in the context of discussing the interpretation of Nestor’s name and the meaning of forms from the root *nes- as “safe return home” or without “home” where it needed to be specified

It seems at first as if everything is coming together here in Iliad 16. Achilles, best of the Achaeans, sends out his other self, Patroklos, to fight Hector and his Trojans, who are now on the verge of setting on fire and destroying all the beached ships of the Achaeans. Patroklos does in fact succeed in stopping the fire, which had been endangering not only the survival of the Achaeans but even the very existence of their notional descendants, imagined as the Greeks who are listening to the story of the Iliad in their own time. The conflagration that could have burned down the beached ships of the Achaeans is now literally ‘quenched’ by Patroklos, whose heroic action in putting out the fire of the Trojans is compared in a simile to a cosmic action taken by Zeus himself when this weather-god drenches and thus destroys in a violent rainstorm the farmlands of unjust men. Clearly, Zeus is now once again on the Achaean side of the Trojan War. But the success of Patroklos is not to last: soon after he kills Sarpedon, son of Zeus himself, in the course of a spectacular chariot fight, Patroklos now gets killed in the course of a second spectacular chariot fight. This time, Patroklos has gone too far, daring to attack not only Hector but also the divine protector of that hero, Apollo himself. Now everything is about to come apart again, and Achilles has yet to find out about the tragedy that awaits him.

A chariot driver and a chariot fighter in a biga (two-horses chariot). Terracotta, Late Helladic IIIA–IIIB (ca. 1400–1200 BCE). Louvre Museum, CA 2959. Credit line: Purchase, 1934.  Image Marie-Lan Nguyen (User:Jastrow), 2009-06-28 [CC BY 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons.

Patroklos wears the armor of Achilles, but he leaves behind that hero’s meliē ‘ash spear’ I.16.143. Only Achilles can wield that weapon, I.16.140–144. The symbolism of this spear corresponds to the myth of the bronze generation of heroes in Hesiod Works and Days 143–151, who were born of ash trees and were made of bronze, just as the shaft of the spear of Achilles is made from an ash tree while the tip is made of bronze. By contrast with the immortalizing armor that Achilles receives from his immortal mother Thetis, he receives the ash spear from his mortal father Peleus. For more on the symbolism of the hero’s ash spear, I recommend Shannon 1975.

The word melíē functions as the word for both "ash tree" (e.g. I.16.767) and "ash spear" (as it does here). For a thorough discussion of the Homeric evidence, see The Arms of Achilles and Homeric Compositional Technique (1975) by Richard Shannon, especially pp. 46–48 for his comments on Works and Days 143–155. There is a manifestation of the heroic type represented by the Bronze Men of Hesiod in the heroic character of Achilles himself, and more specifically, in the spear he wields. In fact, Achilles is described as the only hero who could wield this magnificent spear (I.16.140–142), which is also the only piece of the hero's armor that Patroklos did not take with him when he fatally replaced Achilles. In sum, the diction of the entire Iliad makes the bronze-tipped ash spear an emblem of Achilles just as surely as the bronze and ash wood characterize the equally wanton Bronze Men, who are depicted by Hesiod as bent on nothing but húbris and war.

See the comments at O.12.132 and at O.23.246 on myths about solar horses; the name of Xanthos is relevant.

On the word harpuia, personified as ‘Harpy’, see Parts 3 and 4 of the comment at O.15.250–251.

Here, for the first time in the Iliad, Patroklos is marked as the therapōn of Achilles. His dual role as ‘attendant’ and ‘ritual substitute’ is already implicit.

I note here only in passing the semantic and morphological links between these two adjectives kratero- ‘having the power to win’ and hiero- ‘sacred’ in contexts where they describe the noun menos ‘mental power’.

This word biē ‘force, violence, strength’ and its synonym īs are conventionally associated with violent winds.

analysis of mēnis as a tabu deformation and here specifically an example the relaxation of the speech tabu

The powerful muthos performed by Achilles as he marshals the Myrmidons begins with an injunction to recall their previous threats (apeilai) against the Trojans: "Myrmidons, let no one forget on me the threats with which you threatened the Trojans at the ships all during the time of anger" (16.200-201). Although Achilles mentions threats, he does so not to threaten anyone himself but to challenge the Myrmidons—a strategy of recalling past speech-acts to shame the present hearers into action, already displayed by Nestor early in the poem (2.349). Achilles' challenge is the more effective because he not only recalls one speech-act but uses a direct quotation to mimic another, one the Myrmidons had employed, and then dismisses these earlier grumbling speeches as mere talk (ebazete, 16.207). In familiar flyting fashion, he contrasts "then" with "now": the Myrmidons used to talk of going home because Achilles was angered, "but now has appeared the great work of strife, of which you were previously enamored" (16.207-8) (Martin 1993:71-72).

For the broader analysis of the flyting genre and the recalled-speech strategy, see the comment on Iliad 4.336-421.

References

Martin, R. P. 1993. The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad. Ithaca.