Meaning
To die - with a classical flourish. Borrowing the Greek underworld's boundary river makes death sound like travel paperwork: a ferry to catch, a coin for the fare, a far shore, and Charon at the oar checking tickets. Wry-literary register - suits epitaphs, reviews, and retirement speeches; the pedant's footnote is that Acheron held the boundary job first. Regional use: General English; classical origin.
Origin
Homer makes the Styx a dread river of oath and a boundary of Hades; Hesiod gives her a goddess's biography - eldest Oceanid, first to side with Zeus - and makes swearing by her water the gods' most terrible oath, the forsworn lying breathless a year. Virgil's Charon ferries the dead across it, winding nine times along Hell's border; the older tradition, the record notes, actually makes Acheron the river that separates the living from the dead, but popular imagination long ago gave the job to the Styx - helped by Patroclus's shade waiting beyond the river and by Dante, who made the Styx the Fifth Circle's marsh. The English phrase survives as a literary or humorous euphemism: a Liverpool sailor's memoir of 2009 jokes about visitors coming daily until I cross the Styx, and a reviewer of Hilary Mantel asked in 2020 whether Cromwell had to cross the Styx himself four years after Anne Boleyn.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- cross the Styx
- ferry across the Styx
- over the Styx
Usage Examples
- The chairman intends to chair the centenary personally or from beyond the Styx, whichever comes first.
- Ancient coins under the tongue, the curator noted, were simply fare for crossing the Styx - travel insurance, in effect.
- The old professor threatened to mark finals from across the Styx, and nobody doubted he would.