Acheron

Also Known As: Greek Akheron; the Acherusian Lake, Akherousia limne, is the marsh or lake it feeds; the Greeks heard the name as coming from akhos, “pain”
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology, Roman Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Places
Mythical Attributes: Acheron is the river of Hades that the dead must cross, and it is also a real river in Thesprotia in northwestern Greece whose landscape the ancients took for the road to the underworld.
Role in Mythos: It marks the boundary between the living and the dead, the water where Charon keeps his boat and where Homer has the rivers of the underworld meet.
Relation to Humans: Every soul had to cross it, and Roman poets said the unburied were refused passage until their bones were laid to rest. On the earthly Acheron in Epirus stood an oracle of the dead where the living went to put questions to ghosts, as Herodotus says the tyrant Periander of Corinth did.

The painter Polygnotus put it on a wall at Delphi, and Pausanias stood in front of it six centuries later and wrote down what he saw: water like a river, reeds growing in it, and fish so faint in the paint that they looked more like shadows than fish. On the water was a boat. An old man sat at the oars. That was Acheron as the Greeks pictured it, a river with nothing much to recommend it except that everyone would one day have to cross it.

The name did its own work. Greek listeners heard akhos, pain, inside it, and the poet Melanippides said the river was called Acheron because it went through the bosom of the earth pouring out pains. Later lexicographers repeated the same derivation. Whether the etymology is sound matters less than the fact that people believed it. It was the river of grief because that is what it sounded like.

Homer gives the oldest map. In the Odyssey, the witch Circe tells Odysseus to beach his ship at the edge of the world ocean and walk on into the dank realm of Hades. There, she says, two streams run into the Acheron, the Pyriphlegethon and the Cocytus, which is a branch of the Styx, and a rock stands where the two loud-roaring rivers meet. At that spot Odysseus digs his pit, pours his offerings and gives blood to the dead so that they can speak. Homer names the rivers and stops. He never mentions a lake.

Later writers filled in the geography, and they did not all fill it in the same way. The lyric poets saw it plainly. Sappho, gripped by longing, wanted to die and see the dewy, lotus-covered banks of Acheron. Alcaeus reminded a friend that even Sisyphus, cleverest of men, who thought he had mastered Death, still had to cross eddying Acheron twice. In Athenian tragedy the crossing had a vessel and a pilot: Aeschylus writes of a black-clothed ship carrying the dead over Acheron to the sunless land where Apollo never walks, and the chorus in Euripides’ Alcestis tells the dead queen that the old man at the steering oar has never ferried a braver wife across the tarn of Acheron.

Plato gave it the strangest shape of all. In the Phaedo, Socrates describes four great rivers circling the underworld. Oceanus runs outermost, and Acheron flows opposite it, through desert places and under the earth, into the Acherusian Lake. The souls of most of the dead come to that lake, board the vessels waiting for them, and stay there for an appointed time before they are sent back to be born again. The worst of the curable sinners are thrown into Tartarus for a year, then washed out along the rivers to the edge of the lake. There they shout to the people they killed or wronged, begging to be let out of the current. If their victims forgive them, they climb out. If not, the water carries them back down into Tartarus, and the whole round starts again.

The Romans made the river muddier and louder. Virgil’s Sibyl shows Aeneas the road that leads to the dismal waters of Acheron, where a whirlpool boils with mud and spews its sand into the Cocytus. A grim old ferryman keeps the crossing, and the crowd on the near bank are the unburied, who must wander there for a hundred years before they are taken over. Seneca calls Acheron the roaring stream that cannot be recrossed and puts a funereal rock over its sluggish shallows. By the time of Cicero and Virgil the word could stand for the whole underworld, the way English uses “the grave”.

The river also had a god. The mythographer Apollodorus names Acheron as the father of Ascalaphus by a nymph called Gorgyra, and Ovid gives the mother as Orphne, bearing the child to Acheron in her dusky bower. Beyond that one parentage the god has no myth of his own in the ancient texts. A story that he was a son of Helios and Gaia, turned into an underworld river for giving the Titans water during their war with Zeus, is a late tradition, reported by the sixteenth-century Italian mythographer Natalis Comes rather than by the classical poets.

Then there is the other Acheron, the one with a mouth and a bay. In Thesprotia, in Epirus in northwestern Greece, a real river of that name flows into the Ionian Sea. Thucydides describes the Acherusian Lake near the city of Ephyre pouring its waters into the sea and taking its name from the river that falls into it. Pausanias, writing in the second century AD, found the lake and the river near a place called Cichyrus, along with a tributary called Cocytus, “a most unlovely stream”. He was sure that Homer had seen these places and borrowed their names for the rivers of Hades. He also believed that Heracles found the white poplar growing on the banks of this Acheron and carried it south to Olympia, which is why Homer called the tree acherois.

