Charon. In Greek mythology, Charon or Kharon is the ferryman of Hades who carries souls of the newly deceased across the rivers Styx and Acheron 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 in or on the mouth of a dead person. 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 Aeneas, Dionysus, Heracles, Hermes, Odysseus, Orpheus, Pirithous, Psyche, Theseus and Sisyphus-journey to the underworld and return, still alive, conveyed by the boat of Charon. Charon is the son of Erebus.
He was also the brother of, among many others, Thanatos and Hypnos. The name Charon is most often explained as a proper noun from, a poetic form of, 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. 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. Charon is depicted frequently in the art of ancient Greece. Attic funerary vases of the 5th and 4th centuries BC are often decorated with scen
A coin to pay Charon for passage, usually an obolus or danake, was sometimes placed in or on the mouth of a dead person. 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 Aeneas, Dionysus, Heracles, Hermes, Odysseus, Orpheus, Pirithous, Psyche, Theseus and Sisyphus-journey to the underworld and return, still alive, conveyed by the boat of Charon. Charon is the son of Erebus.
He was also the brother of, among many others, Thanatos and Hypnos. The name Charon is most often explained as a proper noun from, a poetic form of, 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. 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. Charon is depicted frequently in the art of ancient Greece. Attic funerary vases of the 5th and 4th centuries BC are often decorated with scen
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