Janko mentions the accusation of savageness only as the point of comparison, but there is at least one linguistic connection as well.

The rest of XVI 204 does not have language that is markedly connected to Achilles, but does contain conventional elements. The first is the formula παρὰ νηυσί(ν). It occurs 36 of 49 times before the feminine penthemimeral caesura. There are several other formulae, which include παρὰ νηυσί(ν). One line of particular interest from a compositional view is II 391–393, Agamemnon’s threat,

The implied script of παρὰ νηυσίν explains why Achilles’ companions are presented as ἀέκοντας ἑταίρους; they want to fight.

The last line of Achilles’ quotation has in part the same influence as νηλεές. αὖτις occurs occasionally in the first foot, although it also frequents the second and third feet, which would indicate that its positional appearance is variable and not fixed. What is interesting in this particular line is the fact that αὖτις is enjambed (which occurs nowhere else that it begins a line). Milman Parry discusses three ways in which one verse may relate to a following verse (M. Parry 1971:253). First, a sentence may end with the line, and a new sentence may begin the next line. The second type is when a thought is complete by verse end, but the sentence continues the next verse by adding free ideas through new word groups. This he refers to as unperiodic enjambment, a term taken from Dionysus of Halicarnassus. Finally, a verse can end without the thought completed, in which case enjambment is necessary. Carolyn Higbie adds two more types of enjambment to the list, and she also reclassifies Parry’s “necessary” as clausal and suggests necessary enjambment to be those instances when the verb is enjambed, since that is the crucial element in a clause (Higbie 1990:49). Her fourth type is violent enjambment, where there is close connection between the elements that verse end divides. The use of αὖτις by Achilles can be classified as this second, unperiodic, or adding type, given that the previous line could easily make a sentence on its own. Furthermore, αὖτις adds nothing semantically to the previous line, since returning home implies going back. At least here, αὖτις seems to have a purely functional status as line filler. The same appears true for the rest of the first half-line up until χόλος. αὖτις, ἐπεί has a strong phonetic similarity to the common line beginning αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα. Furthermore, the only cases in the quotation of the metrical phenomena of hiatus and correption occur at the first half of this line with τοι ὧδε. It is significant that there has not been hiatus or correption up until this point. Parry gives an account of hiatus as the desire to express a thought being stronger than the need for metrical regularity (M. Parry 1971:191–196). We may exclude from Parry’s generalization any such phrases that originally included a digamma, although that is not the case here. Thus far Achilles has been demonstrating conventional language, what “everyone” says, and so there has been no need to express a thought that has not already been manifested in formula. This first half-line does not seem to express any thought significant enough to require hiatus either. And yet, αὖτις, ἐπεί ῥά seems like a formulaic echoing already. The strain in the conventional language appears to be a result of Achilles’ efforts to get to the main concern of this line, the fixed formula χόλος ἔμπεσε θυμῷ.

As the next few lines show, however, the agonistic poetics implicit within the passage are not the major purpose of the speech. Our attention is focused away from the speech back to the present with the phrase νῦν δὲ πέφανται, which follows a bucolic diaeresis. From this point on, the speech is more or less conventional in its formulae, coinciding with the conventionality of the speech act, a call to battle. Still, the formulaic oddities are not entirely eliminated. πέφανται occurs three other times after a bucolic diaeresis, all in speeches calling troops to battle. At II 122 Agamemnon calls them to battle by feigning a desire to return, and at V 531 and XV 563 Ajax rallies the troops: αἰδομένων δ’ ἀνδρῶν πλέονες σόοι ἠὲ πέφανται. Fain- + μέγα ἔργον in the next line is a relatively bound formula. The phrase appears at XI 734 (ἀλλά σφι προπάροιθε φάνη μέγα ἔργον Ἄρηος), and at XII 416 (τείχεος ἔντοσθεν, μέγα δέ σφισι φαίνετο ἔργον). Both other uses have a narrative context: in the former, it is Nestor narrating his adventure, in the latter, it is simply the narrator. Thus, there are formulaic and metrically regular lexical elements up until the first hemistich of XVI 208.

