cost the eyes of the face is a popular expression that means cost too much, have a very high price, price above the expected average.
expression source
The expression "cost the eyes of your face" originated in ancient customs. In Greece, many poets were blind. The first of them was Tamires, who boasted of being a better singer than the Muses, daughters of Zeus. The Muses were angry and in their wrath, they made him blind.
In the same way, Daphnis, Teiresias, Thissychorus, and even Homer himself, were blinded. This is more than a coincidence. There was a definite reason for depriving poets of vision. It was not the Muses that blinded them, but the Greek kings. These kings were jealous of their poets and held them to themselves, gouging out their eyes.
The barbarian people gouged out their prisoners' eyes.
Titus Mácio Plautus, a Roman dramatist who lived during the republican period, refers to this expression in one of his plays.
It cost an arm and a leg to be a poet in ancient Greece or fall into the hands of the barbarians.
