Charon in Greek Mythology: The Ferryman of the Dead

Charon is the ferryman of the dead in Greek mythology. He waits with his boat at the water that marks the border of the underworld, usually the river Acheron or the marshy lake beside it, and carries the souls of the properly buried across to the realm of Hades. The dead paid him a small coin, an obol, for the trip. He is not in Homer or Hesiod: he first appears in a lost early epic, and his famous portrait as a filthy old man with burning eyes comes from the Roman poet Virgil.

Charon quick facts

Who is Charon in Greek mythology?

Charon is a working figure in the machinery of death, not a ruler. The jobs are divided: Hermes guides the soul down, Charon takes it over the water, Cerberus guards the gate on the far side, and Hades and Persephone rule the realm beyond. Athenian vase painters of the 5th century BC showed this handover on white-ground lekythoi, oil flasks left at graves: Hermes brings the dead to the shore, where Charon waits in his boat. There he looks like an ordinary boatman in a workman's cap and short tunic, grim but not monstrous.

In Euripides' Alcestis, the dying queen sees the two-oared boat on the lake and Charon, hand on the pole, calling her to hurry because she is holding him up.

Why did the Greeks pay Charon a coin?

Because the ferry was not free. The fare is a joke in Aristophanes' comedy Frogs, performed in 405 BC: when Dionysus asks Heracles how to reach the underworld, Heracles tells him the old ferryman charges two obols. Dionysus pays, and Charon even makes the god row himself across the lake, while his slave Xanthias has to walk around.

Later writers make the coin a burial custom. The satirist Lucian, in On Funerals, says families put an obol in the mouth as the fare for the ferryman. In Apuleius' Roman novel Metamorphoses (often called The Golden Ass), Psyche is told that even a poor man must pay Charon, and she carries the coins in her mouth so that the ferryman can take one with his own hand.

What does archaeology show about Charon's obol?

Scholars call the grave coin "Charon's obol," but the excavated evidence is messier than the myth:

• The custom was real but patchy. Coins do turn up in Greek graves, and some lie in or near the mouth of the dead. Many others were found in the hand, on the chest or loose in the grave, and most Greek burials contain no coin at all.
• It varied by place and period. The practice is better attested in the Hellenistic and Roman periods than in early Greece, and spread unevenly.
• Not every grave coin was a fare. Coins in graves may also have served as offerings or protective objects, so the fare was one meaning among several.

Even the ancient writers admit exceptions. The geographer Strabo says the people of Hermione put no fare in the mouths of their dead, because they believed the road to Hades from their town was short.

Films often show coins laid over the eyes; Lucian and Apuleius both speak of the mouth.

Did Charon cross the Styx or the Acheron?

In most Greek sources, the Acheron. Pausanias describes the great painting of the underworld by Polygnotus at Delphi, in which a river full of reeds, clearly the Acheron, carries a boat with Charon at the oars. Aristophanes and Euripides speak of a lake. Homer already has the rivers, without a ferryman: in Odyssey Book 10, the Pyriphlegethon and the Cocytus, a branch of the Styx, flow into the Acheron.

The Styx crossing is largely Roman. In Book 6 of Virgil's Aeneid, the road leads to the waters of Acheron, which pour into the Cocytus, and the Sibyl tells Aeneas he is looking at the pools of Cocytus and the Stygian marsh. Charon's boat becomes "Stygian," and because Virgil was so widely read, later tradition settled on the Styx. Dante's Inferno went back to the Acheron.

What does Charon look like?

Most retellings borrow Virgil's description in Aeneid 6. Charon is filthy and frightening, with an unkempt white beard, eyes that blaze like fire and a dirty cloak knotted at his shoulder. He is old, but with a god's old age, still green and strong. He poles his rust-dark boat himself, and from the crowds pressing to the bank he takes some and drives others away.

Why did unburied souls have to wait?

