  Based on a realistic model for the rho meson in free space we investigate
it's medium modifications in a hot hadron gas generated by hadronic
rescattering processes, i.e. renormalization of intermediate two-pion states as
well as direct rho meson scattering off hadrons. Within the vector dominance
model the resulting in-medium rho spectral function is applied to calculate
$e^+e^-$ spectra as recently measured in heavy-ion collisions at CERN-SpS
energies in the CERES experiment.
