Charon

Charon was born to Erebus and Nyx, two primordial deities who existed before the Olympian gods. Erebus was the personification of darkness, and Nyx was the goddess of night, whose children included Thanatos, the personification of death, and Hypnos, the god of sleep. Charon was the ferryman of the underworld. In the earliest Greek accounts, he rowed the dead across the river Acheron, the river of woe that bordered the underworld. In later Roman tellings, the river became the Styx, the river of hatred by which the gods swore their most binding oaths. His boat was a rust-coloured skiff, and he poled it across the dark water with a single staff.

The dead did not find Charon on their own. Hermes, the messenger god, also served as Psychopompus, the Guide of Souls, leading the shades of the newly dead from the upper world down to the Acherusian mere, the marshy shore where Charon waited. But Charon was a surly man, and he did not ferry everyone. He demanded his fee, a single obol placed in the mouth of the corpse during burial rites. Those properly buried were taken aboard. The unburied, the lost at sea, and the poor were turned away. They wandered the near shore as ghosts, unable to enter the underworld proper, forced to wait one hundred years before Charon would finally agree to ferry them across without payment.

Several living mortals crossed Charon's river and returned to tell the tale. The greatest was Heracles, the hero forced to complete twelve impossible labours, the last of which was to capture Cerberus, the three-headed hound who guarded the gates of the underworld. Heracles simply forced Charon to ferry him across, and the old boatman had no choice but to comply. When Hades learned that Charon had allowed a living man to cross, he sentenced the ferryman to a year in chains. The musician Orpheus, whose songs could charm the very stones and trees, descended to retrieve his dead wife Eurydice. He paid with music, playing his lyre so beautifully that the ferryman was moved to grant him passage.

The Romans gave Charon his most vivid physical description. Virgil, in the Aeneid, described him as appallingly filthy, with a bush of unkempt white beard, eyes like jets of fire, and a dirty cloak knotted and stained. He was an ancient god, but a god's old age was still green and sappy, and he had strength enough to pole his skiff against the current of the dead. In Greek art, Charon was depicted as an ugly, bearded man with a crooked nose, wearing a conical hat and a red tunic, standing in his boat with his pole ready to receive the next shade.

Charon survived the fall of paganism and re-emerged in the Christian era as one of the most enduring figures of the underworld. Dante Alighieri, in the Inferno, placed him on the river Acheron at the entrance to Hell, his eyes burning with demonic fire, using his oar to beat the reluctant souls into his boat and cursing them as they boarded. When the largest moon of Pluto was discovered in 1978, astronomers named it Charon, because Pluto was the Roman name for Hades, and every king of the dead needs his ferryman. From the first shadows of Greek myth to the edge of the solar system, Charon remains the eternal boatman, the last face every mortal sees before the shore of the living fades forever.