How white-collar warriors gear up for the day
leadership team, descending from on high to cause complete chaos. For most of the book Achilles, a prototype of the talented jerk, is on strike. This is a big problem for the Greek management team, who have lost their best performer.
A delegation from HR fails to win Achilles over. Eventually, however, he returns to the office, and all is well (Trojans may disagree). The parallels between the 21st-century workplace and “The Iliad" are admittedly inexact.
There are fewer swords and spears glinting in the rosy-fingered dawn today; there is a bit less brain matter on the floor. But to see the modern connections to Homer’s epic, look at Achilles’s preparations to go back to work. “Now I shall arm myself for war," he says in Book 19.
The arming of Achilles is the forebear of gearing-up scenes ever since, from Chaucer to Rambo. But it also has echoes of current daily rituals. Achilles puts on bronze greaves and shining breastplates; employees choose clothes that they don’t wear at the weekend.
Achilles puts on his golden-plumed helmet; commuters don their Bose headphones. The Homeric hero takes up a shield forged by Hephaestus, the god of fire. The office worker stuffs a laptop and charger into a rucksack.
Most of this white-collar arming takes place inside the home, but not all. It also happens en route to the battlefield, as compacts emerge and make-up is applied on the Tube. Sometimes the transformation takes place in the office itself.
Trainers are swapped for heels. Lycra-clad colleagues disappear from view and emerge in something less off-putting. Battle may be close but it does not arrive instantly, whether you are the king of the Myrmidons or Barry from accounts.
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