Charon

The ferryman of the dead

Charon is the ferryman of the dead. He carries them in his boat across Acheron, the water that leads into Hades, the world below. He is not Hades, and he does not judge anyone. His power covers one boundary and the boat that crosses it. What happens to the dead after they step ashore belongs to the rulers and punishments of the world below.

Charon does not appear in Homer’s account of the dead. The earliest words about him that survive come from a lost early poem called the Minyas. Pausanias, the author of a Description of Greece, quoted it centuries later. In the poem, Theseus and Peirithous reach the underworld and cannot find the boat of the dead at its mooring. The poem calls Charon its old ferryman.

That detail shaped how he was pictured. When the painter Polygnotus painted the underworld at Delphi in the fifth century BC, he showed Charon as an old man. Pausanias thought the painter was following the Minyas and had not invented the old boatman himself.

The god who has to row

The comic playwright Aristophanes brings Charon on stage in his comedy the Frogs. The god Dionysus reaches the lake of the underworld dressed as the hero Heracles. A small boat comes near, and Charon calls for passengers. He lets the god aboard, puts an oar in his hands and orders him to row.

The crossing takes real effort. Dionysus has never handled an oar. The frogs answer each stroke with their song, and Charon keeps the boat moving until they reach the far bank. When they arrive, he asks for the fare. Dionysus pays two obols, which are small coins.

Aristophanes turns a journey to the dead into physical comedy. Even so, the scene sets out Charon’s job with unusual precision. He controls the boat, decides who boards, hands over the oar and collects payment after the crossing. Even a god travelling alive enters Hades on the ferryman’s terms.

What the dead paid

The two obols in the Frogs are a comic payment on stage, made by Dionysus. They do not prove one burial rule for every Greek place and period. Strabo, author of the Geography, gives firmer evidence for passage money placed in the mouth of the dead, because he records a community that left it out.

The people of Hermione claimed that their local way down to Hades was a short route. For that reason, Strabo says, they did not put passage money in the mouths of their dead. This exception shows that a payment went with the crossing. It also shows that local beliefs could change the practice.

The ancient evidence does not give the familiar pair of coins laid over the eyes, or one fixed fare for every dead person. It gives a payment in a comedy and a burial custom reported in a book of geography. Charon’s price was well enough known for both writers to use. It was not uniform enough to rebuild as a single rule.

What Pausanias saw at Delphi

The people of Knidos gave a meeting hall, the Lesche, to the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, a holy site of the god. Polygnotus covered its walls with two great paintings. One showed Troy after its capture. The other showed the underworld, through the visit of Odysseus to the dead.

In the painting, Charon sits at the oars on a river named as Acheron. Reeds grow in the painted water, and the fish are so faint that Pausanias compares them to shadows. In the boat are Tellis, shown as a youth, and Cleoboea, a young woman holding a chest connected with the goddess Demeter.

The painting has not survived. Pausanias describes how it was laid out, along with the older verse that Polygnotus may have followed: a river of shadows, two passengers and the old ferryman at work.