ROHDE, ERWIN. – Classical philologist, born in Hamburg on 5 October 1845, died in Heidelberg on 11 January 1898. He taught in Kiel (1872), Jena (1876), Tübingen (1878), Leipzig and Heidelberg (1886).
He wrote: Der griechische Roman und seine Vorläufer (Leipzig 1876); Psyche. Seelenkult und Unsterblichkeitsglaube der Griechen (2 vols., Freiburg im Br. 1891–94; Italian translation, Bari 1916); this work has not aged at all despite its nearly seventy years of existence; it surveys all the Greeks’ otherworldly beliefs from the Promethean period to the late Hellenistic age, through Eleusinian and Orphic mystery-theology, the cult of Dionysus and its union with that of Apollo at Delphi, down to Neoplatonic philosophy, always presenting, in its discussion of the various problems, the soundest view. Only the relationship between Apollo and Dionysus at Delphi, in asserting which R. perhaps placed too much emphasis on the figure of Dionysus, from whom divination by inspiration was supposedly derived, has been subject to revision. R.’s minor writings were collected by O. Crusius (Kleine Schriften, 2 vols., Tübingen 1902).