In ancient Greek , Charon or Kharon, the son of Erebus and Nyx,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 Heracles, Orpheus, Aeneas, Dionysus and Psyche— journey to the underworld and return, still alive, conveyed by the boat of Charon...
The Etruscans of central Italy identified him with one of their own underworld daimones who was named Charun after the Greek figure.
He was depicted as an even more repulsive creature with blue-grey skin, a tusked mouth, hooked nose and sometimes serpent-draped arms. His attribute was a large, double-headed mallet...
Living persons who wish to go to the underworld need a golden bough obtained from the Cumaean Sibyl...
Given the fact that they need two trips, Charon charges significantly more... Several Greek and Roman authors wrote about traveling to the Underworld, usually with the assistance of an experienced guide. Dante, for example, wrote The Inferno, and the Aeneid by Virgil also features a trip to the Underworld...
Incidentally, for anyone concerned about paying the ferryman, his going rate in Ancient Greece was an obolus, a silver coin worth a sixth of a drachma. Since Greece has now switched over to the Euro, along with other members of the European Union, Charon would probably accept a Euro coin, and he may be open to other currencies as well.
Resources:
See Nyx:
See Hades:
See Dionysus:
Bonus:
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