Ridgeway, who believes that the whole of the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ was composed before 1000 B.C.[66] and who has done so much to differentiate Achaean and Pelasgian burial customs, finds in the _Nekuia_ a fusion of _Achaean and Pelasgian ideas_. ‘Such a blending of religious ideas,’ he says, ‘is but the natural concomitant of the intermixture of two different races and cultures.’[67] But Ridgeway is still not quite accurate if he means to imply that any real blending of _ideas_ had occurred. We have said that the ideas underlying these different rites could never be really fused, but they could amalgamate in the form of an eclectic religion. We may regard it as a confirmation of our view that Ridgeway has to confess that the fusion of Achaean and Pelasgian ritual of which there is a solitary suggestion in the _Nekuia_ does not seem to have established itself in Greece very long before the time of Aeschylus.[68] He says: ‘According to the Homeric doctrine, once the body was burned, the spirit returned no more from its dwelling place with the dead. But on this point Aeschylus held a very different view. It is evident that by the time of Aeschylus an eclectic doctrine had been evolved. The Homeric belief in a separate abode for disembodied spirits was adopted, but at the same time the ancient doctrine of the constant presence of the soul in the grave of its body was retained, the gulf between both doctrines being bridged over by the theory that even though the body was burned, the soul could return to its ashes in the grave.’ Now the tomb-offerings made by Odysseus in the _Nekuia_ do not take place at a tomb, but at the entrance to Hades. The inference from this fact is _not_ that there was a blending of Achaean and Pelasgian _ideas_, in the cult of the dead, but that it was possible for Achaeans who practised other forms of Chthonian ritual to perform such rites when commanded to do so in the realm of Hades, _the only place where their dogmas made such rites intelligible_. If the Achaeans had believed in the Pelasgian doctrine of the presence of the soul in the tomb, they would normally have made Chthonian offerings at their tombs. Believing, as they did, that the souls of the dead lived in Hades, they could only find meaning in such a rite if they came, as Odysseus came, to the realm of Hades. We have seen that the Achaeans, and Odysseus in particular, were familiar with Pelasgian beliefs, and had, in common with their subjects, certain Chthonian rites. The _Nekuia_ therefore, instead of proving a fusion of beliefs, seems to us to suggest, on the contrary, that such a fusion had not taken place in Homeric Greece.