Note 1 — NOTES TO CHAPTER XIV PART II

What Diels, Parmenides, p. 15 (1897) says in support of his view might stand if we were willing to ignore the fact that Pythag., as has already been remarked, remembered his previous lives while he was still alive, and not in the ecstatic condition—not ἔξω γενόμενος τοῦ σώματος. But this is a fact, so that Diels’ view remains untenable.—I cannot see what there is of a “rationalist” character (Diels) in the fact that Pyth. saw Hesiod and Homer in Hades undergoing punishment ἀνθ’ ὧν εἶπον περὶ θεῶν (D.L. viii, 21). This is, in fact, an anti-rationalist, priestly invention (and so I see Dieterich also understands it, Nekyia, 130). This fact certainly does not tell against the view that the Hades poem had its origin in the sixth (or the first half of the fifth) century B.C.