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Is it a wind that buffets them? is it a storm that lashes?

No, ’tis no wind that buffets them, nor ’tis no storm that lashes;

But ’tis great Charos passing by, and the dead passing with him.

He drives the young men on before, he drags the old behind him,

And at his saddle-bow are ranged the helpless little children.

The children cling and cry to him, the old men call beseeching,

“Good Charos, at some hamlet halt, halt at some cooling fountain;

There let the young men heave the stone, the old men drink of water,

There let the little children go agathering pretty posies.”

“No, not at hamlet will I halt, nor yet at cooling fountain,

Lest mothers come draw water there and know their little children,

Lest wife and husband meet again and there be no more parting.”

Such is the more pagan presentment of the modern Charos, a tyrant as absolute in his own realm as God in heaven, a veritable Ζεὺς ἄλλος[204] as was Hades of old, but hard of heart, heedless of prayer, delighting in cruelty.

At first sight then the Charos of modern Greece would seem to have little in common with the Charon of ancient Greece beyond the name and some connexion with death: and Fauriel, in the introduction to his collection of popular songs, pronounces the opinion that in this case the usual tendencies of tradition have been reversed, in that it is the name that has survived, while the attributes have been changed[205]. To this judgement I cannot subscribe. I suspect that in ancient times the literary presentation of Charon was far more circumscribed than the popular, and that out of a profusion of imaginative portraitures as varied as those seen in the folk-songs of to-day one aspect of Charon became accepted among educated men as the correct and fashionable presentment. Hades was, in literature, the despot of the lower world, and for Charon no place could be found save that of ferryman. But this, I think, was only one out of the many guises in which the ancient Charon was figured by popular imagination; for at the present day the remnants of such a conception are small, in spite of the fact that there has remained a custom which should have kept it alive—the custom of putting a coin in the mouth of the dead.