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Why Do We Leave Coins With the Dead?

Writer: The Commonplace
The Commonplace
Nov 24, 2023
7 min read

Updated: Sep 18


Charon’s fare is the famous answer. It is not quite the whole one.

The Greek underworld was not disorganised: On the contrary, it had some bureaucracy to it.

You die. Hermes delivers you to the edge of the world below. There is a river to cross, a boat waiting, and a ferryman who, despite the fairly exceptional circumstances, still expects to be paid.

His name is Charon.


Most people know the rest. Put a coin in the dead person’s mouth so that Charon will carry them across the water. No coin, no passage. The unfortunate soul remains stranded on the wrong bank. It is one of those pieces of classical mythology that has survived remarkably well. You do not need to have read much Greek literature to recognise the image: dead person, small coin, ferryman, underworld.

The odd thing is that the version we repeat today is considerably tidier than the evidence left behind by actual dead people.



First, the boat fare


By 405 BCE, Aristophanes could already make a joke about Charon’s fee. In The Frogs, Dionysus decides to travel to Hades to retrieve the tragedian Euripides. Heracles gives him instructions for the trip, including the money he will need for the crossing. The fare in this case is two obols, which is already inconvenient for the modern retelling that claims Charon always charged exactly one.

Later Greek and Roman writers make the connection between death, the coin and Charon explicit. Lucian, writing in the second century CE, describes an obol being placed in the mouth of the corpse for the ferryman. Coins have also been found between the teeth of skeletons in Greek graves. Roman writers knew the custom too.

So Charon’s obol was not invented by modern tour guides. There really was an ancient tradition of placing a small coin with the dead, and ancient people really did explain it as passage money.

The trouble begins when we start treating that explanation as universal.


The graves are much less orderly


In 1991, classicist Susan T. Stevens looked at the literary story alongside the archaeological evidence. They do not match nearly as neatly as you might expect.

Only a minority of ancient graves contain coins at all. Where coins do appear, there may be one or several. They may be cheap or valuable. They of course turn up in mouths, certainly, but also around hands, heads, arms, legs and elsewhere in the grave. Some seem to have been placed with the body immediately after death; others appear to have entered the burial later.

More recent work finds much the same problem. In late antique northern Italy, for example, burial coins have been found beside the head, near the arms, between the legs and feet, along the sides of the grave and even in the soil covering the body. People buried in the same cemetery at roughly the same time did not necessarily receive the same treatment.

Calling every one of these coins “Charon’s fare” feels a little like finding money in every modern coffin and deciding it must be taxi fare. Don’t get me wrong; Some probably were meant for Charon. The written sources and the archaeological examples from mouths give us good reason to think so.


Some were doing something else. Exactly what that something else was is the million dollar question.


A coin can do quite a lot


Money is a peculiar thing to put into a grave, no? Food makes immediate sense. So do clothes, weapons, jewellery, tools or objects somebody loved. Even if we know nothing about the religion involved, we can understand the gesture: take this with you.

Money is more abstract. It is only important because a community agrees that it has value. Burying it implies something interesting. Perhaps the dead person was imagined as going somewhere where value continued to matter, or perhaps there were tolls to pay, gifts to offer, people or beings to appease. Perhaps the coin protected the body, or perhaps it belonged to the deceased. Perhaps it marked status. Perhaps, in some burials, the mourners themselves could not have supplied a single explanation.

Funeral customs do not need to retain their original logic in order to survive. Anyone who has ever obeyed a family custom and answered “because that’s what we do” knows that. Ancient funerals were no different.

This is one reason archaeologists have become increasingly wary of treating Charon’s obol as a catch-all explanation for funerary money. A major recent comparative study of Roman burial coins notes that the literary explanation of a single payment for crossing the Styx simply does not account for the variety in the physical record. And Rome was hardly the only place where money went underground with the dead.


Charon did not have a monopoly on dead people’s money


This is where the story becomes much more interesting.

