Charon Charon In Greek mythology, Charon or Kharon (; Greek Χάρων) is the ferryman of Hades who carries souls of the newly deceased across the rivers Styx and Acheron that divided the world of the living from the world of the dead. A coin to pay Charon for passage, usually an obolus or danake, was sometimes placed in or on the mouth of a dead person. 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. In the catabasis mytheme, heroes – such as
Hades the Garden of the Hesperides, often identified with the Isles of the Blessed, where the blessed heroes may dwell. In Roman mythology, the entrance to the Underworld located at Avernus, a crater near Cumae, was the route Aeneas used to descend to the realm of the dead. By synecdoche, "Avernus" could be substituted for the underworld as a whole. The "di inferi" were a collective of underworld divinities. For Hellenes, the deceased entered the underworld by crossing the Styx, ferried across by Charon kair'-on), who charged an "obolus," a small coin for passage placed in the mouth of the deceased