even to the authority of Christ as given in the words, 'Thou fool, this night they require thy soul of thee[1],' where the commentators explained the vague plural as implying some such subject as 'toll-collectors' or 'custom-house officers[2].'
But the belief does not stop here. One does not pass the custom-houses of this world, or at any rate of Greece, without some expenditure in duty or in douceur; and the same apparently holds true of the celestial custom-houses. Hence in some places the belief has generated a practice, or, to speak more exactly, has breathed a new spirit into the old practice of providing the dead with money. My view of the origin of this practice has already been explained; I have given reasons for holding that the coin placed in the mouth of the dead was simply a charm to prevent evil spirits from entering, or the soul from re-entering, into the body, and that the interpretation of the custom, according to which the coin was the fee of the ferryman Charon, was of comparatively late date. At the present day Charon in the rôle of ferryman is almost forgotten; but in his place the Telonia seem locally to have become the recipients of the fee, and the old custom has thus received a second and equally erroneous explanation.
This may have been the idea in the mind of my informant who vaguely said that a coin placed in the mouth of the dead was 'good because of the aërial beings[3].' If the particular aërial beings whom he had in mind were the Telonia, he no doubt thought of the coin as a fee payable to them, though in that case it is somewhat strange that he should not have used the name which actually denotes their toll~collecting functions.
But from other sources at any rate comes evidence of a less ambiguous kind that the idea of paying the Telonia for passage is, or has been, a real motive in the minds of the peasantry. In Chios (where however the object actually placed in the mouth of the dead is clearly understood as a precaution against a devil entering the body) it is believed that the soul after death remains for forty days in the neighbourhood of its old habitation, the body, and then making its way to Hades has to pass the Telonia., etc.]
