Besides all this, it is quite certain that Parmenides went on to describe how the other gods were born and how they fell, an idea which we know to be Orphic, and which may well have been Pythagorean. We shall come to it again in Empedokles. In Plato’s _Symposium_, Agathon couples Parmenides with Hesiod as a narrator of ancient deeds of violence committed by the gods.[483] If Parmenides was expounding the Pythagorean theology, all this is just what we should expect; but it seems hopeless to explain it on any of the other theories which have been advanced on the purpose of the Way of Belief. Such things do not follow naturally from the ordinary view of the world, and we have no reason to suppose that Herakleitos expounded his views of the upward and downward path of the soul in this form. He certainly did hold that the guardian spirits entered into human bodies; but the whole point of his theory was that he gave a naturalistic rather than a theological account of the process. Still less can we think it probable that Parmenides made up these stories himself in order to show what the popular view of the world really implied if properly formulated. We must ask, I think, that any theory on the subject shall account for what was evidently no inconsiderable portion of the poem. Footnote 483: Plato, _Symp._ 195 c 1. It is implied that these παλαιὰ πράγματα were πολλὰ καὶ βίαια, including such things as ἐκτομαί and δεσμοί. The Epicurean criticism of all this is partially preserved in Philodemos, _de pietate_, p. 68, Gomperz; and Cicero, _de nat. D._ i. 28 (_Dox._ p. 534; R. P. 126 b). [Sidenote: Physiology.]