The Greek Journey Across the River Styx: Charon and the Coin for the Dead

For the ancient Greeks, death was a journey with a river in the way. Getting across depended on two things the living had to provide: a proper burial and a small coin.

What happened to a Greek soul after death?

The soul, or psyche, left the body and was escorted to the underworld by Hermes in his role as psychopomp, guide of souls. At the boundary it reached a river, and on the far side lay the realm of Hades, where the great majority of the dead, good and bad alike, spent a shadowy, diminished existence. Judgment and punishment were reserved for a notable few; reward in the Elysian Fields for fewer still. For most, the afterlife was simply elsewhere, and the crossing was the moment that made it final.

Which river was it, the Styx or the Acheron?

Both, depending on who is writing. Greek authors such as Pindar, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Plato placed the ferryman on the Acheron, according to a survey of the sources; Pausanias associated him with the Acheron’s marshes. The Styx, the river the gods swore oaths by, became the crossing in Roman poetry: Propertius, Ovid, and above all Virgil, whose Aeneid, written in the late 1st century BC, puts Charon on both rivers. Because Dante drew on Virgil, and Western art drew on both, the Styx is the river most people know.

Who was Charon?

The ferryman. On Athenian vases from the 5th century BC he appears as a rough, unkempt boatman in a reddish-brown tunic, holding a pole and reaching out a hand to the dead, with Hermes sometimes standing by, according to Wikipedia’s summary. Virgil describes him poling a rust-colored skiff in Book 6 of the Aeneid. He carried only the dead who had been given funeral rites, and he ferried a few living heroes, Heracles and Aeneas among them, who came with divine permission or a golden bough. Later writers made him a figure of satire: Lucian, in the 2nd century AD, set him chatting with Hermes about the folly of the living.

What was the coin for?

Charon’s fare. Literary sources say the dead paid an obol, a low-value Greek coin worth a sixth of a drachma, about a day’s wage for a laborer, and that families placed it in the mouth of the dead before burial so the soul arrived able to pay. All the ancient sources specify the mouth; the coins on the eyes familiar from films are a modern invention, according to Wikipedia’s note on the sources. The custom was already being mocked in antiquity: Lucian has the dead arrive with their coins and Charon grumbling.

Did people really do it?

Some did. Archaeology confirms low-value coins in, on, or near the mouth of the dead in some Greek and Roman burials, and next to some cremation urns, with evidence from the Kerameikos cemetery in Athens from the 5th century BC onward and from Pompeii. But most graves contain no coin, and scholars caution against assuming every grave coin was Charon’s fee rather than a gift or an offering. The numismatist Lucia Travaini has argued a coin should only be called Charon’s obol if it is found in the mouth, according to a folklore writer citing her work. The literary picture, in other words, was never the whole practice.

What happened to the unburied?

They were stranded. In Virgil’s account, souls who had not received burial rites had to wander the near shore for a hundred years before Charon would carry them across. The idea is older than Virgil: in Homer’s Odyssey, the dead sailor Elpenor begs Odysseus to go back and bury him so he can rest. This is why denying burial was among the gravest wrongs in Greek thought, the engine of Sophocles’ Antigone, and why the Greeks took such care over the rites. See funerals in ancient Greece and Rome.

Why has the image lasted?

A river is a natural picture of a boundary that can be crossed only once, and a ferryman is a human face for the crossing. The image passed from Greece to Rome, from Virgil to Dante, and from Dante into painting; it even traveled east, where coins placed with the dead in western China have been linked to the Greek custom. Other cultures imagined their own waters: see why rivers symbolize life and death and, for a different ancient judgment of the dead, the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the weighing of the heart.

This article describes historical beliefs and customs as the sources report them. Interpretations vary among scholars.