Note 9 — Chapter VII · IDEAS OF THE FUTURE LIFE

Charon’s fare (2 obols instead of the otherwise usual one—the difference not satisfactorily explained) is first mentioned in Ar., Ran. 140, 270. That this is the purpose of the money that was inserted between the teeth of the dead is frequently asserted by later authors. The many different names which were given to this “Charon’s penny” (καρκάδων, cf. Lobeck, Prol. Path. 351; κατιτήριον, δανάκη and simply ναῦλον: see Hemsterh. Lucian, ii, 514 ff.) show that this idea and the symbolism underlying it was a favourite subject of speculation. In spite of this we may doubt whether the custom of supplying the dead with a small coin has really arisen out of the wish to give them the fare-penny for the underworld ferryman. It is extremely doubtful whether Charon and his boat can have been figures of such clear dogmatic fixity as to have given rise to such a remarkable custom expressing itself in such a literal fashion. The custom itself, now, it seems, attested in Greece only from graves of a late period (see Ross. Archäol. Aufs. i, 29, 32, 57 Anm.; Raoul Rochette, Mém. de l’Inst. de Fr., Ac. des Ins. xiii, p. 665 f.) must be ancient (though no older than the use of coined money in Greece), and has held its own with the most remarkable tenacity in many parts of the Roman Empire to a late age—even through the Middle Ages to our own time (cf. among others Maury, La magie et l’astrol. dans l’antiq. 158, 2). It is not very hard to understand that it might be ingeniously connected with the poetical story of the ferryman of the dead, and this plausible explanation of the strange custom might then become a part of popular belief. The custom itself ought rather to have been brought into connexion with the practice common in many lands of satisfying the requirements of the dead by the gift of some diminutive and all but symbolical object which is offered at burial and put in the grave (see something of the kind in Tylor, i, 193–4). Parva petunt Manes: pietas pro divite grata est munere; non avidos Styx habet ima deos. The obol may be the last symbolical vestige of the entire property of the dead which the ancient law of the dead required to be placed undiminished in their graves. τεθνήξῃ . . . ἐκ πολλῶν ὀβολὸν μοῦνον ἐνεγκάμενος: the epigram of Antiphanes Maced. (AP. xi, 168) expresses more nearly perhaps, though in sentimental language, the original and primitive intention of the gift of an obol, than does the fable of Charon’s penny (cf. AP. xi, 171, 7; 209, 3). According to German superstition “money should be laid in the mouth of the dead man so that if he has buried a treasure he may not return”, Grimm, p. 1785, n. 207. Here the undoubtedly ancient conception is quite clearly betrayed: that by giving a coin the property of the dead was bought up. The evidence for this first and proper meaning of the custom has been preserved in the strangest fashion, together with the custom itself, even down to the eighteenth century, when J. Chr. Männlingen voices it, Albertäten 353 (summarized in A. Schultz, Alltagsleben e. d. Frau im 18 Jh., p. 232 f.): this custom, common both to heathendom and Christianity, of putting a penny in the coffin of the dead “means that men buy up the property of the dead, whereby they think they will have good luck in their life”.