The word _hero_ itself is adjectival. A gloss in Hesychius[859] tells us that by hero was meant ‘mighty,’ ‘strong,’ ‘noble,’ ‘venerable.’ In Homer the hero is the strong man _alive_, mighty in battle; in cultus the hero is the strong man _after death_, dowered with a greater, because a ghostly, strength. The dead are, as already noted, κρείττονες, ‘Better and Stronger Ones.’ The avoidance of the actual proper name of a dead man is an instructive delicate decency and lives on to-day. The newly dead becomes, at least for a time, ‘He’ or ‘She’; the actual name is felt too intimate. It is a part of the tendency in all primitive and shy souls, a tendency already noted (p. 214), to remove a little whatever is almost too close, to call your friend ‘the kind one,’ or ‘the old one,’ or ‘the black one,’ and never name his silent name. Of course the delicate instinct soon crystallizes into definite ritual prescription, and gathers about it the practical cautious utilitarianism of _de mortuis nil nisi bene_. * * * * * It is often said that the Greeks were wont to address their heroized dead and underworld divinities by ‘euphemistic’ titles, Eumenides for Erinyes, χρηστέ, ‘Good One,’ when they meant ‘Bad One.’ Such is the ugly misunderstanding view of scholiasts and lexicographers. But a simpler, more human explanation lies to hand. The dead are, it is true, feared, but they are also loved, felt to be friendly, they have been _kin_ on earth, below the earth they will be _kind_. But in primitive days it is only those who have been kin who will hereafter be kind; the ghosts of your enemies’ kin will be _un_kind; if to them you apply kindly epithets it is by a desperate euphemism, or by a mere mechanical usage. Of such euphemism Homer[860] has left us a curious example. Zeus would fain remind the assembled gods of the blindness and fatuity of mortal man: ‘Then spake the Sire of Gods and Men, and of the Blameless One, Aigisthos, he bethought him, whom Agamemnon’s son, Far-famed Orestes, slew.’ Aigisthos, traitor, seducer, murderer, craven, is ‘the Blameless One.’ The outraged morality of the reader is in instant protest. These Olympians, these gods ‘who live at ease,’ go too far.