page_title: Charon's obol
section_title: Charon's obol as viaticum
hierarchical_section_title: Charon's obol / Terminology / Charon's obol as viaticum
caption_attribution_description: Español: Cráneo con dupondio (óbolo) de Antonino Pío (140-144 d.C). Fondos del Museo de Prehistoria de Valencia, Comunidad valenciana, España. Deutsch: Charonspfennig-Fund (hier ein Dupondius mit dem Konterfei Antoninus Pius) als Grabbeigabe in einem römischen Schädel in Spanien (Museo de Prehistoria de Valencia, ca. 140-144 n. Chr.). English: Roman skull with an obol (an Antoninus Pius dupondius) in the mouth.
context_page_description: Charon's obol is an allusive term for the coin placed in or on the mouth of a dead person before burial. Greek and Latin literary sources specify the coin as an obol, and explain it as a payment or bribe for Charon, the ferryman who conveyed souls across the river that divided the world of the living from the world of the dead. Archaeological examples of these coins, of various denominations in practice, have been called "the most famous grave goods from antiquity."
  The custom is primarily associated with the ancient Greeks and Romans, though it is also found in the ancient Near East. In Western Europe, a similar usage of coins in burials occurs in regions inhabited by Celts of the Gallo-Roman, Hispano-Roman and Romano-British cultures, and among the Germanic peoples of late antiquity and the early Christian era, with sporadic examples into the early 20th century.
  Although archaeology shows that the myth reflects an actual custom, the placement of coins with the dead was neither pervasive nor confined to a single coin in the deceased's mouth.
context_section_description: In Latin, Charon’s obol is sometimes called a viaticum, which in everyday usage means "provision for a journey" (from via, "way, road, journey"), encompassing food, money and other supplies. The same word can refer to the living allowance granted to those stripped of their property and condemned to exile, and by metaphorical extension to preparing for death at the end of life’s journey. Cicero, in his philosophical dialogue On Old Age (44 BC), has the interlocutor Cato the Elder combine two metaphors — nearing the end of a journey, and ripening fruit — in speaking of the approach to death:
  I don’t understand what greed should want for itself in old age; for can anything be sillier than to acquire more provisions (viaticum) as less of the journey remains? … Fruits, if they are green, can scarcely be wrenched off the trees; if they are ripe and softened, they fall. In the same way, violence carries off the life of young men; old men, the fullness of time. To me this is so richly pleasing that, the nearer I draw to death, I seem within sight of landfall, as if, at an unscheduled time, I will come into the harbor after a long voyage.
  Drawing on this metaphorical sense of "provision for the journey into death," ecclesiastical Latin borrowed the term viaticum for the form of Eucharist that is placed in the mouth of a person who is dying as provision for the soul’s passage to eternal life. The earliest literary evidence of this Christian usage for viaticum appears in Paulinus’s account of the death of Saint Ambrose in 397 AD. The 7th-century Synodus Hibernensis offers an etymological explanation: "This word ‘viaticum’ is the name of communion, that is to say, ‘the guardianship of the way,’ for it guards the soul until it shall stand before the judgment-seat of Christ." Thomas Aquinas explained the term as "a prefiguration of the fruit of God, which will be in the Promised Land. And because of this it is called the viaticum, since it provides us with the way of getting there"; the idea of Christians as "travelers in search of salvation" finds early expression in the Confessions of St. Augustine.
  An equivalent word in Greek is ephodion (ἐφόδιον); like viaticum, the word is used in antiquity to mean "provision for a journey" (literally, "something for the road," from the prefix ἐπ-, "on" + ὁδός, "road, way") and later in Greek patristic literature for the Eucharist administered on the point of death.
caption: Roman skull with an obol (an Antoninus Pius dupondius) in the mouth.
exif: {"Image Make": "Canon", "Image Model": "Canon EOS 500D", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS3 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2013:12:01 23:47:28", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ExifOffset": "232", "GPS GPSVersionID": "[2, 2, 0, 0]", "Image GPSInfo": "1000", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "1114", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "3351", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/10", "EXIF FNumber": "8", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Aperture Priority", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "1600", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2013:12:01 15:16:43", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2013:12:01 15:16:43", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "27/8", "EXIF ApertureValue": "6", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "-1", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Spot", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "39", "EXIF SubSecTime": "05", "EXIF SubSecTimeOriginal": "05", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "05", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "3168", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "4752", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "968", "EXIF FocalPlaneXResolution": "792000/149", "EXIF FocalPlaneYResolution": "3168000/593", "EXIF FocalPlaneResolutionUnit": "2", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard"}