![]() ![]() Other Latin authors also describe Charon, among them Seneca in his tragedy Hercules Furens, where Charon is described in verses 762–777 as an old man clad in foul garb, with haggard cheeks and an unkempt beard, a fierce ferryman who guides his craft with a long pole. There Charon stands, who rules the dreary coast –Ī length of beard descends, uncombed, unclean Ī girdle, foul with grease, binds his obscene attire. In the 1st century BC, the Roman poet Virgil describes Charon, manning his rust-colored skiff, 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: On later vases, Charon is given a more "kindly and refined" demeanor. Hermes sometimes stands by in his role as psychopomp. 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. Attic funerary vases of the 5th and 4th centuries BC are often decorated with scenes of the dead boarding Charon's boat. 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.Ĭharon as depicted by Michelangelo in his fresco The Last Judgment in the Sistine ChapelĬharon is depicted frequently in the art of ancient Greece. 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, until they were allowed to cross the river. A coin to pay Charon for passage, usually an obolus or danake, was sometimes placed in or on the mouth of a dead person. In Greek mythology, Charon or Kharon ( / ˈ k ɛər ɒ n, - ən/ Ancient Greek: Χάρων) is a psychopomp, the ferryman of Hades who carries souls of the newly deceased who had received the rites of burial, across the river Acheron (or in some later accounts, across the river Styx) that divided the world of the living from the world of the dead. ![]() ![]() ![]() Attic red-figure lekythos attributed to the Tymbos painter showing Charon welcoming a soul into his boat, c. ![]()
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