Note 29 — Chapter XIV · PART II POPULAR BELIEF

χρηστοὺς ποιεῖν euphemism for ἀποκτιννύναι in a treaty between Tegea and Sparta: Arist., fr. 542 [592]. They become χρηστοί only after death. This ancient and evidently popular expression gives far stronger grounds for believing that χρηστός applied to the dead than does the passage from Thphr., Ch. x, 16 (xiii, 3), for the opposite view (the περίεργος writes on a tombstone that a dead woman and her family χρηστοὶ ἦσαν, which Loch concludes that the word really “denotes a quality of the living and not of the dead”, op. cit., 281). It is possible at the same time that those who used such words did not mean anything special by their χρηστὲ χαῖρε, and at any rate only thought of it as a vague adjective of praise. But that was not its real meaning.