Laudator Temporis Acti

Homer, Odyssey 16.294 = 19.13 (tr. A.T. Murray):

For of itself does the iron draw a man to it.

αὐτὸς γὰρ ἐφέλκεται ἄνδρα σίδηρος.

Joseph Russo on 19.13:

apparently a proverb, used here to add persuasiveness by an appeal to traditional wisdom (cf. note to xvii 347, where an apparent proverb also closes a speech). Although meant as a warning against the temptation to resort to weapons in a drunken quarrel—a common danger in heroic societies—this proverb may have older origins in an awareness of the magnetic, and hence magical, properties of iron. So M. Cary and A.D. Nock, CQ xxi (1927), 125-6. And perhaps the early availability of meteoric iron contributed to this belief: G.A. Wainwright, Antiquity x (1936), 6: ‘Iron was the thunderbolt, one of the most appalling powers in Nature’. The use of ‘iron’ as the word for an unspecified weapon, instead of the more normal ‘bronze’ (cf. xi 120, xix 522, xx 315, and throughout the fight in xxii), is criticized by Lorimer, Monuments, 510, as ‘an unexampled breach of epic convention’ (but see 119-20 for what she admits are ‘partial exceptions’), but this is hardly an adequate reason for doubting the line’s authenticity.