Filippo Albacini (1777–1858), The Wounded Achilles. Marble, 1825. © The Devonshire Collections, Chatsworth

'Like the generation of leaves, the lives of mortal men.
Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth,
now the living timber bursts with the new buds
and spring comes round again. And so with men:
as one generation comes to life, another dies away.'
Homer, ‘The Iliad’, VI

I recently attended an exhibition at the British Museum considering the enduring myth of ancient Troy. (‘Troy, Myth and Reality’ runs until 8 March, 2020.)

The displays recount the legend of the Trojan War as described by Homer, Virgil, the great tragedians and poets. They consider the central role the story had in ancient cultures, the archaeological endeavours to discover the true site of Troy, and the range of artistic responses to the myth through the centuries.

According to legend, the Trojan War was precipitated by the abduction of Helen, the wife of Spartan King Menelaus, by the Trojan Prince Paris. An alliance of Greek kings, led by Menelaus’ brother, Agamemnon of Mycenae, rallies in support. They sail in their ‘sea-cleaving ships’ across the Aegean for ‘many-towered’ Troy. A huge army of ‘well-greaved‘ Greeks then embarks on a ten-year siege that culminates in the fall of the city.

'At last the armies clashed at one strategic point,
they slammed their shields together, pike scraped pike,
with the grappling strength of fighters armed in bronze
and their round shields pounded, boss on welded boss,
and the sound of struggle roared and rocked the earth.
Screams of men and cries of triumph breaking in one breath,
fighters killing, fighters killed, and the ground streamed blood.’
Homer, ‘The Iliad’, IV

It’s a story of fearless bravery and human frailty, of camaraderie and brutality. Heroes strive through their acts of courage to create reputations that will endure through the ages. Theirs is a quest for immortality. But ultimately their fates are determined by the gods, who are fickle, capricious and partisan.

'And someday one will say, one of the men to come
steering his oar-swept ship across the wine-dark sea
'there's the mound of a man who died in the old days,
one of the brave whom glorious Hector killed.'
So they will say, someday, and my fame will never die.’
Homer, ‘The Iliad’, VII

The ancients studied Homer and Virgil as sacred texts that revealed truths about life, death, individual responsibility and destiny. Let us consider whether these same myths and legends have any contemporary relevance.

1. Life and business are about hard choices

Inevitably the true origins of the Trojan War derive from a disagreement among the gods. Paris is asked to arbitrate in a dispute over a golden apple inscribed ‘to the most beautiful.’ The apple is claimed by three competing divinities: Hera, the goddess of marriage and power, who promises Paris an empire; Athena the goddess of war and wisdom, who guarantees glory in battle; and Aphrodite, the goddess of love, who vows to give him the most beautiful woman in the world.

Paris chooses the path of passion and sentiment, and so sets in train the events that lead to war.

We may censure Paris for his short-sightedness. But what was he to do? Which goddess should he have chosen? Whomever he selected, wouldn’t he inevitably have encountered problems?

The exhibition features a 1569 painting of Queen Elizabeth I by Hans Eworth that shows that Paris could have been more creative. Elizabeth, confronted with the same dilemma, chooses to reject the offers of the three goddesses and retain the apple herself - thereby demonstrating her extraordinary wisdom, and instinct for diplomacy and peace.

And this is the first lesson: life and business are about hard choices.

Hans Eworth - Elizabeth I and the Three Goddesses 1569. © The Royal Collection Trust

2. Petty rivalry divides a team

‘Rage - Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds, and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.'
Homer, ‘The Iliad’, I

A central character in the siege of Troy is ‘swift-footed’ Achilles, fearsome warrior and Greek hero. The war rages for nine years without any decisive victory, but in the tenth year an argument prompts Achilles to withdraw from the fray. He has been given Briseis, the queen of a neighbouring city, as his prize. However, ‘wide-ruling lord’ Agamemnon pulls rank and demands her for himself. Furious Achilles threatens to remove his troops and return home. He prays that the Trojans will succeed and retires to sulk in his tent.

This seemingly insignificant incident tips the scales in favour of the Trojans, who drive the Greeks back behind their defences. The Trojans now have the upper hand.

Beware. Petty rivalries, trivial feuds and false pride can divide a team and determine events.

‘Love at first sight’: amphora, c530BC (detail), showing Achilles killing Penthesilea. Photograph: British Museum

3. Everyone has an Achilles’ heel

'I know you and what you are, and was sure that I should not move you, for your heart is hard as iron; look to it that I bring not heaven's anger upon you on the day when Paris and Phoebus Apollo, valiant though you be, shall slay you at the Scaen gates.'
Homer, ‘The Iliad’, XXII

When Achilles was a baby, his mother Thetis made him invincible by dipping him into the River Styx. But since she held him by the heel, one foot was untouched by the magical water and was therefore left unprotected.

When Achilles is eventually persuaded to reengage with the combat, he kills ‘horse-taming’ Hector, the first-born son of King Priam, and drives the Trojans back behind the gates of the city. But triumphant Achilles is then shot by Paris. The arrow is guided by the god Apollo ‘with the unshorn hair’ to strike Achilles at his one weak point: his heel. It seems a tragically modest way for such a man to die.

Even the most fearsome warrior has an Achilles’ heel. And even the most celebrated businessperson has a vulnerability, flaw or weakness.