Han Chinese tombs also contained money, sometimes in quantities far beyond anything normally associated with the little coin for Charon. Researchers have the advantage here of surviving funerary-object lists, which can help identify what was deliberately provided for the dead. Money also circulated around Chinese funerals among the living: people contributed toward funeral expenses, and such gifts helped bind communities together.

It would be very easy to look at coins in a Chinese tomb and say, “Ah, their version of Charon.”

It would also be wrong. There is no need to make unrelated traditions secretly identical in order to find the resemblance interesting. Two societies can both decide that the dead need money and use very different ideas about death, obligation, wealth and the next world to get to that conclusion. In Rome, a coin might be associated with a ferryman. Elsewhere, the money belonged to another system entirely.


The coin did not disappear when the old gods did


You might expect Charon’s coin to vanish once Christianity became dominant in Europe, but, no, it did not vanish so cleanly.

A study of Christian viaticum records much later examples of practices resembling the old death coin in parts of Greece and the Balkans. Clergy tried to suppress them. Travellers and folklorists still encountered versions centuries after the classical world had gone. On Naxos, one reported custom had changed almost beyond recognition: instead of a coin, a small wax cross bearing Christian initials was placed on the dead person’s lips. Remarkably, the object was still associated with the old idea of freight money for the journey.

That is folklore doing what folklore does best. Nobody simply presses delete on an old custom.

It gets corrected, renamed, condemned, accommodated, Christianised, localised, forgotten and sometimes practised anyway. There are stranger survivals.

At Drawsko in north-west Poland, archaeologists excavating a seventeenth-century Christian cemetery found several unusual burials. Sickles had been laid across some of the bodies, in several cases directly across the throat. Coins or traces of copper appeared near the heads of a number of the dead. One older woman had a stone on her throat, a sickle across her hips and evidence of a copper coin placed in her mouth.

The researchers were careful about interpretation. Coins in graves can mean many things, and the Drawsko burials should not simply be labelled “vampire graves,” as popular accounts of unusual Eastern European burials often do. The sickles appear to have had an apotropaic or protective function, but even here there are competing explanations for exactly whom or what they were meant to protect.

The important thing for our purposes is much smaller. Seventeenth-century Christians were still putting coins into the mouths of their dead. More than two thousand years after Aristophanes could joke about ferry money, the gesture had not entirely gone away.


One coin, two coins, eyes, mouth

There is one image worth clearing up before we leave Charon at his boat.

In films, paintings and photographs, the dead are often shown with a coin over each eye. That image has become so familiar that it is regularly explained as the ancient Greek payment to Charon.

The classical evidence is much stronger for a coin in or on the mouth.

Pairs of coins over the eyes belong to a more complicated history and appear in later burial practices for reasons that could be practical as well as ritual. In early modern European cemeteries, coins have been found around the eyes, and one practical explanation is straightforward: they helped keep or make the eyelids appear closed before burial. Archaeologists studying those later burials caution that coins found around the body can represent several different customs rather than one unbroken survival from ancient Greece.

So if someone tells you that every corpse in ancient Greece went to the grave with two coins over its eyes because Charon demanded them, you are allowed one extremely scholarly raised eyebrow.


So why do we leave coins with the dead?


Sometimes, apparently, to pay the ferryman.

That answer is essential to our societal beliefs, so it stays. It is old, documented and attached to a real funerary practice. It just should not swallow every other answer.

A coin beside a Roman body, a handful of money in a Han tomb and a copper piece in the mouth of a seventeenth-century Polish villager may look similar when they come out of the earth. However, they do not necessarily tell the same story.

That is the danger of folklore with a completely good explanation attached to it. The explanation becomes more famous than the custom. “Charon’s obol” is almost too...perfect. Death is a journey, the grave, a departure point, a tiny piece of metal is the last useful thing the living can give you.

I mean no wonder we kept the story.

Still, I think rather there's something even more lovely about the messier version. For thousands of years, people have stood beside their loved ones and felt that the person leaving should not go empty-handed.

So, sometimes they packed food, sometimes jewellery, sometimes a tool, a charm, a weapon, a cross.

And sometimes somebody reached for a coin.

Just in case.



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