Charon

Charon, in classical mythology, the son of Erebus and Nox, is first mentioned by the later writers of Greece. His duty was to ferry the shades of the buried dead across the rivers of the under-world. For this service he exacted an obolus from each, and consequently this coin was placed in the mouth of the dead. If this rite was neglected, Charon refused to convey the unhappy shade across, and it was doomed to wander restlessly along the shores of Acheron. He is generally represented as a gloomy old man, with a rough beard and wretched clothes. In the Etruscan monuments he holds a hammer. In the folklore of modern Greece Charon still survives as a kind of shadowy representative of death and a mysterious under-world. (The Greek is châron; the English pronunciation, kârôn.)