Achilles responds to the apparition in his dream, I.23.094–096, declaring to the spirit of Patroklos that he intends to do exactly what this spirit has instructed him to do. But the hero’s declaration here is interwoven with a question that he asks of the spirit: why do you appear to me and instruct me to do things that I already intended to do? This interwoven question at I.23.094–096 is most curious, since it is patently unjustifiable. I argue that the things intended by Achilles fail in more than one way to match the things intended by the psūkhē of Patroklos. There are two main reasons for making this argument:
First, Achilles intends to do more than the two things that Patroklos instructs him to do. As we saw at I.23.045–046, Achilles intends not only to cremate Patroklos and to entomb him but also to cut off a long lock of his own hair as a sacrifice to be burned on the funeral pyre of his friend. And he intends to do even more than that. As we saw in the lament of Achilles where he addressed the dead Patroklos, he repeats to him there at I.23.20–23 the two deeds that he had promised at I.18.334–337 to perform before the funeral could take place: first, Achilles had promised to bring back, together with the dead body of Hector, the armor that Hector had stripped from the dead body of Patroklos, and, second, he had also promised to slaughter twelve captive Trojan youths on the funeral pyre of Patroklos and then to cremate their bodies together with the body of Patroklos himself. And there is even more: as we have seen at I.22.326–330, at I.22.354, and at I.22.248 (together with I.22.354), Achilles intends to expose the body of Hector to be devoured by dogs and birds, after having degraded the corpse by dragging it behind his chariot. But the fact is, the spirit of Patroklos had not spoken to Achilles about any of these other things.
And here is the second reason for arguing that the interwoven question of Achilles at I.23.094–096 is not justifiable: the fact is, Achilles had never spoken about any intent to have himself entombed together with Patroklos when the time comes for his own funeral. The idea of such a double entombment came from the psūkhē of Patroklos.