4. You’re most at risk at the height of your success

And then one day, as ‘rosy-fingered Dawn’ rises over the city, the Trojans awake to discover that the Greeks have sailed away across the ‘wine-dark sea’. They assume that the invaders have been fatigued by the years of fighting, or that the gods have demanded their departure. They then discover that the Greeks have left a huge wooden horse on the beach and interpret this as an offering to appease the heavens. The Trojans drag the horse into the city, breaching their own defensive wall in the process.

‘Four times it stalled before the gateway, at the very threshold;
Four times the arms clashed loud inside its belly.
Nevertheless, heedless, blinded by frenzy,
We press right on and set the inauspicious
Monster inside the sacred fortress.'
Virgil, ‘The Aeneid’, II

In fact the wooden horse conceals the Greeks’ best warriors. When night falls, the Greek fleet sails quietly back to Troy and the warriors emerge from the horse. Troy is sacked, suffering many atrocities.

When we think we’re on top, we’re most exposed to complacency. Pride comes before a fall.

Exekias Achilles and Ajax Playing a Board Game 540-530 BCE. Terracotta amphora. Height 2 feet (Musei Vaticani, Rome) — **Exekias**
*Achilles and Ajax Playing a Board Game* 540-530 BCE. Terracotta amphora. Height 2 feet (Musei Vaticani, Rome)

5. It’s not enough to be right

'I fear the Greeks, even those bearing gifts.’Virgil, ‘The Aeneid’, II

Red-figure jar, c480-470BC: Odysseus, strapped to the mast, sails past the Sirens. Photograph: British Museum — *Red-figure jar, c480-470BC: Odysseus, strapped to the mast, sails past the Sirens.* Photograph: British Museum

The tragedy of Troy’s fall is enhanced by the fact that, first the priest Laocoon, and then the priestess Cassandra, warn that the Greek horse cannot be trusted.

Serpents emerge suddenly from the sea and devour Laocoon and his sons, seemingly confirming that the horse is bona fide. Cassandra, the daughter of King Priam, is gifted with prophetic skills, but cursed never to be believed. With the fall of Troy she is taken back to Mycenae as a concubine by Agamemnon, and subsequently murdered by his embittered wife.

Sadly, it’s not enough to be right in life or business. Your success and happiness revolve around your ability to persuade others that you are right.

6. Sometimes it pays to delay

'So by day she’d weave at her great and growing web—
by night, by the light of torches set beside her,
she would unravel all she’d done. Three whole years
she deceived us blind, seduced us with this scheme.’
Homer, ‘The Odyssey’, II

Meanwhile the Greek heroes have left their loved ones to cope without them for ten years. In Ithaca Penelope, the wife of ‘great hearted’ Odysseus, must fend off an army of suitors who assume that the king is dead. She is obliged by the laws of hospitality to entertain these admirers at great expense, but, ever loyal, she devises a scheme to keep them at bay. She promises she will choose a new husband when she has woven a shroud. So she sits all day weaving this garment and then spends all night secretly unpicking her work.

We tend nowadays to celebrate speed of thought and immediacy of action. But sometimes, as Penelope knew, it pays to delay.

7. Leave a legacy

There are passages in ‘The Iliad’ that are little more than relentlessly grim lists of wretched, painful deaths. The phrases and epithets are repetitive and formulaic. The plot seems stuck in a rut.

There is, of course, poetic truth in these ‘retarded’ verses: war is a brutal, endlessly monotonous exercise in munitions, names, numbers and statistics. It has no neat narrative shape.

Scholars have also concluded that ‘The Iliad’ was not originally a written work, but rather was transmitted orally. Primarily performed around a campfire, the poem was the product of improvisation, adapted to the location and audience. Homer may have felt obliged to name-check the local hero of the townsfolk he was addressing. And so with time the work accrued more and more valiant deaths.

'My doom has come upon me; let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter.’
Homer, ‘The Iliad’, XXII

With ‘The Iliad,’ Homer secured the immortality of legions of heroes for generations to come. Perhaps we too should sometimes focus on the reputation we leave behind us.

8. Follow your destiny

Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’ picks up the tale of Troy with its demise, and pursues a positive theme. It relates the fate of Aeneas, a Trojan prince who survives the defeat, endures adventures, and goes on to found Rome. ‘The Aeneid’ suggests that some people are ordained by the gods to achieve great things. They will undergo hardship and tragedy on the way, but they will succeed.

'Duty bound,
Aeneas, though he struggled with desire
to calm and comfort her in all her pain,
to speak to her and turn her mind from grief,
and though he sighed his heart out, shaken still
with love of her, yet took the course heaven gave him
and turned back to the fleet.'Virgil, ‘The Aeneid’, IV

We may conclude our review of the Trojan story with a somewhat outdated sentiment. Perhaps we, like Achilles, Hector and Aeneas before us, would do well to pursue our lives and careers with a belief in our own destiny; with a sense of purpose; with an ambition to leave a legacy in the hearts and minds of our colleagues and friends.

Even in this anxious modern age - even in the context of contemporary commerce - it’s still possible to be a hero.

'When I am laid, am laid in earth, May my wrongs create
No trouble, no trouble in thy breast;
Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate.
Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.’
Henry Purcell, ‘Dido’s Lament’ (Nahum Tate)

No. 264