Mythological character birthed by the goddess Ceres in a cave on the island of Crete. Fleeing from the sunlight, he descended into Hell through the cracks in the earth. There he has a son, Ascalaphus, with the nymph Orphne (Ovid, Met. V, 539-541).
According to classical mythology, Acheron (from the Greek term ἄχερος meaning “lake” or “pond”) is one of the rivers in Hell, along with Styx, the Phlegethon, Cocytus, and Lethe. In certain Latin poems, it is sometimes equated with the Styx or Cocytus rivers (p. ex. Aen. VI 323, 369, 374 ff.), which generically illustrates the river of the beyond.
Acheron marks the entrance to the kingdom of the dead; the limit that every soul must inevitably and irreversibly cross on Charon’s boat. The image of the ferryman, symbol of passage to the other life, is quite common in ancient mythologies. To represent this river, the Latin poets evoke feelings of mourning and offer descriptions filled with sadness and ugliness. In his Aeneid, for example, Virgil depicts it as a dirty swirl of mud (VI, 296-297), of “vada livida” (VI, 320), while Statius describes it as “tristes ripae” (Theb. I, 93; and IV, 522).
Dante is familiar with the traditional descriptions of Latin poetry but adapts them to the hydrography of his Inferno. In the Comedy, the infernal rivers constitute a single river (except for the Lethe, which is relocated in the earthly paradise) originating in the painful tears of human misery that flow from the cracks of the Old Man of Crete (a statue situated in a Cretan grave). This unique river, which descends along the abyss of Inferno to the center of the Earth, assumes, from one time to another, different names (Acheron, Styx, Phlegethon, or Cocytus) and different aspects (livid swamp, muddy pond, river of boiling blood, icy lake). One detailed explanation can be found in Inf. 14, 97-138. This invention of the infernal rivers is not Dante’s; as stated above, we already see this assimilation in the Latin poets who alternated their toponyms with ease, and confusion. We find this tendency in several authors from Servius to the third Vatican Mythographer: “volunt Acheruntem de imo nasci Tartaro; huius aestuaria Stygem creare; de Styge nasci Cocytum”.
Dante’s Acheron is depicted as a sad river, a livid swamp with brown waves through which the dead are accompanied by Charon (Inf. 3, 78-118). One notable difference, however, distinguishes the Dantean conception from that of the ancients: among the latter, those who flow towards the banks of Acheron include the dead (except those deprived of burial); with Dante, who is Christian, they are only the souls of the damned. Thus, eternal damnation is added to the themes of sadness and the hideousness of the kingdom of the dead. The adjectives used to describe this river then take on a moral meaning, already perceptible in the medieval pseudo-etymological interpretation. Dante’s Acheron is “the evil stream” (Purg. 1, 88): its evil banks are deserted by souls who long to reach the other shore, driven by an immeasurable force that leads them to hastily reach the torment that awaits them.
Consult the entry of the Enciclopedia Dantesca in Italian.
Entry taken from the Enciclopedia Dantesca published by the Istituto Treccani — Texts revised by the Centre d’études médiévales of the Université de Montréal.
Editing: Gabrielle Hamelin, Martyna Kander.
English translation: Brittany Buscio.
