or wives belonging in the home, or they are enchantresses who lure heroes to their deaths. In her work In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy (1995), Adriana Cavarero gives voice to four female mythological figures who are mentioned in passing in the works of Plato, often as metaphorical conduits for the denouement to a metaphysical argument. For example, in her account of the character of Penelope (who we know from Homer's Odyssey and subsequent rewritings, as I will discuss below), Cavarero begins with an excerpt from Plato's Phaedo wherein Penelope's role as weaver (and unweaver) operates as a fleshly metaphor for the task of philosophy itself. Penelope's task of weaving and unweaving is rendered a pointless exercise in Plato's analogy, because the unweaving symbolises precisely what the soul should not do; it should not return to the body but rather strive to contemplate truth and the divine by following discourse, until death finally frees it.