Achilles - Wellington Monument (London, UK) - Statues of Religious Figures on Waymarking.com

The impressive bronze statue of Greek mythologic hero and later worshiped god Achilles, a key part of monument devoted to Arthur Wellesley, the 1st duke of Wellington, is located in south-eastern corner of Hyde Park.

The Wellington Monument unveiled in 1822, work of British sculptor Sir Richard Westmacott, shows why Westmacott was so highly regarded. Monument consists of a bronze nude Achilles, with cloak draped over his arm, his armour beside him. He carries a leaf-shaped short sword, and holds aloft a shield. The whole effect is heroic, and the statue is nicely elevated on a pediment of plain Dartmoor granite blocks in two colours.

More information about the monument You can find in Wikipedia.

In Greek mythology, Achilles was a Greek hero of the Trojan War and the central character and greatest warrior of Homer's Iliad. His mother was the nymph Thetis, and his father, Peleus, was the king of the Myrmidons. Achilles’ most notable feat during the Trojan War was the slaying of the Trojan hero Hector outside the gates of Troy. Although the death of Achilles is not presented in the Iliad, other sources concur that he was killed near the end of the Trojan War by Paris, who shot him in the heel with an arrow. Later legends (beginning with a poem by Statius in the 1st century AD) state that Achilles was invulnerable in all of his body except for his heel. Because of his death from a small wound in the heel, the term Achilles' heel has come to mean a person's point of weakness.

There was an archaic heroic cult of Achilles on the White Island, Leuce, in the Black Sea off the modern coasts of Romania and Ukraine, with a temple and an oracle which survived into the Roman period. In the lost epic Aithiopis, a continuation of the Iliad attributed to Arktinus of Miletos, Achilles’ mother Thetis returned to mourn him and removed his ashes from the pyre and took them to Leuce at the mouths of the Danube. There the Achaeans raised a tumulus for him and celebrated funeral games. The heroic cult of Achilles on Leuce island was widespread in antiquity, not only along the sea lanes of the Pontic Sea but also in maritime cities whose economic interests were tightly connected to the riches of the Black Sea. Achilles from Leuce island was venerated as Pontarches the lord and master of the Pontic Sea, the protector of sailors and navigation. Sailors went out of their way to offer sacrifice. To Achilles of Leuce were dedicated a number of important commercial port cities of the Greek waters: Achilleion in Messenia (Stephanus Byzantinus), Achilleios in Laconia (Pausanias, III.25,4) Nicolae Densusianu (Densusianu 1913) even though he recognized Achilles in the name of Aquileia and in the north arm of the Danube delta, the arm of Chilia ("Achileii"), though his conclusion, that Leuce had sovereign rights over Pontos, evokes modern rather than archaic sea-law."

[excerpted from Wiki]