Charon (mythology) edit
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A 19th-century interpretation of Charon's crossing.
See also Charon's obol.

In Greek mythology, Charon or Kharon (Greek Χάρων) 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.1 Some authors say that 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.2

Contents

Etymology of name

The name Charon is most often explained as a proper noun from χάρων (charon), a poetic form of χαροπός (charopós), “of keen gaze”, referring either to fierce, flashing, or feverish eyes, or to eyes of a bluish-gray color. The word may be a euphemism for death.3 Flashing eyes may indicate the anger or irascibility of Charon as he is often characterized in literature, but the etymology is not certain. The ancient historian Diodorus Siculus thought that the ferryman and his name had been imported from Egypt.4

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.5 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.6
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)
An 1807 British political cartoon by James Gillray uses "Charon's Boat" as an allegory for the then recent demise of the Ministry of All the Talents. The rowing Charon is here Charles Grey.

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.

A large part of the Woody Allen film Scoop takes place on board Cahron's boat.

Underworld geography

Most accounts, including Pausanias (10.28) 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.7

In Popular Culture

See also


References

Greek underworld
Residents
Geography
Famous Inmates
  1. ^ Callimachus, Hecale fragment 31 from the Suidas, also Etymologicum Graecum ("Danakes"); Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, entry on "Charon."
  2. ^ Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, "Reading" Greek Death: To the End of the Classical Period (Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 308, especially note 28 online. An entry ("Akmonides") in the lexicon of Hesychius offers relatively late evidence that Charon was a son of Akmon, but the text may be corrupt. Confirming a lack of genealogy are William F. Hansen, Handbook of Classical Mythology (ABC-Clio, 2001), p. 136 online and The Routledge Handbook of Greek Mythology: Based on H.J. Rose's Handbook of Greek Mythology (Routledge, 2003), p. 113 online. The notion that Erebos and Nyx are the parents of Charon appears to be based on a misreading of Cicero, De natura deorum 3.44 online; discussion of the passage by P.A. Meijer, Stoic Theology (Eburon Delft, 2007), pp. 199–202 online. Neither Pauly-Wissowa nor Daremberg and Saglio offer a genealogy.
  3. ^ Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1843, 1985 printing), entries on χαροπός and χάρων, pp. 1980–1981; Brill’s New Pauly (Leiden and Boston 2003), vol. 3, entry on “Charon,” pp. 202–203.
  4. ^ Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, "Reading" Greek Death (Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 359 online and p. 390 online.
  5. ^ L.V. Grinsell, “The Ferryman and His Fee: A Study in Ethnology, Archaeology, and Tradition,” Folklore 68 (1957), p. 261.
  6. ^ Vergil, Aeneid 6.298–301, as translated by John Dryden (English lines 413–417.)
  7. ^ See Kharon at theoi.com for collected source passages with work and line annotations, as well as images from vase paintings.
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