The word epea is used here at I.20.249 to mean not only ‘words’ but also, more specifically, ‘words of poetry’, such as the words of epic. The words of poetry are spoken here in an act of boasting—which is framed within the act of performing epic. See the general comment on I.20.200–258; see also the earlier comment on I.12.387–391. Here at I.20.248–250, Aeneas is cautioning Achilles about the variability of epea as ‘poetic words’. There is a wide range of different ways of saying different things. Different epics, Aeneas is saying in effect, can have different truth-values in different places. What is said in a positive sense at one place may be said in a negative sense at another place. That is the nature of mūthoi, I.20.248, which are ‘wordings spoken for the record’. For more on the Homeric sense of this word mūthos as ‘wording spoken for the record’, see the comment at I.19.084–085. As I noted in that comment, any wording that is called a mūthos by the Master Narrator himself in the act of actually quoting the words of the wording will have the prestige of reality—to the extent that the listeners were actually expected to accept the idea that such wording had once upon a time been really spoken exactly as quoted by Homer himself. In the context of I.20.248–250 here, however, it becomes clear that there were in fact different regional versions of epics as quoted, as it were, by Homer. As Aeneas says at I.20.248–249, there is no single mūthos in the sense that there is no single way of wording a story for the record: rather, there are many ways of wording a story, and so there are many mūthoi to be heard by listeners, not just one. And, to repeat, there is a wide range of different ways of saying different things. As Aeneas says it, I.20.249, the nomós or ‘range’ of epea as ‘words of poetry’ is vast, varying from place to place. The choice of wording here is most evocative: the word nomós can mean literally ‘range of lands used for pasturing’, as at I.02.475, and the metaphorical application here to the wide range of epics about Aeneas and Achilles may evoke a pastoral scene of a cattle-raid in the highlands of Mount Ida, where Achilles was once upon a time rustling the cattle that were pastured there by Aeneas. Such a pastoral scene is signaled in the story as told by Aeneas at I.20.089–102: he was pasturing his cattle in the highlands of Mount Ida, and Achilles evidently caught him off guard in a cattle-raid, I.20.090–091. See the comment on I.20.089–102.