After the hemistich, linguistic irregularities arise again. As Achilles mentions his men’s speech, it appears as though the conventional language fails. As Janko’s commentary tells us, ἕης is an artificial form for ἧς, by analogy with ὅου (from *ὅο) and the possessive ἕος / ὅς. The only motivation for such an analogy would be metrical fit. Furthermore, ἐράασθε appears to be an improvised thematic form of the older athematic ἔραμαι. Here it seems that Achilles (or the poet, as the distinction blurs in this passage) analogizes from other words ending the verse, such as ἀγοράασθε (II 337), ἠγοράασθε (VIII 230), μητιάασθε (XXII 174), and εἰσοράασθε (XXIII 495), which are four of the five thematic uncontracted second-person plural mediopassive endings in the entire Iliad, outside of this speech. The diectasis represents the older form, when the contacted theme vowel becomes opaque. Such a form would be in mind given that the suffix shows up just a few lines above, in ᾐτιάασθε at XVI 202. Finally, the last line of Achilles’ speech, ἔνθά τις ἄλκιμον ἦτορ ἔχων Τρώεσσι μαχέσθω, is comprised of entirely formualic elements. As would be expected, a common event necessarily has certain attendant bound expressions. This is the call to battle, upon which everything else in Achilles’ speech is predicated.

And so we see the conventional character of Achilles’ mimetic speech, which includes part of a formula set for the χόλος frame, and on the whole Achilles conscientiously refers to that frame, as the source for the Myrmidon’s conventional language. And this is offset by his own nonconventional language within the speech. Yet typologically the speech is entirely conventional, as the last line, the culmination of the speech, indicates. Why then is the mimetic speech present? To characterize Achilles? It most definitely does show him to be on a verbal par with the poet(s) of the Iliad. And yet characterization would not explain why the mimesis appears where it does. To answer this question, we need to think in terms of the narrative. In Book 16, Patroclus essentially presents us with the Second Embassy. Achilles abandoned the Argives; Agamemnon, inspired by Nestor, sends an embassy to bring him back; Achilles wholly rejects them; Nestor inspires Patroclus to get Achilles to join; Achilles agrees to send Patroclus in his place: a partial acceptance. And as we have seen, an overwhelming majority of the formulae involved in this speech point us back toward Book 9, but are fundamentally linked to the traditional, cultural poetic χόλος frame. Because of the metonymic connection these formulae have to the larger frame, by way of speech-acts, the speeches themselves, when employing traditional formulae, help in performing traditional scripts. The speeches themselves become a means of acting in accordance with tradition. This, I think, is what Adam Parry was attempting to explain in his famous article “The Language of Achilles,” when he discusses “the common language.” He says, “The unity of experience is thus made manifest to us by a common language. Men say the same things about the same things, and so the world to them, from its most concrete to its most metaphysical parts, is one.” And later he adds, “For the language of society is the way society makes things seem” (A. Parry 1989:4–5). Martin correctly demonstrates that there is not necessarily a 1:1 ratio between signifier and signified (Martin 1989:152). That connection is only made possible in speech through the cultural frame and the bound expressions or formulae, which are mechanisms for cultural frames. And so characters participate in the younger Parry’s notion of a “unified world,” what we may call the Iliad’s representation of Tradition, through their employment of frames. Achilles, on the other hand, imitates that very participation. For Achilles, the mimesis of his men’s conventional speech-behavior allows him to go through the motions, to take part in their traditionality, to accede to it, while still keeping himself at one degree of separation.

Thus, it is in his connection to Thetis that Achilles has a heightened status, outside of the traditional χόλος frame and script. Nevertheless, he must accede to the culturally scripted series of events, as he states in XVI 60–62:

In the course of two lines he refers to the two most poetically charged words of the Iliad, both of which exist as cultural scripts, in reference to his own activity and the impossibility of maintaining separation. Examination of the “embassy speeches,” which I consider to be more than simply those of Book 9, will make clear Achilles’ gradual accession to this traditional script.

Formulaic studies have ceased to occupy Homeric scholars’ central interest, but I maintain that the formula is just as significant to Homeric poetry as Milman Parry had originally argued, only on different grounds. As we have seen, Kiparsky established that the formula is a linguistic phenomenon akin to bound expressions. Understanding the formula in this light requires a complete hermeneutic methodology, which we find in frame theory semantics, as it has been defined by Fillmore and refined by Kiefer. Frame theory is able to combine the work of a number of Homeric scholars into a single cohesive model, which can produce fruitful results for the reading and interpretation of Homeric language. Achilles’ mimetic quotation and the prevalence of χόλος within that quotation provide excellent evidence for frame theory as operative within Homeric poetry. What we see at work within the Iliad is a particular traditional cultural poetic frame becoming intimately connected with the figure of Achilles, so much so that he becomes a generic element in the frame. Thus a frame theory model of the formula allows us to see a “language about Achilles” developing in the Iliad.