In modern times, he is commonly depicted as a living skeleton in a cowl, much like the Grim Reaper. Elsewhere, Charon appears as a mean-spirited and gaunt old man or as a winged demon wielding a double hammer, although Michelangelo's interpretation, influenced by Dante's depiction in the Inferno, shows him with an oar over his shoulder, ready to beat those who delay ("batte col remo qualunque s'adagia", Inferno 3, verse 111). Dante depicts him as having eyes of fire. Charon is the first named mythological character Dante meets in the underworld, in Canto III of the Inferno. In the 14th century, Dante Alighieri described Charon in his Divine Comedy, drawing from Virgil's depiction in Aeneid 6. In the Divine Comedy, Charon forces reluctant sinners onto his boat by beating them with his oar. In the second century, Lucian employed Charon as a figure in his Dialogues of the Dead, most notably in Parts 4 and 10 ("Hermes and Charon" and "Charon and Hermes"). When the boatman tells Heracles to halt, the Greek hero uses his strength to gain passage, overpowering Charon with the boatman's own pole. 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. Charon as depicted by Michelangelo in his fresco The Last Judgment in the Sistine ChapelĬharon is depicted in the art of ancient Greece.
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