Charon's Obol and Other Coins in Ancient Funerary Practice

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3937639
AutoresSusan T Stevens (autor de correspondencia)
Año1991
Volumen45
Número3
Páginas215
Fecha de publicación1991-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaPhoenix (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0031-8299 • E-ISSN: 1929-4883
EditorialJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/1088792
OpenAlexW2334371006
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas21

GREEK AND LATIN LITERATURE from the late fifth century B.c. to the late second century A.D. mentions the custom of placing a coin in the mouth of the deceased as a payment to the boatman Charon for ferrying the soul across Acheron or Styx into the underworld. The sources are sufficiently common and consistent to promote the belief that Charon's was a widely-practiced funerary custom throughout the Greco-Roman world.' Although the classical authors who mention the custom are widely separated in time, space, culture, and literary genre, their unanimity on the subject of coins for the dead should not surprise us since all of them mention the custom in the context of an underworld journey. As a result, their focus is usually on Charon and other proverbial characters of the Greek netherworld rather than on funerary customs per se. Removed as they are from any mythological context, coins found in cemeteries represent the facts of funerary practice. While archaeology confirms that a single low-denomination coin was sometimes placed in the mouth of the deceased at the time of death, the most striking thing about the evidence from ancient cemeteries is how different a story it tells from classical authors. Only a small proportion of burials contain any coins at all; in many of these, multiple coins (sometimes valuable) were placed in various locations on the body, sometimes at the time of death, sometimes at the time of burial. The evidence shows that Charon's was only one manifestation of a much wider funerary use of coins and suggests a richer and broader context in which it can be understood. Scholars have attempted to reconcile this apparent contradiction between the literary obol and the archaeological evidence by calling the custom Charon's fee, a rubric which at the same time accepts the mythological motive of ancient authors and acknowledges the many different forms of the practice attested by archaeology.2 Rather than advancing our under

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Numismatics · Ancient Egypt and Archaeology · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classics · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies · History