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Updated: May 18, 2025
Placing food with the corpse or in its mouth, and money in the hand, finds its analogue in the custom of the ancient Romans, who, some time before interment, placed a piece of money in the corpse's mouth, which was thought to be Charon's fare for wafting the departed soul over the Infernal River. Besides this, the corpse's mouth was furnished with a certain cake, composed of flour, honey, &c.
Menekleides the orator had been one of the conspirators who came with Pelopidas and Mellon to Charon's house. As, after the revolution, he did not obtain equal rights with the rest, being a man of great ability in speaking, but reckless and ill-conditioned, he took to using his powers to slander and assail the men in power, and was not silenced even by the result of that trial.
"I shall die childless, perhaps," answered the Chian; "and any friend will give me enough to pay Charon's fee across the Styx." "That is a melancholy reflection," said Uliades, "and there is no subject of talk that pleases me less than that same Styx. Why dost thou bite thy lip, and choke the sigh? By the Gods! art thou not happy?" "Happy!" repeated Antagoras, with a bitter smile. "Oh, yes!"
See this great fleet of scattered leaf-boats which we paddle amid, in this smooth river-bay, each one curled up on every side by the sun's skill, each nerve a stiff spruce-knee, like boats of hide, and of all patterns, Charon's boat probably among the rest, and some with lofty prows and poops, like the stately vessels of the ancients, scarcely moving in the sluggish current, like the great fleets, the dense Chinese cities of boats, with which you mingle on entering some great mart, some New York or Canton, which we are all steadily approaching together.
"Well, take your hundred florins," said the frightened Nabob, who could scarcely contain himself for terror, and wished to comfort and compensate the gipsy on his return from Charon's ferry-boat. "Thank you," sobbed the latter, "but there's no need of it now. It is all up with Vidra; Vidra is dying. If only it had been a wolf that had killed poor Vidra; but a mouse oh, oh!" "Don't be a fool, man!
Those strange combinations, into one tableau, of students and grisettes; opera-dancers, authors, viscounts, swindlers, romantic Lorettes, gamblers on the Bourse, whose pedigree dates from the Crusades; impostors, taking titles from villages in which their grandsires might have been saddlers and if detected, the detection but a matter of laugh; delicate women living like lawless men; men making trade out of love, like dissolute women, yet with point of honour so nice, that, doubt their truth or their courage, and piff! you are in Charon's boat, humanity in every civilised land may present single specimens, more or less, answering to each thus described.
Aquila turned in his saddle and looked. Momus rose in his seat and looked. Behind them only one camel rocked along in their wake. The other and its driver had disappeared. "Deserted!" Aquila exclaimed under his breath. "Three!" the woman said. "A pest on your counting for a Charon's toll-taker!" Aquila whispered savagely. "We will have no more of it!"
His garments nought but many ragged clouts, With thornes together pind and patched reads, The which his naked sides he wrapt abouts." Southeast of Crossman's Isle lies Hood's Isle, or McCain's Beclouded Isle; and upon its south side is a vitreous cove with a wide strand of dark pounded black lava, called Black Beach, or Oberlus's Landing. It might fitly have been styled Charon's.
Thus, they experienced a sort of home-coming, mingled with a peculiar dream-like feeling, that they were arriving on a strange planet, after having been ferried across Stygian currents on a Charon's raft. Out there, on the ocean and over the ocean, hovered a gruesomeness of solitudes, in which the human being, himself seeing everything, remains unseen, unknown, forgotten by God and the world.
His gloom, his bitterness were all forgotten; she only remembered his unceasing care and kindness, his noble generosity, his brilliant smile, which was bestowed only on her. Pressing her face against Charon's head, she murmured pleadingly: "Oh, Father, protect him from suffering and death! Guide him safely home. Give me my guardian back. Oh, Father, give me my wandering friend once more!"
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