  We reinterpret the dilepton emission rate from a hadronic gas expected to be
produced in heavy ion collisions in terms of the spectral functions available
from the $e^+e^-$ annihilation and the $\tau$ lepton decays experiments. We
take into account all possible hadronic state especially the multi-pion
contributions to the dilepton emission and the parity mixing phenomenon due to
the soft final-state corrections. A new compilation of the experimental data
for the spectral functions is presented.
