Charon

Charon is a son of Erebus and Nyx, darkness and night, which places him among the oldest beings in the cosmos. He is not a god and not a monster. He operates a boat, and he does it with the manner of a man who has been doing an unpleasant job for a very long time. Virgil describes him as filthy, matted-bearded, with eyes of flame — an old man, but a god's old age, hard and green.

His terms are simple and non-negotiable. He carries the dead across the Acheron, and he requires payment: an obol, a small coin. The Greeks placed one in the mouth of the dead at burial for exactly this reason, and the practice is attested in graves across the Greek world.

Those who cannot pay — the unburied, the lost at sea, the ones nobody found — wait on the near bank for a hundred years before he will take them. It is the myth's argument for burial rites, expressed as a transport policy.

He is also the reason arriving in the Underworld alive is difficult rather than impossible. He refused Heracles until forced; Hades punished him with a year in chains for having yielded. Orpheus got across by playing to him. Aeneas needed the Sibyl to show him the Golden Bough before Charon would even discuss it.

The obol survives in odd places. The Greek word for it lingers in Modern Greek for the ferryman's fee, and the custom of placing coins on the eyes of the dead, still occasionally practised, descends from the same idea: nobody crosses for free.