Achilles tells about a past encounter with Aeneas in an epic story that is situated outside the time-frame of the Iliad, I.20.187–194. The story supplements what Aeneas says at I.20.089–098 about such an encounter, where that hero tells a different though related version of the same story. The differences are highlighted in the story as told by Achilles here at I.20.187–194, where we find additional details about the escape of Aeneas from Achilles. According to this version of the story, Aeneas seems to have escaped from Achilles not once but twice: after Aeneas ran down from the highlands of Mount Ida and reached the coastland without getting caught by Achilles, he found refuge in the city of Lyrnessos, which Achilles then destroyed—but without catching him, since Aeneas somehow escaped, I.20.190–194. In this narrative, Achilles knows that it must have been the gods who made it possible for Aeneas to escape, but he does not know the exact identity of the god who actually rescued that hero: the wording of Achilles is ostentatiously vague when he refers at I.20.194 to the action of ‘Zeus and other gods’ in rescuing Aeneas from the besieged city of Lyrnessos before Achilles destroyed it. This vagueness about the interference of the gods is relevant to what will happen in the upcoming encounter between Aeneas and Achilles. As we will see in the comment on I.20.290–352, Achilles will be literally kept in the dark about the identity of the god who will rescue Aeneas from being killed when the two heroes finally engage in mortal combat. That said, I return to my focus on the second escape of Aeneas from Lyrnessos—following his first escape when he ran down to that city from the highlands of Mount Ida. The details we have seen about the second escape explain why only Lyrnessos is mentioned in the version of the story as told by Achilles, unlike the version as told by Aeneas, where both Pedasos and Lyrnessos are mentioned. The second escape of Aeneas, from a besieged city, could only have happened at one of the two cities of Pedasos and Lyrnessos, which were both ultimately destroyed by Achilles. Aeneas could not have been present in two besieged cities at the same time. I propose, then, that Pedasos and Lyrnessos were alternative places of refuge for Aeneas in alternative versions of his story, just as these same two cities had been alternative places of residence for Briseis in alternative versions of her own story, as I noted in the comment on I.16.057. In yet another story, there was yet another city from which Aeneas escaped before it was completely destroyed. The dramatic time of this other story, unlike the stories we have just considered about the cities of Pedasos and Lyrnessos, comes after rather than before the dramatic time of the Iliad. This other story is about the city of Troy itself, and, in this story as well, Aeneas managed to escape before the city was completely destroyed. The story was told in an Ionian epic that belonged to the epic Cycle, and the name of this epic was the Iliou Persis ‘Destruction of Ilion’, attributed to Arctinus of Miletus, Proclus summary p. 107.24–26 ed. Allen 1912. On the epic Cycle, see the inventory of Words and Ideas.