And yet the poet ventures to go beyond Homer in one important point. What he hints rather than actually says of the condition of things in Hades conflicts in no single point with the conventional Homeric view; but it is an innovation to suggest that this condition of things can even for the briefest moment be interrupted. The blood drunk by the souls gives them back for a moment their consciousness; their remembrance of the upper world returns to them. Their senses must then all the while have been not dead but sleeping. There can be no doubt that the poet for whom this supposition is indispensable to his story did not thereby intend to formulate an entirely new doctrine. But in order to add to his poetic effect, he was led to include in his story some touches which, meaningless within the circle of his own beliefs, pointed elsewhere, and, indeed, backward, to older, quite differently moulded beliefs, and to the usages founded upon them. He makes Odysseus, following the advice of Kirke, dig a grave at the entrance of Hades in which to pour out a solemn drink-offering to "all the dead", consisting first of all in a mixture of milk and honey, then wine and water, over which white meal is finely sprinkled. Next he slays a ram and a black ewe, bending their heads downwards into the grave.[71\1] {37} Then the bodies of the animals are burnt, and round the blood collect all the souls, who flutter about it, kept at a distance by Odysseus' sword[72\1] till Teiresias has first drunk. Here the drink-offerings constitute undoubtedly a sacrificial offering devoted to the dead and poured out for their satisfaction. The poet indeed does not think of the slaughtered animals as a sacrifice; the tasting of the blood is simply intended to restore to the souls their consciousness; in the case of Teiresias, who retains his senses, the gift of prophetic clairvoyance. But this, we can see clearly, is a fiction of the poet's: what he here describes is in every detail a sacrifice to the dead, such as we so often find described as such in accounts from later times. The scent of the blood calls up the spirits; their satiation with blood (~haimakouri/a~) is the essential purpose of such offerings; and these are what the poet's imagination dimly recalls as models. Nothing in this picture has been invented. Neither, on the other hand, it is quite clear, has he altered his sacrificial ceremony to make it fit in with _novel_ ideas that were beginning to gain ground; ideas that ascribed a more vital existence to the souls of the dead. For here, too, just as in the case of the offerings to the dead described in the funeral of Patroklos, the poet's manner of conceiving the life of the dead is not such as could give support to new and more vigorous cult ceremonies. His conception tends rather to contradict the ceremonies that he describes. In fact, what we have here, too, is a "fossilized" and no longer intelligible vestige of a practice that