[3] Most classical accounts, including Pausanias (10.28) and later Dante's Inferno (3.78), portray the Acheron as the entrance to the Underworld and depict Charon ferrying the souls of the dead across it.

Ancient Greek literary sources such as Pindar, Aeschylus, Euripides, Plato, and Callimachus also place Charon on the Acheron.

[9] According to later traditions, Acheron had been a son of Helios and either Gaia or Demeter, who was turned into the Underworld river bearing his name after he refreshed the Titans with drink during their contest with Zeus.

[12] The river called Acheron with the nearby ruins of the Necromanteion (oratory of the dead) is found near Parga on the mainland of Greece opposite Corfu.

In Book VII, line 312[13] he gives to Juno the famous saying, flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo: 'If I cannot bend the will of Heaven, I shall move Hell.'

The same words were used by Sigmund Freud as the dedicatory motto for his seminal book The Interpretation of Dreams, figuring Acheron as psychological underworld beneath the conscious mind.