"Am I the first person to have thought of this?" "No."

[thanate]

So... Charon used to take a toll of a coin (or sometimes two, one from each eye) from every soul that died and passed into the underworld. (well, Virgil says if you weren't buried-- ie, didn't have the coin-- you got a free ride if you waited around a hundred years for it)

What happened to all that money?

I mean, ferrying the dead is pretty much a 24-7 sort of job, so it's not as if he could go on a spending spree. In fact, there's no particular indication I've heard that he ever left the boat, and it was certainly not overflowing in riches. All but the earliest descriptions seem to imply it's close to falling apart, in fact, so he wasn't spending it on repairs, either. Does Pluto (whose name literally implies wealth, being the god of things under the earth including gems & metals to be mined) come by occasionally and collect the takings to melt down into new ores? Or is there a huge fortune buried in the mud at the bottom of the Styx and the other various rivers the dead have been ferried over?

Comments

[lagged-variable.livejournal.com]

I imagine he took the coins, chucked 'em in the Styx and laughed at you. He's a jerk like that. (I mean, I don't blame him, his job doesn't really have any glamour or opportunities for advancement. All the same, a "top of the morning" every once in a while would be nice!)

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Ok, I can totally see Aristophanes' Charon doing that...

[fishy1.livejournal.com]

i have a vague recollection of a couple of stories with someone (trickster-god of some description?) switching places with Charon (or his equivalent) in order to win/earn something. This will take some searching. I don't recall the story mentioning what He did with his time off, though.

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Interesting-- let me know if you remember the reference. For some reason I picture Charon's time off as kind of like Death's sabatical in... whichever Pratchett book it was where he got all obsessed with forgetting things & joined the Klatchian Foreign Legion. Although that could just be the parallels between animate skeletons being loosed on the world. (dunno when Charon got de-fleshed, either... I think it was post-Virgil, anyway. Maybe he just got mixed up with the medieval dance of the dead stuff after the fact?)

[fishy1.livejournal.com]

Mort or Reaper Man, i believe. (the Pratchett)

Will have to do some looking for the other story. Possibly Norse?

[saladmonkeylamb.livejournal.com]

I think that was "Soul Music" where he quit suddenly and his granddaughter had to take over?

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Reaper Man. That's the one where he gets replaced by a non-anthropomorphic force, and lots of people stop dying.

[scraun23.livejournal.com]

There's a quote from (I think) that book, where someone asks Death "how do you get all those antique coins" and he replies IN PAIRS.

[greta-k.livejournal.com]

Charon probably bought some investment property in Pergatory. Perhaps even an island with a hammock in Tahiti :-)