Because the ferry was for the buried only. In the Aeneid, the Sibyl explains that the souls Charon turns away are the unburied. They may not cross until their bones are at rest; until then they wander the shore for a hundred years. Aeneas meets his own helmsman Palinurus among them, lost overboard on the voyage and left unburied.

The idea is much older than Virgil, even if the hundred years is his. In Iliad Book 23, the ghost of Patroclus begs Achilles to bury him quickly, because the spirits of the dead keep him away and will not let him join them beyond the river. Homer has the barrier but no boatman.

Which heroes crossed with Charon alive?

Very few, and the sources make a point of it.

In the Aeneid, Charon grumbles that he was never glad to have carried Heracles, Theseus or Pirithous, since they came to steal from the king of the dead. When Aeneas steps aboard, the stitched boat groans under the weight of a living man and lets in marsh water. Servius, the late Roman commentator on Virgil, adds that Charon was kept in chains for a year as punishment for ferrying Heracles.

Where does Charon first appear in literature?

Not in Homer. Neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey mentions a ferryman, and Hesiod's Theogony, full of powers of night and death, leaves him out too.

The earliest known mention is in the Minyas, an early epic that is now lost. Pausanias, describing Polygnotus' underworld painting at Delphi, says the painter followed that poem, and quotes a few lines in which Theseus and Pirithous find that the boat of the dead, steered by the old ferryman Charon, is not at its moorings. By the 5th century BC, Charon was familiar enough for Athenian vase painters, Euripides and Aristophanes to use him without explanation.

Who is Charun, the Etruscan Charon?

The Etruscans of Italy borrowed the name but reshaped the figure. Charun appears in Etruscan tomb paintings and on sarcophagi from roughly the 4th century BC onward, often with a hooked nose, bluish skin and a large hammer. He is not a boatman. He stands at doorways, escorts the dead and threatens them, sometimes alongside a winged female spirit, Vanth. In the François Tomb at Vulci, a Charun stands beside Achilles as he slaughters Trojan prisoners at the funeral of Patroclus.

In the sources

Charon's main ancient sources are the lost Minyas; Euripides' Alcestis; Aristophanes' Frogs; Pausanias' Description of Greece; Strabo's Geography; Virgil's Aeneid and Georgics; Ovid's Metamorphoses; Seneca's Hercules Furens; Lucian's On Funerals and Dialogues of the Dead; and Apuleius' Metamorphoses.

The sources disagree on several points:

• Which water? Pausanias' account of Polygnotus puts Charon on the Acheron. Aristophanes and Euripides speak of a lake. Virgil blends Acheron, Cocytus and the Stygian marsh, which is where the popular Styx comes from.
• How much is the fare? Two obols in Aristophanes, one in Lucian. Strabo says the people of Hermione paid nothing at all.
• What does he look like? A plain working boatman on Athenian vases; a squalid old god with fiery eyes in Virgil; a hammer-wielding demon as the Etruscan Charun.
• Did Heracles pay or force his way? Virgil only has Charon complain about carrying him. Seneca has Heracles overpower the ferryman, and Servius says Charon was chained for a year for letting him cross.

In popular culture

• Dante's Inferno (14th century). A medieval Charon with eyes like burning coals who beats lagging souls with his oar. Michelangelo painted him in the Sistine Chapel's Last Judgment.
• Hades (2020). Supergiant's game makes Charon a silent, groaning shopkeeper who sells goods for obols, a modern nod to the fare.
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians. In The Lightning Thief, Rick Riordan turns Charon into a well-dressed gatekeeper in modern Los Angeles who wants a raise. The modern setting is pure invention.

Keep exploring

Charon is one step on the road to the dead. Follow the soul onward in Hades in Greek mythology, meet the guide who brings it to the shore in Hermes in Greek mythology, and the watchdog waiting on the far side in Cerberus in Greek mythology. Go deeper still into Tartarus, see how the Romans renamed the gods of the dead in Greek vs Roman gods, or test yourself with the Greek mythology quiz.