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“... But Odysseus / in his heart had pity for his wife as she mourned him, / but his eyes stayed, as if they were made of horn or iron, / steady under his lids. He hid his tears and deceived her” (Homer, The Odyssey, Book 19. 209-12).

The Odyssey

Author: 

Homer

800 BCE – 650 BCE
Dates are approximate

Homer is the name associated since antiquity with the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey, the so-called Homeric Hymns, and some other poems (mostly not extant). Nothing is recorded of him as a historical person; ancient biographical accounts contain nothing reliable, being compilations from apocryphal stories, competing local claims, and imaginative inferences from the poems.

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