  If Ficino shared this notion with Plotinus, and indeed with all Platonists, he differed concerning the issue of the transmigration of souls. Since Plato’s Myth of Er in the Republic (10.614–621), a staple of Platonism had been the notion that souls were not only immortal but that they had also pre-existed before their human embodiment and that they would exist again in another body when the human body-soul dyad was severed after death. Since this notion was heretical to Christian ears (both because it precluded the ex nihilo creation of each and every human soul and because God, having created man in His own image, could not allow a human soul eventually to be reincarnated as an animal), Ficino had to combat it. In his view, Plato himself must be read more sensitively, so that in different contexts Ficino spoke of this heretical notion as prefiguring bodily resurrection, as allusions to the return of the soul to the One, or failing that as a hateful doctrine that must be attributed, not to Plato, but to Pythagoras (Hankins 1989, 358–59; Celenza 1999, 681–99; Allen and Hankins 2001–06, 17.4, vol. 6, p.  45–63)