Charon

Charon is the ferryman of the dead in Greek and Roman myth. He steers a boat across the water that divides the living from the dead and takes the souls of the buried over to the other side, for a fare. He does not appear in Homer or Hesiod. The earliest mention is a line of the lost epic Minyas, quoted by Pausanias; he is a familiar figure in Athenian tragedy and comedy of the fifth century BC, and the fullest ancient portrait is Virgil’s in the Aeneid.

Charon’s Role

Charon is a servant of the underworld, not a judge. He receives the shades at the river and carries them across; what happens to them afterwards is decided elsewhere. Euripides shows him as the “ferryman of the dead”, standing with his hand on the pole of a two-oared boat on the lake, and later calls him “Charon at the oar, the conductor of souls” (Euripides, Alcestis 252–257, 361). In the Aeneid he works the Acheron and Cocytus, and the river he crosses is also called the Stygian marsh (Virgil, Aeneid 6.295–304, 323–326). Greek writers do not agree on a single river; Aristophanes sends the dead over a lake (Frogs 180–197).

Hermes is the guide who brings the souls to the water. In the Odyssey he leads the suitors’ ghosts down to the meadow of asphodel, though the poem mentions no ferryman (Homer, Odyssey 24.1–14). In Lucian’s satirical dialogues, Hermes herds the dead to Charon’s boat and settles his accounts with the ferryman (Lucian, Downward Journey 2–5; Dialogues of the Dead, Hermes and Charon).

Charon’s Portrayal

Virgil gives the standard picture. Charon is a terrible sight in filthy squalor, with a thick unkempt white beard, eyes that stand out like flame, and a dirty cloak knotted at the shoulder. He poles his boat and handles its sail, and carries the dead in a rust-coloured skiff. He is old, but with the raw, green old age of a god (Virgil, Aeneid 6.298–304). Aristophanes makes him an old sailor who calls for passengers and makes the god Dionysus take an oar (Aristophanes, Frogs 180–205). Pausanias saw Charon’s boat in the painting of the underworld by Polygnotus at Delphi, and records the group beneath it of a man who had been undutiful to his father and is being throttled by him (Pausanias 10.28.4).

Charon’s parents are not given in the early epic, tragedy or comedy. Hesiod lists the children of Night, including Death and Sleep, but not Charon (Hesiod, Theogony 211–225).

The Ferryman’s Toll

The ferryman is paid. In the Frogs Heracles tells Dionysus that an old sailor will take him across in a tiny boat for two obols (Aristophanes, Frogs 137–141). Lucian, writing much later, has the dead pay one obol each. Charon collects the fares as the boat crosses and demands his obol from the poor cobbler Micyllus (Lucian, Downward Journey 21), and argues in vain with the penniless Cynic Menippus, who has brought nothing with him (Lucian, Dialogues of the Dead, Charon and Menippus). Lucian also describes the custom of putting an obol in the mouth of a corpse to pay the ferryman (Lucian, On Funerals 10).

The fare matters less in Virgil than burial does. Charon takes only the dead who have been given a grave. The unburied crowd on the bank, and “it is not allowed to carry them across the dreadful banks and hoarse streams before their bones have found rest. A hundred years they wander and flit about these shores; then at last they are admitted and revisit the pools they long for” (Virgil, Aeneid 6.325–330, 313–316). The hundred years is Virgil’s detail about the unburied, not a penalty for failing to pay.

Charon’s Myths and Stories

Charon has no myth of his own. He appears only when someone comes to the river, and the stories are about the visitors.

Encounters with Heroes

In Virgil, Aeneas and the Sibyl approach the Stygian water. Charon challenges them: armed men with living bodies may not be carried in his boat. He says he was not glad to have taken Heracles, who dragged the guardian dog of the underworld away from the throne of Hades itself, nor Theseus and Peirithous, who tried to take the queen of the underworld from her husband. The Sibyl answers that Aeneas means no violence and shows him the golden bough, at which Charon’s anger subsides. He turns his dark boat to the shore, throws the other souls out, and takes Aeneas aboard; the leaky skiff groans under a living man’s weight (Virgil, Aeneid 6.384–416). In this account Charon ferried Heracles, but unwillingly.

Theseus and Peirithous are named in an older epic, the Minyas, quoted by Pausanias: when they came down, they did not find within its moorings the boat that the old ferryman Charon used to steer (Pausanias 10.28.2). Alcestis, in Euripides, is called by Charon from his boat as she is dying: “Why do you delay? Hurry; you are keeping me back” (Euripides, Alcestis 252–257).

Charon in Literature

Aristophanes brings Charon on stage in the Frogs (405 BC). Dionysus, dressed as Heracles and crossing the lake to find Euripides, is hailed by Charon with “Who is for rest from troubles and woes?” and told to sit to the oar and row; the god, who has never rowed, must pull, while his slave Xanthias walks round the lake (Aristophanes, Frogs 180–205). Lucian, in the second century AD, uses Charon as a character in several dialogues in which he haggles over fares and complains about his boat (Lucian, Downward Journey; Dialogues of the Dead). Virgil’s scene in Aeneid 6 is the one most later poets drew on.

Charon Sources

Homer, Odyssey 24.1–14 (Hermes leads the souls, no ferryman); Hesiod, Theogony 211–225; Euripides, Alcestis 252–257, 361; Aristophanes, Frogs 137–141, 180–205; Pausanias 10.28.1–2, 10.28.4 (with the Minyas); Virgil, Aeneid 6.295–330, 384–416; Lucian, Downward Journey 2–5, 21, Dialogues of the Dead (Charon and Menippus; Hermes and Charon) and On Funerals 10. Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods 3.43, names Charon with Cerberus and the rivers of the underworld among the figures that would have to be counted as gods.

See Also: Hades, The Underworld, Cerberus, Thanatos, Hermes, Styx, Acheron