Charon
（
Χάρων).
1.
A deity of the lower world, son of Erebus and Nyx, who conducted the souls of the dead in a
boat over the river Acheron to the infernal regions. The sum exacted for this service, from
each of the shades ferried over by him, was never less than an obolus, nor could it exceed
three. A piece of money, therefore, was generally placed by the ancients under the tongue of
the deceased, in order to meet this necessary demand. Such as had not been honoured with a
funeral were not permitted to enter Charon 's boat without previously wandering on the
shore for one hundred years. If any living person presented himself to cross the river of the
dead, he could not be admitted into the bark before he showed Charon a golden bough, obtained
from the Cumaean sibyl; and the ferryman was on one occasion imprisoned for an entire year
because he had, though against
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Charon. (Stackelberg.)
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his own will, conveyed Heracles across the stream without first receiving from him
this necessary passport. The poets have represented Charon as a robust old man, of a severe
though animated countenance, with eyes glowing like flame, a white and bushy head, vestments
of a dingy colour, stained with the mire of the stream, and with a pole for the direction of
his bark, which last is of a dark rusty hue.
The earliest mention of Charon in Grecian poetry seems to be in the ancient poem of the
Minyas, quoted by Pausanias (x. 28). The fable itself is considered by some to be of Egyptian
origin, and in support of this opinion they refer to the account of Diodorus Siculus relative
to the statements made by the Egyptian priests. The latter asserted, it seems, that Orpheus
and Homer had both learned wisdom on the banks of the Nile; and that the Erebus of Greece,
and all its parts, personages, and usages, were but transcripts of the mode of burial in
Egypt; and here the corpse was, on payment of an obolus, conveyed by a ferryman (named Charon
in the language of Egypt) over the Acherusian Lake after it had received its sentence from
the judges appointed for that pur
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Charon , Hermes or Mercury, and Soul. (From a Roman lamp.)
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pose.
2.
One of the earlier Greek historical writers, a native of Lampsacus, supposed to have
flourished between the seventy-fifth and seventyeighth Olympiads, about B.C. 464. Charon
continued the researches of Hecataeus into Eastern ethnography. He wrote (as was the custom
of the historians of his day) separate works upon Persia, Libya, Aethiopia, etc. He also
subjoined the history of his own time, and he preceded Herodotus in narrating the events of
the Persian War, although Herodotus nowhere mentions him. From the
fragments of his writings which remain, it is manifest that his relation to Herodotus was
that of a dry chronicler to an historian, under whose hands everything acquires life and
character. Charon wrote, besides, a chronicle of his own country, as several of the early
historians did, who were thence called “Horographers” (
ὧροι, corresponding to the Latin
annales,
ought not to be confounded with
ὅροι,
termini, limites). The fragments of Charon have been collected by Kreuzer, in his
Historicorum Graecorum Antiquissimorum Fragmenta, p. 89 foll.; and by
Müller,
Frag. Histor. Graec. (Paris, 1841).
