 Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood has shown that in 5th-century BC depictions of Charon, as on the funerary vases called lekythoi, he is a non-threatening, even reassuring presence who guides women, adolescents, and children to the afterlife.Humor, as in Aristophanes's comic catabasis "The Frogs", "makes the journey to Hades less frightening by articulating it explicitly and trivializing it.