Charon

Who He Is

Charon is the boatman of the Acheron, the first guardian Dante faces after crossing the gate of Hell. The poem presents him as an old man with hair white from great age, with woolly cheeks and eyes ringed with wheels of fire, who comes in his boat across the livid marsh shouting at the souls that they will never see heaven. Dante calls him a demon, and his office is to carry the condemned to the other shore, to eternal darkness, in heat and in ice. The name and the role come from myth: the boatman of the dead, who takes only those who have received burial, and whom the Aeneid already shows in Book VI. What defines him in Canto III of the Inferno is the combination of rage and limit: he shouts, strikes, refuses a living man, and falls silent when Virgil tells him where the order comes from.

In the Aeneid, Charon refuses the dead without burial, and his boat creaks under the weight of Aeneas alive; Michelangelo takes up Dante's boatman, with the oar, in the Last Judgment, as one reads in Charon.

Trajectory

Everything happens in Canto III of the Inferno. Dante and Virgil reach the bank of the Acheron, where crowds wait their turn to cross, and Dante, with downcast and ashamed eyes, fears that his speech will weigh on his master and keeps silent until the river. Then the boatman appears, shouting to the souls that they should not expect ever to see heaven, that he comes to carry them to the other shore, and orders Dante, who is alive, to step away from the dead. When Dante does not step away, he changes his tone: by another way, by another port, he will reach the shore, and not here, because a lighter vessel is fitting to carry him. Virgil answers with the formula of the will that no one disputes:

The woolly faces of the boatman grow calm, and the souls, weary and naked, change color and chatter their teeth at hearing the cruel words. They blaspheme God, their parents, the human species, the place, the time, and the seed from which they were born, and then gather together at the wicked shore that waits for every man who does not fear God. Charon beckons with eyes of glowing coal and gathers them, striking with his oar any who lag behind. As in autumn the leaves fall one after another, until the branch sees all its spoils on the ground, so the evil seed of Adam throws itself from the shore, one by one, at his signal, like a bird at its call. Virgil explains to Dante that all who die in God's wrath gather there from every land, and that divine justice spurs them on, so that fear turns into desire; no good soul ever passes that way, and so, if Charon complains about Dante, he can already understand what that means. With the explanation the dark plain trembles so much that the memory still wets the narrator with sweat, the tearful earth releases a wind, and from it springs a red light that overcomes all of Dante's senses, and he falls as one seized by sleep.

In Canto V of the Inferno the same formula is said to Minos, and in Canto XIV of the Inferno Virgil explains where the rivers Dante crosses come from: the statue of an old man of Crete, cracked, lets tears drip that form the Acheron, the Styx, the Phlegethon, and, through the narrow gutter, Cocytus.

Themes Embodied

Charon is Justice and Law seen from the shore: he does not judge, he carries out what divine justice has decided, and Virgil's speech names the mechanism, fear that turns into desire. The Desire of the souls to cross to the other shore is the irony of the canto, since they rush toward the punishment that awaits them. The scene does not argue whether the punishment is just; it asks how it is possible to want it.

Charon refuses Dante on the ground that he is not from there, and the phrase carries an ambiguity that the poem leaves open: he says by another way, by another port, without saying which. Tradition reads in these words the boat of the angels of Purgatory, and the text does not say so. What we see is a guardian who knows how to distinguish the condemned from the living, and whom Virgil defeats without arguing.

Divergent Readings

Dante's Charon is a direct heir of Virgil's, and the Aeneid already gives him the gesture of refusing a living man; what the poem adds is the demon with eyes of glowing coal who strikes the laggards with the oar, and the formula that silences him.

The text sustains two readings of what this addition does. In one, it is the Christian Inferno absorbing the pagan official and placing him in the service of an order, the same order that later silences Minos. In the other, it is only the poet giving Virgil's boatman eyes of glowing coal and an oar, without changing the office.

Relationships

• Dante: the living man whom he orders to move away from the dead, and who falls unconscious at the end of the canto.
• Virgil: the one who directs to him the formula of the will that no one disputes, for the first time in the poem.
• Minos: the guardian to whom Virgil repeats the same formula, in Canto V of the Inferno.