The Thesprotian river had an oracle. Herodotus tells how Periander, tyrant of Corinth in the sixth century BC, sent messengers to the oracle of the dead on the Acheron to ask where a friend’s deposit had been hidden. The ghost of his wife Melissa appeared and refused to say. She was cold and naked, she said, because the clothes buried with her had not been burned and were no use to her. Periander had every woman in Corinth stripped of her finery, heaped the garments in a pit and burned them with a prayer to Melissa. When his messengers went back, she told them where the deposit lay.

Other rivers carried the name. Apollonius of Rhodes set an Acheron on the Black Sea coast, falling through a deep ravine beside the Cavern of Hades, from whose depths an icy breath rose every morning and covered the headland in rime that melted by noon. Strabo knew another in southern Italy, and lakes called Acherusia were pointed out in Argolis, in Campania and near Memphis in Egypt. Wherever the ground looked like a way down, someone found an Acheron there.

The lake in Epirus is gone. Sediment cores taken in the lower Acheron valley between 1992 and 1994, and published by Besonen, Rapp and Jing in 2003, suggest that it formed between the eighth and fifth centuries BC, which would put Homer’s river before the lake existed, and its marshes were largely drained for farmland in the twentieth century. The swamps bred malaria, and the same team backed an earlier suggestion by Dakaris that the new lake brought the fever that emptied that corner of Epirus.

Between 1958 and 1977 the Greek archaeologist Sotirios Dakaris excavated a building on the hill of Saint John Prodromos, about a mile and a half up from the river mouth, and identified it as the oracle Periander consulted. Its central block was some seventy-two feet square with walls about eleven feet thick and a vaulted chamber beneath. Dakaris read the chamber as a stage for Hades and the bronze fittings as parts of a crane for lowering ghosts. In 1979 Dietwulf Baatz showed that those fittings belonged to third-century BC catapults. In 1980 the German archaeologist Haselberger argued that the building was a tower, and James Wiseman, writing in Archaeology in 1998, set out the case that the whole complex was a fortified farmstead taken by the Romans in 167 BC. Wiseman also noted that the question was not settled for many scholars. If the oracle Herodotus knew stood somewhere else nearby, nobody has found it.

What the river does is simple. It divides. On one side are the living, on the other the dead, and the crossing goes one way. Burial and a coin for Charon buy passage; the Byzantine Suda names the coin the danake. The river’s limits are few and famous. Heracles, Orpheus and Theseus went down and came back, Odysseus spoke to the dead at its edge without crossing at all, and Sisyphus, if Alcaeus is right, crossed it twice. The Suda even preserves a gentler reading, calling Acheron a place of healing rather than punishment, where the sins of humans are washed out.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Acheron in Greek mythology?

The Acheron is one of the rivers of the underworld, the river the dead cross to reach the realm of Hades. Homer names it as the river into which the Pyriphlegethon and the Cocytus flow, and in later Greek and Roman writers Charon ferries the souls over it in his boat.

Is the Acheron a real river?

Yes. A real Acheron flows through Thesprotia in Epirus, in northwestern Greece, into the Ionian Sea. Thucydides and Pausanias both describe it with the Acherusian Lake, and Pausanias believed Homer had seen this landscape and named the rivers of Hades after it.

What does the name Acheron mean?

Ancient Greek writers explained the name as coming from akhos, meaning pain or grief. The poet Melanippides said it was called Acheron because it poured out pains inside the earth, and later lexicographers repeated that derivation.

Was there an oracle of the dead on the Acheron?

Herodotus says there was: Periander, tyrant of Corinth, sent messengers to the oracle of the dead on the Acheron to question the ghost of his wife Melissa. A building excavated by Sotirios Dakaris from 1958 was identified as that oracle, but later archaeologists, including Dietwulf Baatz, Haselberger and James Wiseman, argued it was a fortified farmstead, and the real oracle has not been found.

What happens to souls at the Acherusian Lake in Plato?

In Plato’s Phaedo, the souls of most of the dead travel down the Acheron to the Acherusian Lake, stay there for an appointed time, and are then sent back to be born again. Curable great sinners are washed out of Tartarus to the lake’s edge each year and must beg their victims for forgiveness before they can climb out.