Charon (mythology)

A 19th-century interpretation of Charon's crossing.

See also Charon's obol.

In Greek mythology, Charon or Kharon (in Greek, Χάρων — the bright^[1]) was the ferryman of Hades who carried souls of the newly deceased across the river that divided the world of the living from the world of the dead. A coin to pay Charon for passage, usually an obolus or danake, was sometimes placed on or in the mouth of a dead person.^[2] Those who could not pay the fee, or those whose bodies were left unburied, had to wander the shores for one hundred years. In the catabasis mytheme, heroes — such as Heracles, Orpheus, Aeneas, Dionysus and Psyche — journey to the underworld and return, still alive, conveyed by the boat of Charon. No ancient source provides a genealogy for the ferryman.^[3]

Appearance and demeanor

Gustave Doré's illustration of Charon in The Divine Comedy.

Charon is depicted frequently in the art of ancient Greece. Attic funerary vases of the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. are often decorated with scenes of the dead boarding Charon’s boat. On the earlier such vases, he looks like a rough, unkempt Athenian seaman dressed in reddish-brown, holding his ferryman's pole in his right hand and using his left hand to receive the deceased. Hermes sometimes stands by in his role as psychopomp. On later vases, Charon is given a more “kindly and refined” demeanor.^[4] Aristophanes, in The Frogs, had him spewing insults regarding people's girth.

In the 1st century B.C., the Roman poet Vergil describes Charon in the course of Aeneas’s descent to the underworld (Aeneid, Book 6), after the Cumaean Sibyl has directed the hero to the golden bough that will allow him to return to the world of the living:

There Chairon stands, who rules the dreary coast -

A sordid god: down from his hairy chin

A length of beard descends, uncombed, unclean;

His eyes, like hollow furnaces on fire;

A girdle, foul with grease, binds his obscene attire.^[5]

Michelangelo's Charon, from The Last Judgment.

In the Divine Comedy, Charon forces reluctant sinners onto his boat by beating them with his oar. (Gustave Doré, 1857)

Dante Alighieri also described Charon in his Divine Comedy. He is the same as his Greek counterpart, being paid an obolus to cross Acheron. He is the first named character Dante meets in the underworld, in the third Canto of Inferno. Elsewhere, Charon appears as a cranky, skinny old man or as a winged demon wielding a double hammer, although Michaelangelo's interpretation shows differently. In modern times, he is commonly depicted as a living skeleton in a cowl, much like the Grim Reaper or Dickens' Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.

Underworld geography

Most accounts, including Pausanias (x.28) and later Dante's Inferno (3.78), associate Charon with the swamps of the river Acheron. Ancient Greek literary sources — such as Pindar, Aeschylus, Euripides, Plato, and Callimachus — also place Charon on the Acheron. Roman poets, including Propertius, Ovid, and Statius, name the river as the Styx, perhaps following the geography of Vergil’s underworld in the Aeneid, where Charon is associated with both rivers.^[6]

See also

• Charun - an Etruscan counterpart to Charon
• Psychopomp - the general word for a guide of the dead

References